If all printers were determined not to print anything till they were sure it would offend nobody, there would be very little printed. -- Benjamin Franklin
Poor, poor Republicans. If only Obama wasn't so mean, the Republicans would surely stop attacking him 24/7/365, right David Brooks?
David Brooks: I don’t like the influence of money any more than the next person. It magnifies transparency and unreason. The people who give tend to be tribal in their affiliations and they hate people who compromise and stray from party orthodoxy. The way to rise to leadership in Congress is through fundraising and so it is generally the most partisan who make it to the top.
But the leaders of neither party have the moral authority to criticize the other on this score. To do so means ignoring the mote in your own eye. And it is depressing to see Obama and others going off on this jag. There must be other ways of firing up the Democratic base. Is there no substantive issue they can talk about?
Because to David Brooks, anonymous donors buying elections with hundreds of millions of dollars with no limit and no disclosure is not an susbatantial issue because "both sides do it."
Only if Brooks wasn't such an intellectually lazy gimboid, he'd know that Democrats are the ones pushing for more disclosure, which was...surprise!...blocked by the GOP and the DISCLOSE Act went poof. He'd also realize that just short of half of us are particularly concerned about this, so it might in fact be a "substantive issue".
Brooks dismisses the evidence wholesale, and he's doing it because he's either beneath him to check, or his job to kill the idea that it matters.
Has even one national Republican said anything about this?
Could someone in the press find it in themselves to ask one of them about it?
"Hahahahaha no" and "Hahahahahahahaha no", respectively. Republicans want to stay far, far, far away from this as possible especially now, because somebody might figure out that all this crap originated back when they were in charge of the damn country. The Village is being directed to cover for the banks, but they're having a devil of a time doing that when local foreclosure nightmare stories pop up daily. The Democrats are scared, but this is normal. Some of them have enough balls to say something (Grayson, Franken, etc.) Most of them are not sure what to make of this.
What to make of this is that the largest holder of mortgages right now, you know the mortgages that are potentially screwed because there's no clear title of chain, is the federal government.
A Wheelwright man has filed a lawsuit against Bank of America, alleging agents working for the bank repossessed his home by mistake and refuse to pay for any damages other than the replacement of locks.
According to court documents, Christopher Hamby arrived home on Oct. 5 to find the locks on his doors changed and physical damage to his property from winterization chemicals placed in the plumbing and various lines cut at the residence.
The lawsuit also names A1 Preservation and Richard Spurgeon, who owns the business, as agents acting for Bank of America who wrongfully participated in the actions that Hamby alleges took place.
Hamby said that he does not have a relationship with Bank of America, including any type of mortgage agreement, and that the defendants had no legal right to come on his property. Hamby also said that he has had conversations with various agents for the defendants in the case and they acknowledged they wrongfully entered and damaged his property due to the mistaken belief that his property was in default and subject to repossession. The defendants allegedly offered to pay for a locksmith to repair the damage to the doors but have denied any other form of compensation.
Expect a hell of a lot more of these stories to surface very, very quickly. America is figuring out that the last five years or so has been the largest financial shell game in history, and finally, finally we may be ready for the torches and pitchforks.
A new poll from The Hill shows some rather depressing figures about which party is seen as being "dominated" by extremists, but the only thing extreme here is the hippie punching.
This result comes from The Hill 2010 Midterm Election Poll, which found that 44 percent of likely voters say the Democratic Party is more dominated by its extreme elements, whereas 37 percent say it’s the Republican Party that is more dominated by extremists.
The revelations in a survey of 10 toss-up congressional districts across the country point to problems for Democrats, who are trying to motivate a disillusioned base and appeal to independents moving to the GOP ahead of the Nov. 2 election.
The polling firm Penn, Schoen and Berland conducted the survey, contacting 4,047 likely voters by phone between Oct. 2 and Oct. 7. The margin of error for this sample is 1.5 percent.
More than one in every five Democrats (22 percent) in The Hill’s survey said their party was more dominated than the GOP by extreme views. The equivalent figure among Republicans is 11 percent.
Results for independent voters reflected the larger sample. Forty-three percent of likely independent voters said the Democratic Party is more dominated by its extreme elements, compared to 37 percent who thought the GOP had fallen under the sway of extreme views.
Honestly, America? The Democrats are dominated by extremists? Do some research, people. Christine O' Donnell? Carl Paladino? Rand Paul? Any of these folks ring a bell? Jim DeMint? Michele Bachmann? Virginia Foxx?
You know, this is where "The President Is Secretly X" crap is paying off for the GOP. And surprise, the poll was done by our old friends Doug Schoen and Mark Penn. As BooMan says, the goal here is to lay the foundation for the Mother of All Hippie Punching festivals after the elections. Here's the money quote:
“That’s real trouble for Democrats,” said Jim Kessler, co-founder of the Third Way, a centrist Democratic think tank.
“All the press coverage has been about how these Tea Party candidates are fringe ideologues, and there have been high-profile examples of them proving the point,” he added. “Yet, still at this moment, you have independents saying, ‘I think the Democrats are a little more extreme than the Republicans.' "
Third Way, ladies and gentlemen. It's the hippies' fault! Obama must go to the Center! Obama will obey the Village Daleks!
Kentucky's Republican nominee for Senate, Rand Paul, is running away from his past support for abolishing the federal income tax in favor of a national sales tax, according to reports on the ground in the Bluegrass State.
The move is the latest walkback from the past for Paul, who started out the campaign as some kind of libertarian-tea party hybrid, unafraid to talk on national television about things like the problems he saw in the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Since winning the nomination, however, Paul has headed in pretty much a straight line toward establishment Republican policies when it comes to his campaign rhetoric. The national sales tax shift appears to be part of that trend.
Some conservatives have long called for the abolition of the 16th Amendment -- which created the income tax -- and the creation of a national sales tax as high as 25 cents on the dollar in its place. They argue the sales tax would be more fair. Detractors say it would hit low-income taxpayers the hardest, pretty much undoing exactly what the progressive income tax structure was supposed to do in the first place. Paul used to be one of those who called for a national sales tax, according to reports, though now he claims he never was.
But Rand Paul's record only had one weakness: Google!
On Tuesday, the AP reported that Americans For Fair Taxation, a national sales tax advocacy group, sent reporters a written statement from Paul showing his support for the proposal:
"The federal tax code is a disaster no one would come up with if we were starting from scratch," Paul said in the statement. "I support making taxes flatter and simpler. I would vote for the FairTax to get rid of the Sixteenth Amendment, the IRS and a lot of the control the federal government exerts over us."
The AP reported that Paul's campaign "verified" the statement when asked about it. Paul didn't seem to keen to discuss it himself, however. He "declined to answer questions on the issue during a campaign stop," the AP reported.
Kentucky has been one of the hardest hit states during this economic disaster, and Rand Paul's prescription to fix it is a national sales tax, which of course would hurt those who have limited incomes and have to use that income to buy staples like food, not to mention there's a terrific argument that people who could afford to get by with purchasing little would choose to do so rather than pay 25% sales tax on big ticket items, which would of course reduce demand in our consumption-driven economy.
Talk about a job-killing tax, this one's about as bad as you can get. Hurts the poor coming, hurts aggregate demand going. Rand Paul suddenly no longer thinks this is a good idea like he did earlier.
Funny. For a "maverick outsider" Rand Paul seems to know an awful lot about reversing his positions to take the GOP corporate stance time and time again.
Via Zero Hedge, the Labor Department has been quietly fudging its stats every week, and has been doing so for quite some time now if you take a cumulative look.
Needless to say, the real numbers for weekly jobless and continuing jobless claims are a lot higher than what the BLS is telling us.
Today's numbers continue that trend. Every week, the previous week's numbers are revised upwards, and that's helping to hide some of the real damage.
That damage is pretty apparent in the continuing claims however. Food for thought.
Last night's debate between Delaware's Senate candidates, Republican Christine O'Donnell and Democrat Chris Coons, showed that outside the carefully managed sound bite factory of FOX News, O'Donnell is still just as much of a disaster as she was ten years ago on Bill Maher's show. If even CNN is questioning her gravitas, it's over.
In one testy exchange, O'Donnell referred to Obama administration policies creating what she called "a culture of dependency" by expanding the number of people getting food stamps. Coons immediately tried to portray her as insensitive saying: "To simply denounce people as being dependent because they're applying for and receiving food stamps in the worst recession in modern times is frankly slandering people who are in incredibly difficult times."
O'Donnell interrupted, saying, "That's not fair. That's not fair of you to say that because that's not at all what I'm doing," and then counter-attacking by declaring: "I'm not the person who would cut the tax benefits of disabled and low-income citizens as you did as county executive."
The most serious problem for either candidate came when O'Donnell was asked to cite any specific recent Supreme Court rulings that she opposed.
"Oh gosh, give me a specific one," she said, and when told the question required her come up with cases, O'Donnell responded, "I'm sorry," and promised to put the information up later on her website.
Coons quickly referred to the Citizens United ruling in January in which the court lifted some limits on corporate contributions to campaign spending.
The debate produced a few humorous moments, such as when Coons said O'Donnell's well-publicized statements from a decade earlier that she dabbled in witchcraft and questioned evolution theory were distractions instead of a substantive campaign issue.
"You're just jealous that you weren't on 'Saturday Night Live'," O'Donnell said, referring to the comedy show's satirical skit about her.
"I'm dying to see who's going to play me," Coons responded with a smile.
O'Donnell was blown out of the water. You figure any Senate candidate should be prepared to discuss something like this, considering the Senate's job involves confirming Supreme Court justices. You figure any Tea Party Republican would fall back on Roe v. Wade abortion ruling and say to repeal it if they didn't have anything else in the deck like the recent Citizen United campaign finance case.
Nope. The woman was clueless. Had no idea. But that makes her a regular person, so we should celebrate her ignorance and elect her anyway, right?
Christine O'Donnell ha accomplished the near impossible: she's made Sarah Palin look like a qualified policy wonk in comparison. Hint to Tea Party candidates: read up on the Judicial branch once in a while. Hell, read, period.
She's done here. So, Dems, can we move on to fighting other battles? Because Christine O'Donnell is EPIC FAIL.
The nation’s four largest for-profit health insurers denied coverage to more than 651,000 people over a three-year period, citing pre-existing conditions, according to an analysis of insurer data detailed in a Congressional investigation.
Between Aetna, Humana, UnitedHealth Group, and WellPoint, that averages out to a denial of coverage for one out of every seven applicants, according to an Energy and Commerce Committee memo about the investigation.
The memo, released by Energy and Commerce Chairman Henry Waxman and Bart Stupak, both Democrats, touts provisions in the health care reform bill that address pre-existing condition denials.
But all politics aside, the investigation contains some interesting figures and information culled from thousands of pages of documents provided by the insurers. The memo points out, for instance, that since 2007, the number of denials on the basis of pre-existing conditions has risen each year, outpacing the increase in applications for insurance coverage.
That includes a quarter of a million Americans just last year alone, by just 4 insurers. Children cannot be denied coverage based on pre-existing conditions now, and all Americans will have that benefit by 2014.
But let's repeal it all and let insurance companies refuse to cover people, like the Republicans want. And of course, the Republicans want to replace it with...surprise!...the same provisions to stop insurance companies from denying coverage based on pre-existing conditions. The difference is the Republicans want 100% of the credit for it. Same provision, same benefit, just a different party.
McClatchy's Tony Pugh has a profile of two of the folks who brought Foreclosuregate to light: a pair of regular folks with blogs. Lisa Epstein of Foreclosure Hamlet and Michael Redman of 4closureFraud have been fighting the good fight for a while now, and now the country is taking notice.
For Epstein, who often helped her patients navigate disputes with their health insurance companies, the role of advocate wasn't new — but the thrill of a courtroom victory was.
"It was like something struck inside me, like this is what I'm compelled to do. I can be a nurse for people caught in this foreclosure crisis," Epstein said. "I remember thinking, 'I'm not an attorney, and there are definite obstacles, but maybe there's a role for me.' And I ran back to the hospital like I had wings. I felt like this is my purpose."
Within a year, she and Redman — who didn't know each other at the time — would leave their respective jobs to pursue their passion for helping others and exposing injustice in the foreclosure industry.
After meeting late last year at a foreclosure fraud seminar, they teamed up to become two of the nation's most influential civilian beat cops for the beleaguered foreclosure industry.
Equal parts agitators, activists and advocates, Redman and Epstein have made their presence felt in Florida and nationally through their respective websites, 4closureFraud.org and foreclosurehamlet.org.
Under a sun-drenched sky last week, Redman proudly perused his Web log to see recent visits from the Internal Revenue Service, the Homeland Security Department, the Justice Department, Fannie Mae, the Housing and Urban Development Department and the CIA, among others. Someone from the executive office of the president took a recent look, too, he said.
Major banks also are peeping at Redman's frequent postings and snarky analysis of embarrassing documents that appear to show foreclosure industry fraud.
Last week, he posted a deposition from a clerk at one of four Florida law firms that the state attorney general is investigating on suspicions that they're using fabricated documents to evict thousands of homeowners. She told investigators that the firm's employees regularly signed affidavits without reading them and put incorrect dates on documents.
"This kind of stuff goes on all the time, and it's everywhere," Redman said.
“While Obama and the DNC were wasting money producing false ads to run on DC television, we have been working with like-minded groups to launch a $50 million House Surge that strikes far beyond their 40-seat firewall, expanding the battlefield and forcing them to thin out the resources dedicated to vulnerable members,” American Crossroads spokesman Jonathan Collegio wrote in an e-mail to reporters Wednesday morning.
The effort was first reported by the Wall Street Journal.
The ad blitz is set to begin this week, with the groups reportedly planning to target Colorado Rep. Ed Perlmutter and Indiana Rep. Joe Donnelly.
The alliance is part of an ever growing list of conservative groups, including Americans for Job Security, the Club for Growth, the 60 Plus Association, and American Future Fund, pouring millions of dollars into House races. On Tuesday, POLITICO reported that the Center for Individual Freedom, another conservative group, was planning on spending $2 million in 10 House races.
Great to have tens of millions in anonymous donations spent to buy up midterm elections in the last 30 days, because that's clearly what our founding fathers meant by the preservation of free speech. Meanwhile, who's spending money to buy those seats? We'll never know. You'd think even the Tea Party would feel uncomfortable about that, as they vow to never give a dime to the NRCC and all, but...they don't matter, folks.
Big money talks now, not teabags, not voters, not you and me. And keeping those anonymous donors in money to donate is all that our political system exists to do now.
Case in point: The Obama administration filing an appeal for DADT like...now.
The Obama administration is expected to appeal as soon as Wednesday a federal judge's ruling that halted the Defense Department from enforcing its policy that bars openly gay people from military service, according to senior administration officials familiar with the government's plans.
U.S. District Court Judge Virginia Philips issued an injunction Tuesday that bans enforcement of the "don't ask, don't tell" policy throughout the military services.
While the government has up to 60 days to file an appeal to the Ninth Circuit Court in San Francisco, California, officials familiar with the case said that could happen in the next day or two.
Awesome. Hey, ask for a stay on that injunction from a higher court and let's ruin everybody's day, eh? I understand the need to try doing this, but doing so before the election seems, I dunno, overly eager to maintain a law that the President has vowed to see gone, you know?
...Paul Giamatti, ladies and gentlemen. William Hurt is Hammerin' Hank Paulson, James Woods as doomed Lehman Brothers CEO Dick Fuld, and Timmy the Invisible Boy is played by Billy Crudup...
And that totally works, too.
HBO's movie "Too Big To Fail" will be out next year, based on Andrew Ross Sorkin's book (which is a good read.)
Things fall apart, the center cannot hold. Two potentially huge developments today in Foreclosuregate. First, as expected every state other than Alabama is joining the state Attorneys General probe into this mess (Alabama? Really? Hey Matt Osborne, what's the deal with that?)
The 49 state attorneys general are investigating allegations some banks used shoddy paperwork to kick struggling borrowers out of their homes during a foreclosure crisis that is one of the most visible wounds of the 2007-2009 recession.
"We are in the fourth year of a housing and economic crisis that was brought on by lax practices of the mortgage lending industry," Minnesota Attorney General Lori Swanson said in a statement. "The latest allegations of corner cutting and slipshod paperwork are troubling, but perhaps not surprising."
The attorneys general will be looking at the practice by banks and companies that collect monthly mortgage payments of using "robo-signers" -- people who sign hundreds of affidavits a day. It is alleged they did not properly review the documents they were signing.
The use of robo-signers "may constitute a deceptive act and/or an unfair practice or otherwise violate state laws," the attorneys general said in their joint statement.
Alabama was the only one of the 50 states not to join the investigation and it was not immediately clear why.
Ever wanted to pick up a red war phone and tell the person on the other side to "start the music"? Effectively, the housing market has just taken a semi-permanent vacation until further notice. There's not an insurance underwriter in the country who will touch a housing loan right now. The housing market just got carpet bombed.
And that brings us to major development number two, via Zero Hedge: JP Morgan Chase just threw MERS under the bus. What's MERS, you ask? It's "Robo-Signers R Us", the virtual reality that the mortgage banks created in order to play their shell game.
JPMorgan Chase's CEO says the bank has stopped using the electronic mortgage tracking system used by major financial institutions.
Lawyers have argued in court proceedings that the system is unable to accurately prove ownership of mortgages.
JPMorgan Chase & Co. and other banks have suspended some foreclosures following allegations of paperwork problems in thousands of cases.
JPMorgan's CEO, Jamie Dimon, made the announcement in a conference call Wednesday to discuss the bank's quarterly earnings.
The Mortgage Electronic Registration System, or MERS, acts as a trading house for millions of mortgages. Lawyers for homeowners say the system lacks the required paper trail to prove mortgage ownership in foreclosure proceedings.
MERS is the entity that's supposed to keep track of all the mortgage loans over the last five years. Right now, the validity of every single 1 and 0 in their systems is now 100% suspect. If JP Morgan Chase is walking away from MERS, then all the banks will. And suddenly, nobody knows who has the note for which mortgage anymore, because gosh, how can we make sure the computers are telling the truth?
Please don your peril-sensitive sunglasses at this time, folks. Your October Surprise is a-coming. And as Felix Salmon reminds us, the banks' investors are going to want their pound of flesh too when they figure out foreclosures are just the tip of the iceberg.
So when you see the Village try to blame the American people for this mess because they "defaulted on their mortgages" remember...the banks don't know who owned those mortgages in the first place, so this would have blown up sooner or later anyway.
While proud of his record, Obama has already begun thinking about what went wrong — and what he needs to do to change course for the next two years. He has spent what one aide called “a lot of time talking about Obama 2.0” with his new interim chief of staff, Pete Rouse, and his deputy chief of staff, Jim Messina. During our hour together, Obama told me he had no regrets about the broad direction of his presidency. But he did identify what he called “tactical lessons.” He let himself look too much like “the same old tax-and-spend liberal Democrat.” He realized too late that “there’s no such thing as shovel-ready projects” when it comes to public works. Perhaps he should not have proposed tax breaks as part of his stimulus and instead “let the Republicans insist on the tax cuts” so it could be seen as a bipartisan compromise.
Most of all, he has learned that, for all his anti-Washington rhetoric, he has to play by Washington rules if he wants to win in Washington. It is not enough to be supremely sure that he is right if no one else agrees with him. “Given how much stuff was coming at us,” Obama told me, “we probably spent much more time trying to get the policy right than trying to get the politics right. There is probably a perverse pride in my administration — and I take responsibility for this; this was blowing from the top — that we were going to do the right thing, even if short-term it was unpopular. And I think anybody who’s occupied this office has to remember that success is determined by an intersection in policy and politics and that you can’t be neglecting of marketing and P.R. and public opinion.”
Translation: "Expect me to continually capitulate even more to the Republicans in a good faith effort to address their concerns and to tell anyone to the left of Ben Nelson to go straight to hell, right up until my impeachment for the crime of not giving the GOP 100% of what their Tea Party fanatics demand."
The Village will eat this up. The Republicans will still impeach him anyway. The Democratic base will of course, continue not to do much of anything.
Amazing to see Obama basically throw in the towel three weeks before the election in order to...what, exactly? Convince independents that they should come back to him because he's not everything evil that the Republicans accuse him of? Does he not get that the Republicans blame him for making them attack him on race, religion, ideology, policy, and everything else?
Hear me now and believe me later: If Republicans win and maintain control of the House of Representatives, they are going to impeach President Obama. They won’t do it right away. And they won’t succeed in removing Obama. (You need 67 Senate votes.) But if Obama wins a second term, the House will vote to impeach him before he leaves office.
I would argue that if they win control of both the House and Senate now, this will happen in 2011. The Tea Party will absolutely demand it, and they are going to have a real hard time saying "we have to put up with another two years of Obama at let voters decide".
The more seats the GOP wins in the House and Senate, the more likely impeachment in the President's first term will be. However, Chait is correct: if Obama wins re-election in 2012 and the GOP maintains control of the House, impeachment is a 99.999% probability.
Republicans are winning eight out of 10 competitive open House seats surveyed in a groundbreaking new poll by The Hill.
Taken on top of 11 GOP leads out of 12 freshman Democratic districts polled last week, The Hill 2010 Midterm Election Poll points toward 19 Republican victories out of 22 races, while Democrats win only two and one is tied.
The Democrats are DOOOOOOOOOOOOOO...wait a minute...(reads down a few paragraphs:)
Many races are tight — 12 of the 22 fall within the margin of error — but the margins, though slim, preponderantly favor the GOP.
The Oct. 2-7 poll examined 10 competitive open House seats; Republicans hold two of the districts and Democrats control all the others. Republicans are winning in eight of those races, while Democrats are leading in two. Six races fell within the poll’s margin of error.
Oh. So...in reality, nearly all these races are actually effectively tied, and this being a midterm year the key will be turnout on actual voting, as well as people increasingly using early voting, and how many of those votes have been locked in, which we have no polling on.
In other words, it's still anyone's ball game. Gosh, thanks for being clear about that, guys.
Even with the Biden Administration adults in charge and Democrats in control on Congress (barely), there remains an increasingly crumbling global economy imperiling the world, rising nationalism and deadly racism across Europe and Asia, a seemingly endless war against terror, a federal government nobody trusts or believes in, global climate change putting us on the brink of destruction and a Village media that barely does its job on even the best day.
Needless to say there's a lot of Stupid out there when we need solutions. Dangerous levels of Stupid.
Into the fray, dear Reader. Tray tables, crash helmets, arms inside blog at all times.
Zandar's Tip Jar
If you like what you're reading, drop in two bits.
It's ZVTS, now in a 60-minute podcast!
Get your Zandar and Bon every Saturday and Wednesday!
Also, click on the iTunes button to put the show on
your iTunes podcast list and take us with you!
Or, check out the episode archive page!
Posts
