brainrow

Via Coyote Gulch, here’s a quick rundown of the entire Democratic race so far:

It’s nice to have an election about substance, huh?

Via Atrios, Bloomberg reports on one modern looting technique:

Bank of America Corp., the second-biggest U.S. bank, said it may not guarantee $38.1 billion of Countrywide Financial Corp.’s debt after taking over the mortgage lender, increasing the likelihood of a default.

“There is no assurance that any such debt would be redeemed, assumed or guaranteed,” the bank said in an April 30 regulatory filing, adding that no decision has been reached. Investors had grown more optimistic the bank would back Countrywide debt. Ratings firm Standard & Poor’s cut the mortgage-lender’s debt to junk today after saying it would raise the grade earlier this week.

…

“This confirms how tenuous this transaction is,” said Christopher Whalen, managing director at Institutional Risk Analytics, a banking research firm in Torrance, California.

Whalen expects Bank of America to absorb the best assets, including Countrywide Bank, while the debt remains with a new company created by the merger, Red Oak Merger Corp. Red Oak may then file for bankruptcy, shielding Bank of America from liability, Whalen said.

So bankruptcy law allows this? You can strip out the assets and isolate the debts in a shell company before declaring bankruptcy for the shell company?

If this is legal, we need some new laws.

History is closer than you think:

Philipp Freiherr von Boeselager, believed to be the last surviving member of the inner circle of plotters who attempted to kill Adolf Hitler in 1944 with a briefcase bomb, has died. He was 90.

The German military said in a statement Friday that the former army major died Thursday night. It did not give a cause of death.

Von Boeselager was part of a group of officers who tried to kill Hitler on July 20, 1944, supplying explosives for the operation led by Col. Claus Graf Schenk von Stauffenberg.

Von Stauffenberg placed the bomb in a conference room where Hitler was meeting with his aides and military advisers. Hitler escaped harm when someone moved the briefcase next to a table leg, deflecting much of the bomb’s explosive force.

Almost immediately afterward, von Stauffenberg and many of his cohorts were arrested and executed in an orgy of revenge killings that saw some hanged by the neck with piano wire.

Though many of those rounded up by Nazi officials were tortured in the hopes they would give up other conspirators, von Boeselager’s name was never divulged and he was never found out.

History trivia: twenty-five years to the day after the Hitler assassination attempt, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the moon. The Saturn V rocket that started them on their way was designed by a team led by Wernher von Braun, who had formerly designed rockets for the Nazi war effort. Small world.

I don’t know whether I’ve heard someone else say this before, or whether it just seems familiar because it’s one of those things that’s so obvious once somebody says it. Atrios on George W. Bush:

Watching Bush speak you realize he’s a really dumb person who thinks everyone in the room is even dumber than he is.

This is why he slows down on the three-syllable words, and why, as The Daily Show noted in 2006, he spends so much time explaining what his job is.

I believe I should thank Adam Chodikoff for that.

Some people are hard to please. From the New York Times:

Exxon Mobil reported the second-best quarterly profit in its history on Thursday — and investors could barely hide their disappointment.

Exxon, the world’s largest publicly traded oil company, said its net income rose 17 percent in the first quarter, buoyed by high oil prices. But that was less than Wall Street expected, and Exxon’s shares fell 3.6 percent, to close at $89.70.

The Internet cartoon Joy of Tech thinks the problem is that we’ve passed Peak Profit. (Click the link or the cartoon to see the whole thing.)

It’s all downhill from here.