The House of Saud Needs to Go Cheney Itself

It appears that the corrupt Neanderthals in Ryadh are upset about a bill in Congress that might make them accountable for their support of terrorists:

Saudi officials have long denied that the kingdom had any role in the Sept. 11 plot, and the 9/11 Commission found “no evidence that the Saudi government as an institution or senior Saudi officials individually funded the organization.” But critics have noted that the commission’s narrow wording left open the possibility that less senior officials or parts of the Saudi government could have played a role. Suspicions have lingered, partly because of the conclusions of a 2002 congressional inquiry into the attacks that cited some evidence that Saudi officials living in the United States at the time had a hand in the plot.

Those conclusions, contained in 28 pages of the report, still have not been released publicly.

The dispute comes as bipartisan criticism is growing in Congress about Washington’s alliance with Saudi Arabia, for decades a crucial American ally in the Middle East and half of a partnership that once received little scrutiny from lawmakers. Last week, two senators introduced a resolution that would put restrictions on American arms sales to Saudi Arabia, which have expanded during the Obama administration.

Families of the Sept. 11 victims have used the courts to try to hold members of the Saudi royal family, Saudi banks and charities liable because of what the plaintiffs charged was Saudi financial support for terrorism. These efforts have largely been stymied, in part because of a 1976 law that gives foreign nations some immunity from lawsuits in American courts.

The Senate bill is intended to make clear that the immunity given to foreign nations under the law should not apply in cases where nations are found culpable for terrorist attacks that kill Americans on United States soil. If the bill were to pass both houses of Congress and be signed by the president, it could clear a path for the role of the Saudi government to be examined in the Sept. 11 lawsuits.

Obama administration officials counter that weakening the sovereign immunity provisions would put the American government, along with its citizens and corporations, in legal risk abroad because other nations might retaliate with their own legislation. Secretary of State John Kerry told a Senate panel in February that the bill, in its current form, would “expose the United States of America to lawsuits and take away our sovereign immunity and create a terrible precedent.”

The bill’s sponsors have said that the legislation is purposely drawn very narrowly — involving only attacks on American soil — to reduce the prospect that other nations might try to fight back.

………

The bill is an anomaly in a Congress fractured by bitter partisanship, especially during an election year. It is sponsored by Senator John Cornyn, Republican of Texas, and Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York. It has the support of an unlikely coalition of liberal and conservative senators, including Al Franken, Democrat of Minnesota, and Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas. It passed through the Judiciary Committee in January without dissent.

My heart is bleeding borscht over their discomfort.

We Voted Today

Today was the first day for Maryland early voting, so Sharon^* and I went to vote.

I noticed three things:

• The oddest campaign sign of the season (see picture) wherein one Ray Bly campaigns as a mentally ill child abuser.
• There were no Hillary Clinton signs outside of the early voting sites.
• Maryland has gone from touch screen to optically scanned paper ballots.

I have to figure that the Clinton campaign has strip mined staff from Maryland for their "firewall" in New York State.

The change from touch screen to optoscan is a good thing in my opinion.

It's faster, and it retains a paper trail for a possible recount.


^*Love of my life, light of the cosmos, she who must be obeyed, my wife.

Bernie Sanders Walks the Union Walk

Bernie Sanders walked the picket line with striking Verizon workers, and then the thin skinned CEO of the telco called the Senator contemptible.

Bernie responded that he welcomed the contempt of the these overpaid CEOs.

It a appears that the membership of the Transit Workers Union Local 100 also appreciated the contempt shown by those CEOs , because their membship overwhelmingly voted to endorse Sanders for the New York primary on Wednesday.

Not a surprise.  After all, his opponent was on the board of directors for the virulently anti-union Walmart for years.

So Not a Surprise

And in what might be the last chapter of the lack of investor due diligence that is the blood testing firm Theranos, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) has announced that it will ban the top three executives at the firm from the test business:

Theranos, the high-profile clinical laboratory company, had a day of reckoning yesterday. That’s when The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) published a story revealing that Theranos was sent a letter by the federal Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) providing notice of sanctions.

In a letter to Theranos executives, CMS said it is prepared to:

• revoke the company’s CLIA certificate;
• impose a fine of $10,000 per day;
• suspend and cancel the lab’s approval to receive Medicare payments; and
• impose a two-year ban on the owner, operator, and laboratory director for owning or operating a clinical laboratory.

Pathologists and medical laboratory professionals will recognize that these are among the most severe sanctions that CMS can impose on a laboratory under the Clinical Laboratory Improvement Amendments (CLIA). Further, clinical pathologists who currently serve as medical directors of CLIA laboratories will find it useful to read the entire letter sent to Theranos on March 18, as it describes how CMS viewed the responses that Theranos provided following a January 25, 2016, letter from CMS describing deficiencies identified during an inspection of the Theranos CLIA lab facility in Newark, California.

………

“After careful review, we have determined that the laboratory’s submission does not constitute a credible allegation of compliance and acceptable evidence of correction for the deficiencies cited during the CLIA recertification and complaint survey completed December 23, 2015, and does not demonstrate that the laboratory has come into Condition-level compliance and abated immediate jeopardy. In general, we find that the statements made in the allegation of compliance and evidence of correction: 1) failed to adequately address the deficient practice cited; 2) are incomplete and failed to meet the criteria of acceptable evidence of correction; 3) do not ensure sustained compliance; and 4) show a lack of understanding of the CLIA requirements.

Less than a year ago, Theranos had a valuation in the billions, because it was promising a new technology that would allow for inexpensive blood tests on just a drop of blood. (A little finger stick)

The technology has never worked, even under the most controlled conditions, like demonstrations to investors, but it was treated like the next big thing for reasons that have never made sense to me.

My guess is that the founder of the company, Elizabeth Holmes, dazzled people with a rather spot on impersonation of Steve Jobs (she only wears black turtle necks), which convinced people who knew better that the nothing-burger business model of dot-coms could be applied to healthcare.

I Just Saw the Debates

Hillary and Bernie went toe to toe in Brooklyn.

I was watching, and Charlie was hooting and hollering like it was the denouement of the next Star Wars movie.

He has Hillary pegged as being part of the Empire.

My quick take:

• It was the most contentious debate yet.
• Wolf Blitzer could be replaced as moderator by a toaster with a not particularly advanced operating system.  (I should note here that it is not my intent to offend any toasters)
• Hillary Clinton kept filibustering, and it drove Charlie nuts.
• Hillary Clinton seemed to be seething with barely suppressed anger at times.
• It really is a treat to hear Bernie Sanders say, "Yuge."

No clue as to what the pundits will be saying in the morning.

Thanks Elizabeth

The Federal Reserve and the FDIC just rejected the living wills required under Dodd Frank of the 5 largest banks in America:

“The goal to end too big to fail and protect the American taxpayer by ending bailouts remains just that: only a goal,” Thomas M. Hoenig, the vice chairman of the F.D.I.C., said in a statement.

The regulators were responding to the so-called living wills that banks must submit to regulators on a regular basis to explain how the banks plan to enter bankruptcy in an orderly fashion in case of a crisis. The living wills are a requirement of the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial overhaul, intended to help make large financial institutions less of a threat to the wider economy.

The Fed and the F.D.I.C., which jointly oversee the largest banks, agreed that the plans put forward by five of the big banks, JPMorgan, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, State Street and Bank of New York Mellon, were “not credible or would not facilitate an orderly resolution under the U.S. Bankruptcy Code.”

Only one of the biggest banks, Citigroup, was given a passing grade by both agencies, though it too was told that its plans needed improvements. Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley received passing grades from only one of the two agencies.

Of course the Vampire Squid got a passing grade.

BTW, the only reason that this happened is because Elizabeth Warren nailed Fed chair Janet Yellen to the wall over her inaction on this Dodd Frank requirement:

………

A serious dust-up occurred on July 15, 2014 during a Senate Banking hearing between Senator Elizabeth Warren and Fed Chair Janet Yellen on the matter of these living wills. Warren told Yellen that at the time of its collapse in 2008, Lehman Brothers had $639 billion in assets and 209 subsidiaries and it took three years to unwind the bank in bankruptcy. Warren singled out JPMorgan Chase for comparison, saying that it has $2.5 trillion in assets and 3,391 subsidiaries.

Dodd-Frank specifically states that these wind-down plans must be “credible” each year or the Fed and FDIC must reject them and force the banks to take remedial steps such as simplifying their structure or selling off assets.

Yellen was clearly not prepared for this line of questioning and stumbled badly in her answers to Warren. She said the Fed was pursuing a “process,” that the plans are “complex” with some banks submitting plans that are “tens of thousands of pages.” Yellen then summed up with this:

“I think what was intended is this interpretation you’re talking about, whether they’re credible, in other words, do they facilitate an orderly resolution, and I think we need to give these firms feedback.”

This hearing came more than six years after the greatest Wall Street banking collapse since the Great Depression and Warren was visibly agitated by these stonewalling answers from Yellen. Warren responded:

“I have to say, Chair Yellen, I think the language in the statute is pretty clear, that you are required, the Fed is required, to call it every year on whether these institutions have a credible plan — and I remind you, there are very effective tools that you have available to you that you can use if those plans are not credible, including forcing these financial institutions to simplify their structure or forcing them to liquidate some of their assets — in other words, break them up.

“And I just want to say one more thing about this process, the plans are designed not just to be reviewed by the Fed and the FDIC, but also to bring some kind of confidence to the marketplace and to the American taxpayer that in fact there really is a plan for doing something if one of these banks starts to implode.”

The public has never been allowed to see those 10,000 pages of what it would take to unwind one of the banking behemoths but is instead provided with a mere glimpse of each bank’s plan. Warren’s reference to bringing “confidence to the marketplace” was called into further question yesterday when the Government Accountability Office (GAO) released its own study on the living wills, which they refer to as “Resolution Plans.”

The GAO noted that the FDIC’s Board of Directors determined that all of the 2013 plans submitted by systemically important banks with more than $250 billion in nonbank assets were “not credible” or “would not facilitate an orderly resolution under the Code.” The Federal Reserve, however, made no such determination and simply said the banks would have to improve their plans going forward.

The GAO also gave low marks to the regulators in terms of public transparency on the living will process, writing in the report that “FDIC and the Federal Reserve are considering publicly providing more information about their resolution plan reviews. Federal Reserve officials told us that while they were continuously evaluating the release of more plan information into the public domain, they did not have a time frame for reaching a decision on this issue. FDIC officials also told us that the regulator was considering disclosing more information about its review process but had not yet reached the point of sharing such information with the public.”

Warren is one of the good ones.

I Will Dine on His Tears, and They Will Be Sweet

It looks like I Heart Radio, the company known as Clear Channel before Bain Capital looted it, is on the edge of collapse, and it looks like Rush Limbaugh will be facing a far less generous contract when it is renewed:

One of the favorite pastimes for sports fans is commiserating over the worst contract their home team ever made; guffawing over management’s decision to waste tens of millions of dollars for a player who never justified the huge payday. (See: Gilbert Arenas.)

For talk radio, there’s probably only one contract that enters that realm of notoriety: Rush Limbaugh’s eight-year, $400-million deal, signed in the summer of 2008 with his longtime radio employer Premiere Radio Networks.

Owned by Clear Channel Communications, which has since changed its name to iHeartRadio, Premiere’s Limbaugh deal instantly dwarfed any payout in AM/FM history. (Only Howard Stern’s contract with Sirius was larger.) The contract, which included a staggering $100 million signing bonus, never panned out as the wheels began to come off Limbaugh’s radio empire.
This year, his contract is up and the timing couldn’t be worse. The talker is facing ratings hurdles, aging demographics, and an advertising community that increasingly views him as toxic, thanks in part to his days-long sexist meltdown over Sandra Fluke in 2012. (He’s also stumbling through the GOP primary season.)

Concurrently, iHeartRadio’s parent company, iHeartMedia, is heading to court, teetering on bankruptcy. The once-dominant radio behemoth is saddled with $20 billion in debt, thanks to a misguided leveraged takeover engineered by Bain Capital in 2008, the same year the radio giant inked its disastrous Limbaugh deal.

I am so amused that in its own way, Mitt Rmoney's bucket shop is involved in Limbaugh's downfall.

I am VERY amused.