Where Are My Keys?

Paris Hilton celebrates "Fleet Week" with semen..

Whoops, I meant "seamen".  Sorry.

Yep everything is awesome!

Dow ends worst May since 1940.  But, since Joe Biden has told us that there will be 500,000 new jobs in May, I'm sure June 2010 will be the best Dow month ever!  Remember people:  the stock market is foward-looking.  When the Dow goes up, analysts see some bright spots ahead.  When it drops, darker days.

It depends what your definition of "talk" is..

Clinton as go-between for Obama/Sestak relations?

Senior White House advisers asked former President Bill Clinton to talk to Joe Sestak about whether he was serious about running for Senate, and to feel out whether he'd be open to other alternatives, according to sources familiar with the situation.

But the White House maintains that the Clinton-Sestak discussions were informal, according to the sources. The White House, under pressure to divulge the specifics of its interactions with Sestak, will release a formal statement later today outlining their version of events, including Clinton's involvement.

According to the sources, White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel asked Clinton and his longtime adviser, lawyer Doug Band, to talk to Sestak about the race. It's unclear right now whether the White House will say that Clinton was asked to suggest specific administration positions for Sestak, whether Clinton floated positions on his own, whether Clinton discussed other options not related to the adminstration, or whether employment even came up at all in the talks.

But the news that Clinton is at the center of this whole story is noteworthy on its own because of the former president's stature, and underscores how heavily invested the White House was in dissuading Sestak from running. The White House sent Clinton to talk to Sestak because Arlen Specter, constituting the 60th Dem vote in the Senate, was viewed as key to enacting Obama's agenda.

President Hazelwood?

Loose lips..

Cause trouble in D.C.

If you weren’t suspicious before Obama’s refusal on Thursday to say anything about the allegations, the apparent gag order imposed on Sestak and the brother-lawyer getting directions from the White House might do it. In any case Obama and Sestak seemed to have reinforced the rap on politicians these day — they are not transparent, play fast and loose with the truth, and don’t follow the same code of ethics that most voters follow. As they say, the cover-up is always worse than the crime — even more so when there may not be a crime.

Plenty of blame to go around..

Krauthammer has a good take on the Oil Spill:

There will always be catastrophic oil spills. You make them as rare as humanly possible, but where would you rather have one: in the Gulf of Mexico, upon which thousands depend for their livelihood, or in the Arctic, where there are practically no people?

All spills seriously damage wildlife. That's a given. But why have we pushed the drilling from the barren to the populated, from the remote wilderness to a center of fishing, shipping, tourism and recreation?

Not that the environmentalists are the only ones to blame. Not by far. But it is odd that they've escaped any mention at all.

The other culprits are pretty obvious.

It starts with BP, which seems not only to have had an amazing string of perfect-storm engineering lapses but no contingencies to deal with a catastrophic system failure.

However, the railing against BP for its performance since the accident is harder to understand. I attribute no virtue to BP, just self-interest. What possible interest can it have to do anything but cap the well as quickly as possible? Every day that oil is spilled means millions more in losses, cleanup and restitution.

Federal officials who rage against BP would like to deflect attention from their own role in this disaster. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, whose department's laxity in environmental permitting and safety oversight renders it among the many bearing responsibility, expresses outrage at BP's inability to stop the leak, and even threatens to "push them out of the way."

"To replace them with what?" asked the estimable, admirably candid Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen, the national incident commander.

...

Obama didn't help much with his finger-pointing Rose Garden speech in which he denounced finger-pointing, then proceeded to blame everyone but himself.

Even the grace note of admitting some federal responsibility turned sour when he reflexively added that these problems have been going on "for a decade or more" — translation: Bush did it — while, in contrast, his own interior secretary had worked diligently to solve the problem "from the day he took office."

Really? Why hadn't we heard a thing about this? What about the September 2009 letter from Obama's National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration accusing Interior's Minerals Management Service of understating the "risk and impacts" of a major oil spill?

When you get a blowout 15 months into your administration, and your own Interior Department had given BP a "categorical" environmental exemption in April 2009, the buck stops.

Read the whole thing.

A more difficult spill to contain..

"The Chart" is broken..

The guys over at IB have assembled the latest few weeks of Initial Unemployment Claims, and notice a few things.  As you look at the chart of Initial Claims, keep in mind that historically we have around 325,000-350,000 claims per week.

 

The first thing that jumps out at me when I look at the data is that 425,000-475,000 new claims seems to be the "new normal", or looks like it will be for the time being.  We saw a pretty dramatic drop in the initial numbers Feb-Nov, but things are now limping along.  While the trend from November forward is slightly heading down, it's doing it at a snail's pace.  At the beginning of November, we were at 475,000-ish.  Last week we were at 460,000.  Not too much to crow about for a 7-month period.

There have been a few bright spots during that period (a week in Feb, a few weeks in Apr, a few weeks in May), but every time we get good news (like April job numbers being the strongest in four years), they seem to get offset by "unexpected" initial claims.

Bottom line, as I have been saying for a loooong time, we are still very much in the thick of this mess, with no end in sight.

“If there is nothing to hide, then Eric Holder should release this information as the law requires. And this is just one more example of how Obama’s promises of transparency are a big lie.”

November can't come soon enough.

It’s about time the courts rule on the panoply of made-up defenses and fake privileges that Holder has cooked up to avoid turning over these documents. Let the courts decide if the Obama administration can have it both ways — declining to invoke executive privilege but relying on the privilege under other names (”deliberative privilege”).

A knowledgeable lawyer e-mails me: “Notice DOJ revealed nothing about the number of panther documents in the AG and deputy AG office. Even for  the associate attorney general they revealed there were 135 but they weren’t going to turn them over. Failing to even name a number is extremely suspicious because those units can be searched quicker and easier for compliant documents. It leads one to conclude any number would be an embarrassment, and a high number would be a catastrophe. So, don’t reveal a number. Typical of this non-transparent operation.”

And now we’re going to see the administration’s true colors played out in open court. As a Judicial Watch spokesman said: “If there is nothing to hide, then Eric Holder should release this information as the law requires. And this is just one more example of how Obama’s promises of transparency are a big lie.”

But the Obama team may have a different problem: if either or both houses of Congress flip to Republican control, new chairmen will populate key committees and subpoenas will begin to fly. Congress is in an even better position to get access to the documents, as attorney-client privilege doesn’t work against a co-equal branch of government. In sum, Holder is running out of room to hide, finally.

A perfect example of the fatal flaw in polling..

I prefer the polling methods of Rasmussen, as he uses "likely voters", while just about everyone else uses "registered voters" in sampling.

"Likely voters" make much more sense to me, as they are more likely to hit the polls on voting day.  They have a higher chance of being engaged in the process, and will show up when it matters.

We had a great opportunity to see the practice in action last night.

There is this show on TV that you may have heard of called American Idol.  A bunch of kids audition for a singing contest, and then have to perform weekly to see who stays or goes.  The viewers call in (vote) by means of a dedicated phone line for their favorite contestant.  This week came down to the final two.

Rasmussen polled Idol viewers (Registered Voters), and found out that the girl in the final had a slight edge to win.  A few years ago, some computer geek created a program that dialed into the show (each of the dedicated lines) and recorded the percentages of busy signals to being able to get through.  The theory being if his computer-generated call was able to connect, that meant fewer voters were voting for that contestant.  His program has been 97% correct in predicting which contestant  will get the boot, and has correctly picked the winner since its inception.  Dial Idol functions like an exit poll, and those people fall into the "likely voter" group.  His model predicted the dude would win.

Lo and behold, we had an upset of sorts, and the dude won.

Likely Voters are always a better measure than Registered Voters.