Rayne Today

Methinks I see a squeeze play in the making, that President Obama's "stern talking to" could have been a warning shot from a different direction while Congress works from another. DailyKos diarist Badabing posted this morning that Sen. Carl Levin, chair of the Senate Permanent Committee on Investigations, has subpoenaed Goldman Sachs, Washington Mutual and more financial industry firms with regards to the financial meltdown. Note this key graf from WSJ excerpted in the DKos diary: According to people familiar with the matter, the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations also has issued a subpoena to Washington Mutual Inc., a Seattle thrift that was seized by regulators in last year's financial crisis and is now largely owned by J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. It appears likely that several other financial institutions also have received subpoenas. Subcommittee investigators declined to comment. A Goldman Sachs spokesman declined to comment on the subpoena. Deutsc...

Maybe this is something, maybe it’s nothing; maybe it's only a movie script waiting to happen. There’s a rash of stories today about the “apparent” suicide of Kuwaiti broker Hazem Khalid al-Braikan, found shot to death in his home Sunday morning Kuwait time. Seems al-Braikan had been involved in running up the price of stock(s) in fake takeover attempts; he bought up enough stock that it appeared someone was going to take controlling interest of a firm, then dumped the stock after the price had run up because other firms bought into the uptick. The SEC had filed a lawsuit against al-Braikan’s firm and several others on Thursday this week, for alleged trading “around hoax bids for US companies.” Textron, a firm which has historically had government contracts, was one of the firms in which al-Braikan had been trading earlier this year. The most recent stock in which al-Braikan took an initial position on June 1 and sold out on July 20 ? Harman International . You may recognize the n...

The garden got off to a very slow start this year, between two and three weeks late due to cool and crappy weather. As you can see, the plants look a little small and lost in my raised beds at the end of June. The peppers in the middle bed were struggling, looking as if they might not even make it to July. But what a difference a little time makes. The peppers in the middle bed were still struggling through the first week of July, but they looked like they turned the corner. The peppers in the bed closest to the deck (and closest to me in this photo) are going gang busters. There are peppers large enough to pick already, but I'm going to let them go and mature a while longer since they have not yet developed thicker walls and deeper color. There are flowers on the cucumbers in the far bed and the middle bed as well as on the zucchini plants in the closest bed. Looks like they are now getting over the chill they experienced in June. Everything has now come up, including the pole bea...

Those of you who know me also know I have a couple of kids -- a teenager in high school, and a tweenager about to enter middle school. Both of my kids have met the infamous blogger who used, you know, THAT word on MSNBC this afternoon. In fact, they were watching the video of the infamous blogger. Neither batted an eye about the use of THAT word. And I am so proud of them. Because even my kids know the real obscenity isn't a euphemism for oral sex, or even that it happened on a cable show in the middle of the afternoon. My kids know that the real obscenities are these: * Our country went to war based on lies told by elected and appointed officials; * Their brother and the sons/daughters/brothers/sisters of many other families like ours served for this war, came back damaged or dead, for nothing but lies; * Their president and vice president lied repeatedly about all manner of things while refusing to accept responsibility for any failures which happened on their watch; * Their gov...

It's hard to tell which generated more bullshit over the last 24-48 hours: Karl Rove's deposition before the House Judiciary Committee, or the tech industry media reaction to Google's Chrome OS announcement. Rove can pile it on high and deep, but tech media sure is doing its best to create more hot air than Michael Jackson's postmortem circus. For those of you who aren't geeks, Google announced Wednesday that it was working on an operating system . It's going to be built upon open source software and target "people who spend most of their time on the web," with the intent to allow these users rapid access to the internet and be minimally invasive. Since Google's announcement, nearly all analyses produced by tech media pundits have concentrated on whether the new OS is the beginning of a cage match to the death between Google and Microsoft, or a skirmish for smart phone dominance between Google and Apple, or whether Google is simply bent on taking ...