The 21th Century Decade Retrospective

Liz Warren Tells Only Half the Story
At FDL News, David Dayen covers an article on Elizabeth Warren in which she argues, correctly, that if the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau had been up and running years ago, much of the banking/Mortgage Fraud could/would have been prevented. That’s fine as far as it goes. But there’s something missing from the polite Ms. Warren’s telling. . . . provided it wasn’t interfered with by more powerful Regulators whose job it was to stop fraudulent banking and Lending p...

New global banking rules proposed on bankers' pay
(12-27) 07:28 PST Geneva, Switzerland (AP) -- New banking rules are being proposed by an influential global regulatory panel that would give investors a better idea of when CEOs and other high-paid executives get bonuses even when their companies are lagging. The panel affiliated with the Bank for International Settlements in Basel said its proposal Monday would require banks to reveal whether a Bonus is linked to a firm's performance and to provide other details aimed at preventing lenders fr...

A Fragile Coalition Holds Iraq Together
After nine months of political paralysis and bickering, Iraq finally has a new government. On Tuesday, the Iraqi Parliament approved the cabinet put forth by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. Unfortunately, this is not the end of Iraq's political troubles. The recent Compromise that allowed Maliki to secure a Second Term as prime minister will lead to continued instability because Maliki had to cobble together a government out of factions that are distrustful of him and one another. There is litt...

Iraq civilian death toll is lowest since invasion
The number of Iraqi civilians killed in violence in Iraq this year fell to its Lowest Level since the 2003 invasion, but the decline is slowing as low-level conflict takes root, a new study shows. Human Rights group Iraq Body Count (IBC) put the 2010 civilian death toll in Iraq at 3,976 up to 23 December, compared to 4,680 in the 2009 year. IBC said that the annual decline in the number of violent deaths had slowed to 15 per cent, compared t ADVERTISEMENT o declines of 50 per cent and 63 per c...

Iraq scrubs Saddam from its history, but relics remain
Baghdad — Deep inside the walled-off Green Zone, in an air-conditioned room watched by round-the-clock security, is a particularly grisly collection of Iraqi Memorabilia: leg irons, bone fragments, a hangman's noose and photographs of skeletons unearthed from Mass Graves, some still wearing their clothes. They're relics of the most brutal periods of the Saddam Hussein era, collected by U.S. and Iraqi investigators as evidence in the ex-dictator's trial for crimes against huma...

WikiLeaks XXV: Security Firms in Iraq Making a Killing (Figuratively in this Case)
According to an Embassy cable written earlier this year, and released last week by the Guardian as part of its Wikileaks coverage, private security firms in Iraq’s southern Basra province have been making a figurative killing protecting foreign investors throughout the region. This isn’t exactly news. Nor is the fact that some private security firms  also offer more comprehensive services, including business intelligence, geopolitical risk management, crisis management, and ki...

Iraq civilian death toll lowest since invasion: study
Human Rights group Iraq Body Count (IBC) put the 2010 civilian death toll in Iraq at 3,976 up to December 23, compared to 4,680 in the 2009 year. IBC said that the annual decline in the number of violent Deaths had slowed to 15 percent, compared to declines of 50 percent and 63 percent in the previous two years. "Taken as a whole and seen in the context of immediately preceding years, the 2010 data suggest a persistent low-level conflict in Iraq that will continue to kill civilians at a similar...

Right Wing Still Delusional on Iraq (Update)
*Bumped Up* Real Clear Politic’s “Best of the Blogs” features a piece posted at Powerline, A Good Year in Iraq. Paul at Powerline is commenting on a Washington Post Op-Ed by the same name. In case you are out of touch, the Post editorial page is a mouthpiece for Neo-Cons insistent on perpetuating the myth that Bush’s decision to start a war in Iraq was just the best damn decision ever made in history. Here are the salient points from the Powerline piece: The Washington ...

Iraq's new government: A tricky cocktail
It may be some time before a new balance of power becomes evident. Mr Maliki was widely blamed, by his fellow majority Shias as well as by Iraq’s Sunni Arab and Kurdish Minorities, for accumulating too much personal clout in his past four years in the job. The new deal is meant to bring checks and balances. The Sunnis have won some beefy ministries. But if they still feel left out of real decision-making, Iraq’s stability will continue to be shaky. Posts have been awarded largely alo...

Gordon Brown's memoirs: Oh me, oh my
Beyond the Crash: Overcoming the First Crisis of Globalization . By Gordon Brown. Free Press; 314 pages; $26. Simon & Schuster; £20. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk MANY politicians use their memoirs to settle old scores. Newspapers scour them for juicy titbits of who said what to whom, and which leaders were perpetually drunk or unreliable. Gordon Brown, the former British Prime Minister, is above such gossip. His first post-election effort is an analysis of the Financial Crisis tha...

Legal Insurrection's Official Predictions for 2011
Here are Legal Insurrection's Official predictions for 2011: Obama will give an unscripted Speech announcing he is resigning to take a year-long road trip to play Golf in each of the 57 states. Joe Biden, the second in line to the presidency, will become President upon Obama's Resignation, and head the Democratic 2012 ticket with V.P. nominee Alvin Greene. The Palin-Coulter ticket will emerge as the overwhelming favorite for 2012, winning the all important Gawker, Maddow, and Feministe endorsem...

2010 Photo of the Year - Iraq
I think anyone who's ever pondered the "comment" option - once only available on blogs and bulletin boards, now ubiquitous on almost any web site - will appreciate this:The so-called faculty of writing is not so much a faculty of writing as it is a faculty of thinking. When a man says, "I have an idea but I can't express it"; that man hasn't an idea but merely a vague feeling. If a man has a feeling of that kind, and will sit down for a half an hour and persistently try to put into writing what ...

Saddam Hussein's curse needn't linger
The Gulf War has been over for 19 years and Saddam Hussein has been out of power for seven years and dead for four, so it really was time that the United Nations finished lifting the sanctions on Iraq contained in more than 70 resolutions. The United Nations dropped its economic embargo after the U.S. invasion in 2003, and in 2004 allowed the country to resume buying some conventional weapons. Iraq’s constitution bars Weapons of Mass Destruction. This month the U.N. Security Council unani...

Liberal empathy on the court
Image via Wikipedia NY Times: At her Confirmation Hearings last year, Sonia Sotomayor spent a lot of time assuring senators that empathy would play no part in her work on the Supreme Court. That was a sort of rebuke to President Obama, who had said that empathy was precisely the quality that separated legal technicians like Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. from great justices. Justice Sotomayor would have none of it. “We apply law to facts,” she told the Senate Judiciary Committee...

Joshua Lockwood: Keeping the American Dream of Homeownership Alive
We are all too familiar with the incredible devastation that the Foreclosure crisis as inflicted across America: Homeowners left destitute, communities destroyed, businesses ruined. Included in the collatoral damage is the near-demise of a long-held national ideal, a belief that for many decades has given Americans a shared purpose and aspiration -- the American Dream of homeownership as a path to financial stability. Now on life-support, the ambition of owning a home has been roundly trashe...

Car finance: Into the fast lane
The $6.3 billion deal makes financial sense for the seller and strategic sense for the buyer. It allows Cerberus, a private-equity firm, to recoup much of the $7.4 billion it invested in Chrysler just before the car market imploded and the company was forced into Bankruptcy. (Cerberus retained control of Chrysler Financial even as its investment in the parent was wiped out.) TD, one of the leading vehicle lenders in Canada, gets a firm foothold in the much bigger market next door. As long as it ...

Spanish women in end of year push
Expectant mothers in Spain are queueing up to give birth before the government axes its 'baby cheque' incentive on 1 January. Photograph: Katie Collins/PA The year may not yet be at its end, but Spain's doctors are already reporting a slew of año nuevo admissions. The cheque bebé - which was introduced in July 2007 in an attempt to boost Spain's low birthrate - is about to be axed in a round of new year public Spending Cuts, but many mothers are not prepared to give up ...

Disgraced Iraq-Enabling Reporter Judith Miller Winds Up At Newsmax
Judith Miller was once an important war reporter person at The New York Times, but then she was sent to jail. But not for writing up fake stories about Weapons of Mass Destruction that helped the Bush Administration wage an illegal war! No, it was because she protected Scooter Libby’s telling her the name of Valerie Plame, another person from that decade. Anyway, Miller has finally found an actual journalism job, and it’s with Newsmax, which is rather hilarious, because that’s ...

Bunnies Frolic on Japans Old Chem Weapons Site
Back when Japan was a rapacious imperial power, a small island near Hiroshima was a nerve center of its Chemical Weapons efforts. But if there are any Toxic Chemical agents still on Okunoshima, they’ve been buried under hundreds of pounds of cuteness. Approximately 300 rabbits are the main inhabitants of the four-kilometer Okunoshima Island, where abandoned factories are all that remain of the once-deadly World War II-era weapons program. A nearby Elementary School needed to abandon its ...

Suicide bombers kill four in Iraq police station
Stumble This! Two Suicide Bombers on Wednesday killed four policemen in a Police Station in Iraq's northern city of Mosul, including an officer who oversaw a deadly Raid on Militants, security officials said. A third bomber was shot dead before setting off his explosives belt in the attack targeting Lieutenant Colonel Shamil Ahmed Oglah, who commanded the operation last week against an Al-Qaeda affiliate, a Police Officer said. The early morning bombings killed Oglah and three other policemen, ...

Breakfast with Jamie [Dimon]
Want to front-run the Fed? If you're Obama's favorite Banker, Jamie Dimon, president of JP Morgan Chase, there's no need to parse FOMC statements or obscure speeches by Fed governors. No need to analyze hundreds of Treasury securities to make an educated guess as to just which ones Brian Sack (of the NY Fed) will buy any given week. Even hiring expert networks staffed with ex-Fed officials is unnecessary. No, if you're Jamie Dimon, you go straight to the top and break bread with William Dudley,...

At Bagram, War's Tragedy Yields Medical Advances
The medevac choppers land and then taxi over to the gate just outside the Emergency Room, where gurneys are waiting. Nightfall has brought a bone-chilling wind, and a gang of nurses and orderlies rushes four patients into the warmth of the ER. It's more than warm inside. In fact it's 100 degrees. It's the first clue that this Hospital — the Joint Theater Hospital at Afghanistan's Bagram Air Field — is a little different. Through years of war, combat surgeons have learned that hypothe...

Journey To The End
BACK IN D.C. — Via Juan Cole, Nouri al-Maliki clarifies his intentions for U.S. Troops in a Wall Street Journal interview: ‘ WSJ: Some American officials have spoken about contingency plans being drawn now in Washington for the possibility that some American Troops will stay after 2011. Do you know about these contingency plans, and do you need troops? Mr. Maliki: I do not care about what’s being said. I care about what’s on paper and what has been agreed to. The withdrawal of forc

We Are Not Needed in Iraq
I'm not sure who is writing the New York Times' unsigned editorials these days, but they are demonstrating once more a lazy support for thoughtless imperialism. We are all happy that the Iraqis have cobbled together a government nine short months after their Elections, but that's not the real point of this column. The administration deserves credit for goading Iraqis into a political deal. But the long delay and Iraq’s daunting list of problems is a reminder that, even after the Troops come hom...

VFW seeks to diversify, reaches out to young vets
LEAVENWORTH, Kan. (AP) — The Veterans of Foreign Wars’ post in Leavenworth traditionally was dominated by aged ex-servicemen. But in recent years a revolution has occurred in the Kansas Army town, with a new young leadership transforming the post into a center providing support and entertainment for male and female Veterans of all ages and conflicts. It’s a scene that the VFW, considered the nation’s largest and most active organization advocating for Military veterans, i...