Last Call

Estimates of the crowd at today's One Nation rally in DC drew some 175,000+ people on the National Mall.

So...since only 87,000 or so showed up at the Glenn Beck rally on 8/28, does that mean that the Tea Party really doesn't represent all of America, and that the majority of Americans are remarkably sane, normal people?

Enquiring Zandars want to know.

Larry, Timmy, And Mike

CNBC's Larry Kudlow has a Kramerian track record on pretty much everything, so I'm not sure why anyone's paying attention to his "insider" claim that NYC Mayor Mike Bloomberg will be replacing Timmy after the election.





I think Larry Kudlow is full of crap. Then again, I always think Larry Kudlow is full of crap.

Up To Yer Ears In Mountaineers

If you haven't read Matt Osborne's piece/video on Appalachia Rising, then do yourself a favor a check it out.  West Virginians battling the mining companies that have killed so many in pursuit of "clean coal" is a noble pursuit indeed.



Here in Kentucky, King Coal owns all the politicians...but they don't own the people.  More power to the Appalachia Rising folks...you can check them out here.

Republican Obstruction Has A Very Real Price, Part 2

Sen. Mitch McConnell went on a rant today in the GOP weekly address accusing Democrats of refusing to take action on the Bush tax cuts.

But the real outrage needs to be directed right at McConnell and the Republicans in Congress for killing a quarter of a million jobs this week.

They left town for their pre-election recess having blocked the extension of a successful jobs program -- praised by conservatives from Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour to economist Kevin Hassett of the American Enterprise Institute -- that provided 250,000 jobs for low-income parents and youths.

A $2.5 billion version of the extension passed the House, twice. The Senate whittled it back to $1.5 billion but still could not dislodge Republican opposition -- even though the cost would have been fully paid for.

The program was a sliver of the giant stimulus measure, but one of the most effective in terms of job creation. And it sounded as if it came straight out of the GOP playbook. The money was used overwhelmingly for private-sector jobs. It went to employers, to subsidize -- depending on the state -- all or part of wages for newly hired workers who would otherwise have been on unemployment rolls or receiving welfare. It was a particular boon to small business, helping them expand at a time when they would not have otherwise had the financial leeway to do so. 

To repeat, Republicans have blocked funding, and now 250,000 Americans are going to lose their jobs.  The Republicans killed a quarter million jobs just to make election gains.  They are heartless bastards.


So when Republicans say "Where are the jobs?", you tell them "You blocked them, you asshole."  They only care about power.  And they will sacrifice as many Americans as it takes to gain it.


Repugnant.

Turn On The Lights, Watch The Roaches Scatter, Part 6

Things are moving quickly now in Foreclosure-gate.  Connecticut AG (and current Dem Senate candidate) Richard Blumenthal has instituted a 60 day moratorium on all foreclosures and other states are moving to follow suit.

Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal on Friday ordered a moratorium on all foreclosures by all banks for 60 days--the most radical action taken by a state on issue of document irregularities.

California also expanded the moratorium on foreclosures it announced last week on Ally Financial foreclosures to include those by J.P. Morgan Chase.

Calling the companies' review of key foreclosure documents "a ruse," California Attorney General Jerry Brown (D) ordered J.P. Morgan to prove it is following the law before it continues foreclosures in the state.

Both J.P. Morgan Chase and Ally have frozen foreclosures in 23 states because some employees had signed off on foreclosure paperwork without properly reviewing the files.


Colorado and Illinois have stopped foreclosures by Ally and at least seven other states have launched probes into the issue. But Connecticut is the first to institute an industry-wide ban.

A multi-state moratorium on foreclosures is almost certainly on the way in the next week or so.   When it finally dawns on investors that the big mortgage banksare most likely guilty of massive, systemic fraud against millions of homeowners (and former homeonwers) then the jig is up.  When it becomes apparent that these banks are also claiming billions of assets they don't actually own and may be liable for billions more in legal indemnity, their stocks will crater.

Connecticut's actions just froze the housing market there.  More states will follow as they investigate.  When they discover there's no titles...at all...then the game ends.

Be ready.

The O'Donnell Meatball War

Real Time host Bill Maher continues to comb the video of his old political panel show Politically Incorrect and keeps running across clips of Christine O'Donnell making an idiot out of herself circa 1999.



In 1999 Christine O'Donnell told Bill Maher that she'd briefly tried Buddhism, and that she'd tried to be a Hare Krishna but couldn't take the vegetarianism.

"I was dabbling into every other kind of religion before I became a Christian," O'Donnell said on "Politically Incorrect," a July 19, 1999 clip revealed tonight on Maher's HBO show "Real Time."

Then the kicker:

I was dabbling in witchcraft, I've dabbled in Buddhism. I would have become a Hare Krishna but I didn't want to become a vegetarian. And that is honestly the reason why -- because I'm Italian, I love meatballs!

O'Donnell, now the Republican Senate nominee in Delaware, has described herself as a devout Catholic and she targeted evangelical voters during her successful primary campaign.

I wouldn't trust this woman to watch a crock pot, let alone be a United States Senator.  And yet there she is, the GOP candidate, admitting crazy stuff like this on national television.

Jesus wept.  Arguably so does the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

StupidiNews, Weekend Edition!

• Flooding from North Carolina to New England is slowly receding after the remnants of Tropical Storm Nicole dropped as many as 20 inches of rain.
• Growing tensions between the US and Pakistan continue to get worse as drone strikes and Pakistani protests increase.
• The US is scrambling to apologize to Guatemala after evidence that American scientists deliberately infected people with syphilis there after WW II emerged this week.
• California may finally have a budget as early as the middle of next week according to reports.
• Microsoft has sued Motorola, claiming that the Android mobile OS is guilty of patent infringement.

Last Call

Steve M. notes Rick Sanchez, formerly of CNN, was done in by his insecurities talking about Jon Stewart.

Sanchez's anger against Stewart is class-based, and, again, he focuses on speech, among other issues:

Anybody who's different than you are, anybody who's not form your frame of reference; anybody who doesn't look and sound exactly like the people that you sound [like] and grew up with. (Emphasis added.)

After Sanchez said this, the host of the show said that Stewart should understand ethnic prejudice because he's Jewish. Sanchez scoffed at that notion, and lashed out in a way that could destroy his career:

Very powerless people… [snickers] He's such a minority, I mean, you know [sarcastically]… Please, what are you kidding? ... I'm telling you that everybody who runs CNN is a lot like Stewart, and a lot of people who run all the other networks are a lot like Stewart, and to imply that somehow they -- the people in this country who are Jewish -- are an oppressed minority? Yeah. [sarcastically]

The notion that Stewart singles out Sanchez's gaffes is nuts, because Stewart attacks the button-nosed Botoxed blonds of Fox (male and female) far more than he attacks Sanchez. If Sanchez thinks he's singled out for especially poor treatment, it's clearly because this insecurity eats away at him and distorts his reading of reality. If he thinks he's singled out by Stewart, he should talk to Megyn Kelly or Steve Doocy, whom Stewart absolutely hammers once or twice a week. But none of that justifies Sanchez's anti-Semitism in any way.

No, it doesn't.  Nothing does.   But what amazes me is that this story unfolded in 24 hours and Sanchez is fired.  Wingers are having a field day, since Sanchez worked for CNN he was a liberal, so that means Sanchez is proof that liberals are always the real racists and anti-semites, etc.

Meanwhile, CNN continues to employ Douchebag Douchebagson Erick Erickson and MSNBC continues to employ Pat Buchanan, both who have said a lot worse things while actually employed by these networks...and actually on these networks themselves.  Sanchez made these comments on a Sirius XM radio interview.

The same people who are waving goodbye gleefully at Sanchez continually excuse Pat Buchanan and Erick Erickson.  There's a bit of a double standard there.   I'm not defending Sanchez, he most certainly deserved to get hammered for that.  But if that's the bar for being dismissed from a network, then a healthy chunk of the people employed by cable news need to be looking for new work.

Turn On The Lights, Watch The Roaches Scatter, Part 5

The NY Times has picked up on the Ginormous Foreclosure Nightmare and things continue to move at a rapid pace as the entire industry is heading into the abyss.

“Maybe this is like shock therapy,” said the economist Karl E. Case. “Maybe this will actually get the lenders to the table and encourage them to work out deals that are to the benefit of everybody.”

While such a happy ending is possible, the near term is more likely to produce paralysis and confusion.

As more defaulting homeowners become aware of the lenders’ problems, they are expected to hire lawyers and challenge the proceedings against them. And if completed foreclosures were not properly done, families who bought the troubled homes could be vulnerable to claims by the former owners.

Apparently alarmed about such a possibility, one of the major title insurance companies, Old Republic National Title, has sent a bulletin to agents saying that “until further notice” it would not insure title to properties foreclosed upon by GMAC Mortgage, the country’s fourth-largest home lender and one of the two big lenders at the center of the current controversy.

GMAC declined to comment, and Old Republic representatives did not return calls. 

With no insurance underwriting of GMAC/Ally's foreclosures, the game's up for real now.  If insurance companies won't touch foreclosures now, then they will not move forward.  JPMorgan Chase is also knee deep in this mess.  And now, Bank of America is checking its foreclosures too while Wells Fargo is trying to sweep everything they can under the rug before the light on Florida's foreclosure farms reaches the West Coast.  That's pretty much the entire mortgage industry right there in those four banks, folks.

The only properties selling now are short sales and foreclosure sales.  With no foreclosure sales now that just leaves short sales and even those will begin to dry up as everyone in the business will want to triple check the title deed.

That means home sales will grind to a halt across the country.  The Tyler Durden prophecy is starting to look like a very real outcome, folks.  No foreclosures.  Potentially hundreds of thousands of lawsuits.  Mass obliteration of the housing market as values wither because there are no sales.  The mortgage banks get slaughtered in the markets because nobody knows who owns what in real estate.

Game over.  Starting to look potentially catastrophic, folks.  This one could very well be the trigger of the next financial crisis.

Stay tuned.  This may be one hell of an October surprise.

And We're Living Here In Harrisburg

The capital of the Keystone State may be the key stone that collapses the municipal bond market.

Harrisburg Mayor Linda Thompson asked Pennsylvania to determine the city to be in municipal financial distress so it would qualify for help and oversight under the state’s Act 47 program.

The city “stands on the precipice of full-blown financial crisis as a looming cash shortfall threatens its ability to pay vendors and meet payroll,” a statement from the mayor’s office said.

Things get interesting from here.  In a very, very bad way.

Folks, as bad as 2010 has been through the first nine months of the year, 2011 is shaping up to be absolutely horrific.  Imagine January has the Republicans in charge, wanting to cut the country off at the knees right when it needs help the most.

Fun, huh?

Zandar's Thought Of The Day

Dick Morris, former Democratic campaign maestro who is wrong about everything, is predicting that the Democrats will lose the House and Senate in the worst midterm bloodbath in history.

Bob Shrum, former Democratic campaign maestro who is wrong about everything, is predicting that the Democrats will heroically hold the House and the Senate.

Both of these men are complete idiots.  I fear they may have just destroyed the space-time continuum as a result.

Militia Mission Creep

When people ask me "Are you worried about terrorists attacking America?" I reply "Not foreign ones, no."

Camouflaged and silent, the assault team inched toward a walled stone compound for more than five hours, belly-crawling the last 200 yards. The target was an old state prison in eastern Ohio, and every handpicked member of Red Team 2 knew what was at stake: The year is 2014, and a new breed of neo-Islamic terrorism is rampant in Michigan, Illinois, Indiana and Ohio ... The current White House Administration is pro-Muslim and has ordered a stand-down against Islamic groups. The mission: Destroy the terrorist command post — or die trying. The fighters must go in "sterile" — without name tags or other identifying insignia — as a deniable covert force. "Anyone who is caught or captured cannot expect extraction," the briefing officer said.

At nightfall the raiders launched their attack. Short, sharp bursts from their M-16s cut down the perimeter guards. Once past the rear gate, the raiders fanned out and emptied clip after clip in a barrage of diversionary fire. As defenders rushed to repel the small team, the main assault force struck from the opposite flank. Red Team 1 burst through a chain-link fence, enveloping the defense in lethal cross fire. The shooting was over in minutes. Thick grenade smoke bloomed over the command post. The defenders were routed, headquarters ablaze.


This August weekend of grueling mock combat, which left some of the men prostrate and bloody-booted, capped a yearlong training regimen of the Ohio Defense Force, a private militia that claims 300 active members statewide. The fighters shot blanks, the better to learn to maneuver in squads, but they buy live ammunition in bulk. Their training — no game, they stress — expends thousands of rounds a year from a bring-your-own armory of deer rifles, assault weapons and, when the owner turns up, a belt-fed M-60 machine gun. The militia trains for ambushes, sniper missions, close-quarters battle and other infantry staples.

These guys are real.  They're out there now in places like Ohio and Utah and Vermont and Montana, training for the use of violence.  To some, it's a game.  To many, it's deadly serious.  Nearly all of them distrust the government, looking to band together in case of "the collapse." 

And they don't like Obama.  No sir.

Obama's ascendancy unhinged the radical right, offering a unified target to competing camps of racial, nativist and religious animus. Even Patriots who had no truck with white supremacy found that they could amplify their antigovernment message by "constructing Obama as an alien, not of this country, insufficiently American," according to Michael Waltman, an authority on hate speech at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Perennial features of extreme-right scare lore — including imagined schemes to declare martial law, abolish private ownership of guns and force dissidents into FEMA concentration camps — became more potent with Obama as the Commander in Chief.

Threats against Obama's life brought him Secret Service protection in May 2007, by far the earliest on record for a presidential candidate. At least four alleged assassination plots between June and December — by militiamen in Pennsylvania, white supremacists in Denver, skinheads in Tennessee and an active-duty Marine lance corporal at North Carolina's Camp Lejeune — led to arrests and criminal charges before Obama was even sworn in.

"We call it somewhat of a perfect storm," says a high-ranking FBI official who declined to speak on the record because of the political sensitivities of the subject. With an economy in free fall and rising anger about illegal immigration, Obama became "a rallying point" for dormant extremists after the 2008 election who "weren't willing to act before but now are susceptible to being recruited and radicalized." 

And this movement is getting worse as the economy does.   These few are the people I'm really, really worried about causing violence in our country.

They've done it before.  We choose not to remember much about it unless you live in Oklahoma City.

It's Probably Full Of Ur-Quan With Dalek Slaves Riding Borg

Astronomers are excited about a planet discovered in the Gliese 581 system, some 20 light-years from here, that may be the most Earth-like planet discovered yet.  Scientists believe there's a pretty good chance there's the ability to support life there, from the readings.

"Personally, given the ubiquity and propensity of life to flourish wherever it can, I would say that the chances for life on this planet are 100 percent. I have almost no doubt about it," Steven Vogt, professor of astronomy and astrophysics at University of California Santa Cruz, told Discovery News.

The discovery caps an 11-year effort to tease out information from instruments on ground-based telescopes that measure minute variations in starlight caused by the gravitational tugs of orbiting planets.

Planet G -- the sixth member in Gliese 581's family -- orbits right in the middle of that system's habitable region, where temperatures would be suitable for liquid water to pool on the planet's surface.

"This is really the first 'Goldilocks' planet, the first planet that is roughly the right size and just at the right distance to have liquid water on the surface," astronomer Paul Butler, with the Carnegie Institution in Washington, D.C., told reporters during a conference call Wednesday.

I've seen this movie.  120 years from now the first colony ship that heads there gets eaten/assimilated/copied/lost in time/zombified/mindwiped/sacrificed to very old, very dark gods, and we have to nuke the place from orbit.

It's the only way to be sure.  Look at the kinds of monsters growing on this planet we're all on now.

Berserker Moderates

CNN's Joe Foreman has an interesting article on the moderate backlash to the tea Party backlash to the liberal backlash to the Bush years:  the rise of the "Militant Middle".

Which brings us to the Tea Party. Despite all the headlines about their impact on the upcoming midterms, I have a theory that out in the political heartland, the trashing by the Tea Partiers may be preparing the battlefield for a much more profound second wave of disaffected, independent voters, who could make the Tea Party look like, well, a tea party.

I've always called them the Militant Middle, and Gary Butts is a founding member. "It's about time the moderates stood up and said, 'Hey, we're in the majority here!'"

He is with ModerateVoters.org, based in Irvine, California, and he says the Militant Middle started growing and coalescing around a broad slogan of "Throw the bums out" long before the Tea Party even started brewing -- and now it's reached a boiling point.

He's not alone. Comedy Central's Jon Stewart stirred the waters with his call for a Million Moderate March on Washington the day before Halloween to "restore sanity."

Stewart tells his devoted audience, "We live in troubled times with real people facing very real problems; problems that have real if imperfect solutions that I believe 70 to 80 percent of our population could agree to try and could ultimately live with. Unfortunately the conversation and process is controlled by the other 15 to 20 percent."

The problem with this is that any "centrist" movement like this always becomes co-opted by the conservative tendencies of the Village.  It would be nice if Americans stood up for fiscally conservative, socially liberal policies, but what happens is it becomes fiscally conservative, socially conservative instead because that's what the Village wants.

The real problem was never the Tea Party.  The real problem is the corporate media that empowers it and ignores the moderates as much as they do progressives.  If you want to take control of the process from the 15 or 20 percent, as Jon Stewart says, you have to take the real control away from the 0.1% that is the Village first.

Gold Rush, Part 16

Gold still up to a record high at $1,317, dollar still down to a six-month low against the euro.  The Japanese yen currency intervention by the Bank of Japan has lasted for two weeks and change, and the yen is now back to the same level it was at and continues to fall.

Stocks meanwhile just came off the best September in decades in the ultimate Dead Cat Bounce.  Just the threat of Helicopter Ben's Magic Printing Press is now driving the markets.  QE2 is now all but assured.

When will Ben pull the trigger?  When he does, the world changes forever.