If even the SEC couldn’t detect Madoff’s Ponzi scheme…

The New Neo Posted on by

…when it was pointed out to them and outlined and described by Harry Markopolus, and they launched an official investigation, why should investors and banks have been expected to discover Madoff’s fraudulent dealings all on their own?

But the Madoff trustee, Irving Picard, is claiming that some large Madoff investors (including brokerage customers) and banks had a duty to figure it all out, and he’s suing them under racketeering and fraud laws:

Many of the suits are based on the theory that banks and investors had a duty to investigate what Madoff was doing. Instead, Picard says, they ignored signs of possible fraud such as the con man’s “three-person accounting firm” in a “strip mall” and unusually steady results. While Picard’s strategy could lead to big payouts, the danger is that if judges reject his approach, he will get less from banks and investors in court and may be left with less leverage in any future negotiations…

JPMorgan, Madoff’s primary banker, could have stopped the fraud if it had passed on its suspicions to regulators, Picard said in his suit against the bank. On June 24 he revised the suit to triple his damage demands to $19 billion, an amount equal to all of the money investors lost in the Madoff fraud. JPMorgan should be responsible for the total because it “knew” that billions of dollars flowing through the Madoff account “could not have been linked to a legitimate business purpose,” Picard wrote.

Banks have no duty to investigate customers, JPMorgan says. Picard’s interpretation of bank law “would impose broad investigative duties on banks that do not exist,” it said in February, when it asked a district judge to pull the case out of bankruptcy court, where Picard filed it. The judge granted the request.

Deepak Chopra gives us some insight into the liberal mindset

The New Neo Posted on by

His own, that is.

Chopra’s basic argument: even though you’re pissed at Obama, you must support him because otherwise evil will triumph.

I especially like his first paragraph:

One of the virtues of being on the liberal side of politics is that total obedience isn’t required. There are no hidden agendas. Ideology doesn’t lead to unreason. In a political climate where it feels as if the inmates are running the asylum ”” as in the current Republican threat to default on America’s debt ”” the prevailing sanity of President Obama is something that others and I have taken for granted.

We cannot afford that luxury any more, I’m afraid.

Bizarro world.

I don’t quite know what I want to say about this…

The New Neo Posted on by

…but I know I want to say something.

This is about the marriage between 51-year-old actor Doug Hutchison and 16-year-old Courtney Stodden, about which a lot of people are up in arms. Her parents are not among them, however; they gave their permission, which was legally required in order for the couple to wed.

I watched the following video of an interview with the newlyweds, and it’s one of the oddest things I’ve ever seen—particularly her facial expressions and body language, which seem almost a parody of provocativeness. It’s like she’s a kid who’s trying to imitate her idea of a va-va-voom movie star.

But although Courtney’s age (which has been documented) means she’s not far from actually being a kid, she looks older. A lot older. She also looks as though she’s been through a significant amount of cosmetic surgery, too, although she denies this.

The other odd thing is that her husband doesn’t look 51; he looks younger. So the general effect (at least to me) is that she seems older than he, in some weird and inexplicable way. Courtney herself says, “I’m very mature for my age. I have an old soul.” Whether or not she’s got an old soul, she certainly seems to have an old aura.

And large ta-tas.

Stop the presses! Michele Bachmann gets migraines!!!

The New Neo Posted on by

Until someone else wins the Republican nomination, or until Michele Bachmann drops out of the running—whichever comes first—there will be a relentless drumbeat to destroy her. This much I know.

The latest salvo is the allegation that she gets severe migraines ( a couple of which may have sent her to the hospital) and that she takes medication for them. Aha! Unfit!

Forget the fact that she seems to have a lot of energy and seems to show up for work reliably. Forget that presidents Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant had migraines, too, and they seemed competent enough. Forget that JFK was nearly incapacitated by Addison’s disease and took far worse medications on a daily basis than Bachmann does.

One of my first thoughts on hearing about the migraine charge against Bachmann is that it’s an affliction far more likely to be suffered by women than men. Indeed, 18 to 25% of women get them. Does that disqualify all of them from office? Or just the Republican ones?

I’m not the only one who’s noticed the female angle here. I was surprised to see that NY Magazine has taken it up, with an article entitled, “Is the Daily Caller’s Bachmann migraine story sexist?” The piece notes that Bachmann has some unlikely defenders:

…[such] as Mother Jones editors Clara Jeffrey and Monica Bauerlein [who] have suggested on Twitter that, reading between the lines, the Daily Caller’s article might be a little gender-biased: ” 2 to 1 that Bachmann’s pill popping = advil and estrogen. It’s called menopause, people. Survived by powerful women all over the world,” and “I think some of it was on the order of ‘she’s a girl.'” It’s similar to the way “flake” isn’t strictly a sexist ding but was read as one when applied to Bachmann.

No doubt these editors can’t stand Bachmann. But the accusations that she’s unfit for the presidency because of her migraines isn’t sitting well with them.

I have migraines myself, although fortunately (at least so far) they are not severe. But I know quite a few women who have really bad migraines. My late mother-in-law was one of them. Somehow she managed to hold down a job and run a large household despite the occasional nasty migraine, and was more than competent at both, and extremely energetic. I have little doubt that it’s the same for Bachmann.

And I have little doubt that more hit pieces will follow if Bachmann continues to surge.

The narrowing of the blogosphere

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John Hawkins at RightWingNews laments the decline of the independent right wing blogosphere. Popular blogs are increasingly bigger and more connected to conventional media, or are group or aggregate blogs. It’s harder for a little guy (such as myself) to get started these days, and most of us who are already established have seen our traffic decline somewhat from a peak of a couple of years ago, or the spike that occurs for the few months before elections. The blogosphere has settled down and filled out, and people have found their niches.

Bloggers talking about blogging are a type of inside baseball, quite intriguing to those involved but perhaps not all that fascinating to the rest of the world. But still, I want to state that I’ve noticed something similar to Hawkins, and I don’t think it’s limited to the right: people’s reading habits have solidified within the blogosphere, and patterns have been laid down that are relatively impervious to change. Also, as alternatives such as Twitter and Facebook have blossomed, there are fewer blogosphere readers in general, especially younger ones.

I’ve also noticed that a lot of the popular blogs feature short and snappy commentary, not longer stuff like mine. In fact, that’s not a new phenomenon; it’s been true from the start. And it makes sense, too. Aside from long-form blog greats Bill Whittle and the incomparable Steven Den Beste (who retired from blogging in the archaic year 2004), most of the really biggees have not been drawn to the lengthy missive (a current exception to this rule is Ace, a master of the long form and the short, with huge traffic.)

Readers increasingly lack patience—especially the young—and to justify asking for a reader’s patience, a writer has to produce quality work. I try for that although I don’t always succeed, but trying for it suits my temperament. It doesn’t suit everyone’s.

In an earlier piece of mine about Den Beste, I quoted him as having written:

I write about something because I’m compelled to, because it’s often the case that if I don’t, then I can’t get it out of my head. Putting my thoughts into print relieves an internal pressure which also isn’t easily described.

And while that isn’t true of me every day, it’s true often enough to keep me going so far, and it’s true about blogging in general for me and for many bloggers with staying power. For us, it’s not a fad.

Carmageddon not what is was cracked up to be

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There’s Armageddon, and then there’s Carmageddon.

No, it’s not the time when all your past deeds come back to haunt you in a karmic tsunami. It’s the temporary closing this weekend (to make repairs) of that part of LA Freeway 405 that goes through the Sepulveda Pass.

Why was the event approached with such dread and foreboding? If you know LA, you know the city’s residents love their cars. And if you know 405, you know how incredibly heavy the traffic ordinarily is there.

I’m one of those people who happen to know 405, because I lived in LA for a year and have spent even more time there than that, a great deal of it traveling that exact stretch of that exact freeway. Like much of Los Angeles, it has its own surprising beauty—the pass, that is, not 405 itself. The brown hills dotted with cacti, the vistas of the valleys beyond the pass, the feeder roads that twist through the high surrounding terrain, and the distant mountain ranges snow-capped in winter (easier to see them then, when the air tends to be clearer), are awe-inspiring, if a person takes the time to notice—and time is often taken whether one wishes to or not, because heavy traffic forces a slowdown and/or stasis there with great regularity.

Knowing the freeway as I do, I didn’t think Carmageddon was going to be all that impressive. People adjust if they’re given advance warning. A freeway closing on a weekend means that most people can stay relatively put and avoid that stretch of road. It’s possible to do a great deal in LA and in the San Fernando Valley without going from one to the other, which is what the Sepulveda pass accomplishes. And then there are the surface streets, if one must do it (for example, to go to LAX airport from the Valley—although the Valley has its own busy airport, Burbank).

With fewer people going very far and more people postponing elective trips, it stands to reason that even the surface streets were going to be easier to traverse. And apparently this is exactly what has happened so far:

“It was a breeze,” Coleman said of her 30-minute drive [to LAX].

Speaking of breezes, that was one of the magical things about that particular stretch of 405 in the summer. Magical? you ask. Are you delusional?

No. I’m referring to a moment that occurs when coming from the Valley towards the city through the pass. The San Fernando Valley is notorious for summer heat, a pancake-flat expanse of what used to be desert, housing close to two million people. If a person travels on 405 through the Sepulveda Pass in the summer in a car with challenged air conditioning, as I used to regularly do, and has the windows open, there’s a sharp line of demarcation where the winds from the much cooler Los Angeles Basin meet the baking Valley air, a sudden wall of refreshment that provides instant relief. It’s one of those literal “Ahhh!’ moments in life.

Robert Reich wonders whether Obama can pull a Bill Clinton before the election of 2012…

The New Neo Posted on by

…and his answer is: probably not, but maybe so.

It’s sort of humorous to read Reich on the subject. As a former member of Clinton’s administration, he must know how different the two men are in personality and temperament, as well as the fact that it was far easier for Clinton to successfully tack to the middle and be perceived as sincere because he was never perceived as a doctrinaire man of the left by the rank and file voter in the first place.

And yet Reich ignores these two all-important differences. Instead, he implies that Obama’s problem is that he’s had bad luck: he “isn’t as fortunate” as Bill Clinton was, in that the economy hasn’t recovered while Obama’s been in office. Poor, poor Obama.

Reich’s remedy for the situation is that Obama should focus on fostering jobs’ creation. What an amazing and revolutionary idea! And a good one, too. Only problem is that the American public has heard before from Obama that he will do so, and so far it has failed to occur.

Reich may not recall that, over and over during his presidency, Obama has promised to focus (sometimes like a laser) on jobs. Reich may not recall it, but my guess is that the American people do.

How long a memory voters have is always an interesting question with an unclear answer. Reich seems to think they have virtually no memory at all, and that if Obama manages to pull the job fat out of the fire at the very last minute—or even appear to try hard to do so—the American people will consider his dedication to jobs creation impressive, and gratefully re-elect him. I beg to differ. Even if Reich is correct when he says, “Most Americans care far more about jobs and wages than they do about budget deficits and debt ceilings,” why not also conclude that because they care, they’ve been paying rather close attention to Obama’s cavalier attitude towards jobs, and will remain resentful of his empty promises on the subject?