- Party in D.C.! Party in D.C. this week, bring your own beer, hard liquor and glow sticks! And when I say party in our nation’s capital, I think you all know exactly what I mean. With lawmakers trickling back to Washington this week, it’s time for the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, a 10-member panel appointed last summer by Congress to investigate the nation’s ongoing financial crisis, to kick off the fun and party-time craziness that will undoubtedly occur when it holds its first public hearings on Wednesday and Thursday. And you know it’s going to be a party when the leaders of some of the best-known and largest banks ride their golden chariots into town to testify before a congressional committee. So who is on the guest list? Well, the top executives of Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, J.P. Morgan Chase and Bank of America, for starters. It should be a rockin’ good time and the panel's chairman, Philip Angelides, knows what sort of hijinks his panel is about to be a part of. Angelides said he's interested in hearing about the banks' role in creating the crisis as well as finding out how they became "too big to fail." Governments are funny that way; when they hand out billions of dollars in loans to failing banks, they like to know how their money was spent. Heck, when the federal government stepped in to prop up the banks in fall 2008, it created the Troubled Asset Relief Program to help provide them with liquidity. "We think it made sense to start by bringing up the four biggest investment banks that were involved in so many aspects of the crisis," said Angelides. "Many of them had arms that were involved in originating mortgages, some were packaging mortgage securities and some of them were betting against these mortgage securities." Angelides and his panel were appointed last July and held their first meeting in September. However, it wasn’t until the past few months that it began building a staff and securing new office space in downtown Washington, a few blocks northeast of the White House. At present, the commission is still working towards its goals of employing between 40 and 50 investigators and other staffers, which $8 million should facilitate quite nicely. As with any good, bureaucratic government entity, its work will eventually result in a ginormous, unwieldy final report that will be thick enough to bludgeon an elephant. That report is due Dec. 15. Were the commission run by your average college student, about one paragraph of it would be written by Dec. 14 and the remaining 1,571 pages would be written in a Red Bull-fueled rush between 11 p.m. on Dec. 14 and 5 a.m. on Dec. 15. The report would then be turned in with a cover page sporting a small pizza stain in the bottom right corner by a frazzled, baseball cap-wearing dude with a dirty t-shirt and ripped jeans. But I assume this process will be slightly more professional than that (at least I hope so) and politicians are looking expectantly at the commission to help absolve them of responsibility for allowing the banking collapse to happen in the first place, so expect it to be mostly on track. Other members of the commission include: Bill Thomas, a retired California Republican congressman; Keith Hennessey, an economic adviser under W.; former Sen. Bob Graham, a Florida Democrat; and Brooksley Born, a past chairwoman of the Commodities Futures Trading Commission. These are the individuals who will start the party Wednesday when they swear in bank chiefs Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs, Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase, John Mack of Morgan Stanley and Brian Moynihan of Bank of America. Not receiving an invitation to the party was Citigroup CEO Vikram. "That doesn't mean we won't be talking with Citigroup, either publicly or privately, in the course of our investigation," panel spokesman Tucker Warren explained. After all the fun and good times that Blankfein, Dimon and Mack had when they visited the House Financial Services committee and were torn a new one with blistering questions about the TARP program, you know these guys are pumped to be heading back to the nation’s capital. And even though Angelides predicts a "professional" but also "tough, thorough and fair” tone to the proceedings, I’ll keep the beer bong, keg and glow sticks handy……………
- Any satisfaction I thought I might feel in hearing Mark McGwire finally coming clean about using steroids during his career never materialized when that moment finally came Monday. Hearing Big Mac admit he used steroids when he broke baseball's home run record in 1998 and throughout much of his career just landed with a thud in my mind. McGwire said in a statement that he used steroids intermittently for nearly a decade. He During a 20-minute telephone interview and sat down for a one-hour television interview with Bob Costas, during which McGwire became very emotional on several occasions. "It's very emotional, it's telling family members, friends and coaches, you know, it's former teammates to try to get a hold of, you know, that I'm coming clean and being honest," he said. "It's the first time they've ever heard me, you know, talk about this. I hid it from everybody." McGwire said he called commissioner Bud Selig and Cardinals manager Tony La Russa to personally apologize, leading to Selig releasing a statement through Major League Baseball saying in part, "I am pleased that Mark McGwire has confronted his use of performance-enhancing substances as a player. Being truthful is always the correct course of action, which is why I had commissioned Senator George Mitchell to conduct his investigation.” In addition to the androstinedione that was spotted in his locker during his career (which is a steroid precursor), McGwire said he also used human growth hormone. During his interview with Costas, he mostly owned his dastardly steroid deeds and admitted that his decision to ‘roid up was "foolish." However, a few key portions of his explanation were severely lacking, namely when he said that he used steroids only to recover from injuires and return to the field quicker rather than for their strength and performance benefits and the statement he made about regretting that he played during the steroid era." Sorry to correct you, Mark, but you were the steroid era. The reason the steroid era was christened in the first place was because of players like yourself and Bar-roid Bonds, superstar sluggers who were linked to ‘roids in the minds of fans, media members and everyone else who had a brain. As for the part about only using the steroids to recover from injuries, allow me to use a quote McGwire made Monday and attack from there. "You don't know that you'll ever have to talk about the skeleton in your closet on a national level," he said. "I did this for health purposes. There's no way I did this for any type of strength use." Bro, you don’t need to use the steroids specifically to boost your bench press and add distance to your home runs for it to be cheating and unethical. All you need to do is to use them to gain an advantage that non-‘roiders do not have and it’s wrong, period. By injecting these performance-enhancing drugs into your system so you could recover more quickly from injuries and return to the field sooner, that’s exactly what you did. So even though you hit a then-record 70 homers in 1998 during a record-breaking race with Sammy Sosa, and helped bring the game of baseball back from life support, fans are not going to remember that. When your name comes up, the first thing to come to mind will always be steroids. And make no mistake about it, this admission didn’t come because McGwire wanted to clear his conscience and get on with his life. He did it because he wants to return to baseball, having been appointed as hitting coach for the St. Louis Cardinals and realizing that unless he addressed the issue, spring training would be an absolute circus for the team for all the wrong reasons. His admission isn't about getting into the Hall of Fame; in voting on Jan. 6, he received 128 votes (23.7 percent) in the balloting, the highest total he’s received in his four years on the ballot and well short of the 75 percent needed for induction. Having said all of this and as much as I still despise McGwire for what he helped do to the game of baseball, hearing him fess up in his own words was strangely unsatisfying. Perhaps it’s because we’ve all known for so long that McGwire was a ‘roider and moved on. In the end, there are just too many things in sports and outside of them that I’d rather devote my time and attention to…………
- Would you like some feces with your soda? Before you answer that question, you should probably be aware that you may have already drank some soda accented with a nice touch of human waste. According to a new study published in the January issue of International Journal of Food Microbiology, nearly half of the 90 beverages from soda fountain machines in one area in Virginia tested positive for coliform bacteria -- which could indicate possible fecal contamination. But wait, there’s more! Researchers also detected antibiotic-resistant microbes and E.coli in the soda samples. "Certainly we come in contact with bacteria all the time," Renee Godard, lead author of the study and professor of biology and environmental studies at Hollins University. "It's simply that some bacteria may potentially cause some disease or gastrointestinal distress. One thing we hesitate with is that people get afraid of bacteria. Many of them are benign or helpful, but certainly, I don't want E.coli in my beverage." Well that’s certainly your opinion, R. But perhaps some people out there disagree? No? Just me? Okay then. The sticklers at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency have drinking-water regulations require that all samples test negative for E.coli, so this is obviously a problem. When the beverages from the soda fountains fell below those standards, a big red flag went up. "The large number of beverages and soda fountain machines containing E. coli is still of considerable concern... and suggests that more pathogenic strains of bacteria could persist and thrive in soda fountain machines if introduced," the study stated. The 90 beverages tested for the study were taken from three basic categories (sugar soda, diet soda, water) and obtained from 30 fast food restaurants in a 22-mile area near Roanoke, Virginia. Beverages were taken from both self-service and employee-dispensed machines. It should be noted that although researchers found that 48 percent of beverages obtained from soda fountains contained coliform bacteria, 11 percent contained E. coli and 17 percent had Chryseobacterium meningosepticum, there were no reported outbreaks of food-borne illness related in the Roanoke area at the time of the study. What the study did not address or examine was how the bacteria got into the soda fountains in the first place, so perhaps that would be a good thing to commission another study on. The only recent study to link an outbreak to soda fountains was done in 1998, when 99 soldiers in a U.S. Army base were hospitalized with gastroenteritis. Even so, I’m certainly going to be more leery the next time I amble up to a soda fountain for a drink…………
- We’ve all had that neighbor some time during our life. You know, the one who is typically on the old side, with a short fuse, a low tolerance for any sort of disturbance and has no problem getting up in your grill to let you know just what you’re doing to irritate them. We’ve all had that neighbor living near us, but most of us have probably not had that neighbor pull out a handgun and threaten a bunch of neighborhood kids who were having a snowball fight and decided to chuck a few balls of winter goodness at parked cars in the vicinity. In the town of Lincoln Heights, Ohio, 70-year-old Silvester Hill is that neighbor. According to a police report, a few kids in his ‘hood were throwing snowballs at cars and Hill said he asked the teens to leave. As younger people are apt to do with senior citizens who chastise them, the kids blew Hill off and kept doing whatever they wanted. It was at that point Hill decided that the well-being of his 2006 Buick Rendezvous could not be put in jeopardy any longer and decided to act. He went inside his house and return with his piece, which he proceeded to point at the group of mischievous teens. Exactly what went down at this point is up for debate, but Hill claimed that he did not point the gun at anyone and never cocked the weapon. Police either don’t believe him or don’t care, because he was charged with aggravated menacing. In other words, he went from the one supposedly being wronged to the one being booked into jail and released on his own recognizance. Oh, and Hill was also ordered by a judge to stay away from the teens and turn over all of his handguns to the police. Even with those guns out of Hill’s hands, I would not advise the kids living on or in the immediate vicinity of Adams Street in Lincoln Heights to resume snowball fights anywhere near Hill’s property. Just because he doesn’t have a gun doesn’t mean that crazy old bastard won't come rushing out the front door brandishing a machete or a homemade weapon…………
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