Last Call

The more the courts dig into the banks' paperwork on mortgages for the last several years, the more we're finding out the banks broke the law.  David Dayen is on the case:

Of far bigger importance is the possibility that the trustees for the mortgage-backed securities they created never secured the assets from the originators. If the notes never transferred to the trust, there’s no way to retroactively do that now; the trusts are governed by very specific pooling at servicing agreements that for the most part give the trust 90 days to transfer all the required assets. You cannot transfer the loan after it’s slipped into default, 3 or 4 years after setting up the trust. It violates the laws and contracts under which the investors purchased the securities.


Now we have documented evidence, beyond anecdote, that Countrywide, one of the largest subprime lenders, which securitized almost all of the loans they made, never sent the notes to the trust. In a deposition provided to a US Bankruptcy Court in the District of New Jersey, Linda DeMartini, a supervisor for Bank of America Home Loans (BofA bought Countrywide in 2008), admitted that the original notes never transferred from Countrywide into the trusts.

In other words, when Coutnrywide turned its mortgages into securitized cole slaw, they never turned in the paperwork.  Anything after that 90 period means that whatever Countrywide did afterward is legally null and void, including trying to foreclose.

This is a deposition from one supervisor, but it could mean that all mortgage pools that Countrywide sold are suspect. That would amount to perhaps hundreds of billions of dollars in MBS. And the law appears to be air-tight on this, and not governed by the Constitution but New York trust law and the specifics of the pooling and servicing agreement.

Now, tell me again how the banks are planning to get out of this.

They're not.  They're screwed and they know it.  That's why they are trying to do everything they can to buy Congress off to retroactively make everything they did legal after the fact.

We can't let that happen.  More on this from Yves Smith:

This is significant for two reasons: first, it points to pattern and practice, and not a mere isolated lapse. Second, Countrywide, the largest subprime originator, reported in SEC filings that it securitized 96% of the loans it originated. So this activity cannot be defended by arguing that Countrywide retained notes because it was not on-selling them; the overwhelming majority of its mortgage notes clearly were intended to go to RMBS trusts, but it appears industry participants came to see it as too much bother to adhere to the commitments in their contracts.

Banks are potentially on the hook for trillions of dollars in putbacks, folks.  Bye bye, banks.  Bye bye, economy.

Again.

Science Is For Losers

Proudly they march, displaying their ignorance for all to see as both sword and shield.  One dares to point this out...

In a Washington Post op-ed yesterday, former Republican Rep. Sherwood Boehlert (NY) articulated his confusion as to why “so many Republican senators and representatives think they are right and the world’s top scientific academies and scientists are wrong.” Allowing for debate over policy, Boehlert said he finds the GOP’s “dogged determination” to deny the actual science “incomprehensible”:

Watching the raft of newly elected GOP lawmakers converge on Washington, I couldn’t help thinking about an issue I hope our party will better address. I call on my fellow Republicans to open their minds to rethinking what has largely become our party’s line: denying that climate change and global warming are occurring and that they are largely due to human activities.[...]

Why do so many Republican senators and representatives think they are right and the world’s top scientific academies and scientists are wrong? I would like to be able to chalk it up to lack of information or misinformation.

I can understand arguments over proposed policy approaches to climate change. I served in Congress for 24 years. I know these are legitimate areas for debate. What I find incomprehensible is the dogged determination by some to discredit distinguished scientists and their findings.[...]

There is a natural aversion to more government regulation. But that should be included in the debate about how to respond to climate change, not as an excuse to deny the problem’s existence. The current practice of disparaging the science and the scientists only clouds our understanding and delays a solution.

While normally walking lockstep with this crowd, the GOP is rebuking the approach of “leaders of some of our nation’s most prominent businesses,” says Boehlert. The U.S. Climate Action Partnership, for example, is “no collection of mom-and-pop shops operated by ‘tree huggers’” but rather a group of “hard-nosed, profit-driven capitalists” like General Electric, Duke Energy, and DuPont pushing Congress to see climate change as an opportunity to “create more economic opportunities than risks for the U.S. economy.” “My fellow Republicans should understand that wholesale, ideologically based or special-interest-driven rejection of science is bad policy,” he said.

...and one is destroyed for it by the Republican "intellectuals" who admit that there is global warming, but say anything we do about it will make the free markets sad.  The party of Reagan is dead.  Ronnie couldn't get elected to county soil commissioner as a Republican in 2012.

Let's Just Bring Back Jim Moose Laws While We're At It

And just to tie everything together over the last three days, Sarah Palin has weighed in on the TSA controversy.

Sarah Palin isn't short on opinions. The 2008 Republican vice presidential candidate weighed in on airport security, questioning why it is "politically incorrect" to profile suspicious persons at airport security gates.

In a Friday Twitter posting, using web shorthand, Palin urged the Transportation Security Administration to "profile away" whenever national security is an issue. "We profile individuals/suspects in other situations," she tweeted. 

In a second posting, Palin wrote, "law enforcement profiles individuals/suspects when seeking info 2 prevent or deal w/other crimes; why can't this be done @aiport 2 prevent?"

Awesome.  Hey Sarah, let's just have two lines at the airport, white people and colored people, and subject everyone in the colored people line to "profiling".  Profile away, indeed.  Two reasons of course prevent this:  it's illegal to use racial profiling as a pretense to obtain evidence against someone (evidence gained this way is inadmissible in court) and singling out all people of a particular group of people as potential criminals to "prevent" crimes is also not only patently unconstitutional but immoral as well.

This of course hasn't occurred to Lady MacMoose here, but it's perfectly fine for the white chick in her late 40's to say "profile away" to guys like me.  Nobody would dare touch Palin or her family.

But why stop at airports?  Why not institute "profile away" at all public buildings, stadiums, schools, courthouses, office buildings, restaurants, stores, malls, anywhere where people can gather and terrorists can attack it as a soft target?  Just bring back Jim Crow laws as a national effort to fight terror.  Single out any Muslim, single out anyone darker than Sarah Palin, slap a "might be a terrorist" warning label on them, subject them to humiliation.  Only way to be sure. Millions of suspects out there.  We don't know for sure unless we constantly check "them".

Won't it be great with President Palin in two years?

Profile away, America.

Hail To The Moose, She's The Moose So You Must Hail Her

Frank Rich sees President Palin in our collective future.

If logic applied to Palin’s career trajectory, this month might have been judged dreadful for her. In an otherwise great year for Republicans she endorsed a “Star Wars” bar gaggle of anomalous and wacky losers — the former witch, Christine O’Donnell; the raging nativist, Tom Tancredo; and at least two candidates who called for armed insurrection against the government, Sharron Angle and a would-be Texas congressman, Stephen Broden, who lost by over 50 percentage points. Last week voters in Palin’s home state humiliatingly “refudiated” her protégé, Joe Miller, overturning his victory in the G.O.P. Senate primary with a write-in campaign.

But logic doesn’t apply to Palin. What might bring down other politicians only seems to make her stronger: the malapropisms and gaffes, the cut-and-run half-term governorship, family scandals, shameless lying and rapacious self-merchandising. In an angry time when America’s experts and elites all seem to have failed, her amateurism and liabilities are badges of honor. She has turned fallibility into a formula for success.

Republican leaders who want to stop her, and they are legion, are utterly baffled about how to do so. Democrats, who gloat that she’s the Republicans’ problem, may be humoring themselves. When Palin told Barbara Walters last week that she believed she could beat Barack Obama in 2012, it wasn’t an idle boast. Should Michael Bloomberg decide to spend billions on a quixotic run as a third-party spoiler, all bets on Obama are off.

Of course Palin hasn’t decided to run yet. Why rush? In the post-midterms Gallup poll she hit her all-time high unfavorable rating (52 percent), but in the G.O.P. her favorable rating is an awesome 80 percent, virtually unchanged from her standing at the end of 2008 (83 percent). She can keep floating above the pack indefinitely as the celebrity star of a full-time reality show where she gets to call all the shots. The Perils of Palin maintains its soap-operatic drive not just because of the tabloid antics of Bristol, Levi, et al., but because you are kept guessing about where the pop culture ends and the politics begins. 

But here's the problem with that:  at some point, Sarah Palin has to commit to run as a candidate in order to be a candidate.  And the second she does that, the GOP explodes. Independents would rather eat their own entrails than vote for her.  Most importantly, they'd rather vote for Obama.  The Republicans will kill themselves over Palin/Not_Palin as candidates.

Second, I don't see Bloomberg running in 2012.  He's smart enough to know that he'd be a disaster as President, with no real power and 90% of Washington out to fillet his ass.

Third, Palin has to run.  She has to, because her ego will not let her hold back in the position she has now.  She lacks discipline.  And that lack of discipline means she's going to get crushed from all sides.  She can play the media game.  She's going to get nuked by the politics.

But it's going to be a hell of a show.

Someone Had To Say It

In the words of Stewart Gilligan Griffin: "Who the hell do you think you are?"

Since when is it the government's business if I choose to live with a woman or a man as my partner? And if you can answer that, then explain why, based on that criteria, I would be unsuitable to volunteer my life to protect my fellow citizens.

Where is my right to privacy? How has giving up my privacy in every regard protected me? Tell me that, if you have an answer I would feel slightly comforted. But to have our phones tapped and our emails sifted (and surely recorded) without permission or knowledge or even judicial oversight, how is that fighting terror? Is giving investigators access to gathering dirt on a whim worth the minor benefit? Not for me. Obama has so far failed to correct a massive mistake in this regard.

How is it that banks bent rules and are now enforcing their law to the letter on those who were caught in the middle? How dare they preach financial responsibility when they are the ones who instigated and profited from the whole mess?

Obama isn't a celebrity, he's a hero. The man doesn't take time to parade and make us giggle, he gets to work and doesn't give up. It's easy to criticize from the sidelines, but turning around the problems we face is like trying to derail a train with kittens and string. It's asking too much that he not only lead our country but dance and sing and make us clap as well.

How can Sarah Palin run for a party that voted unanimously against paying men and women equally? How can quitting as governor qualify one for presidency? Does she truly not see the trap ahead, or is she so full of ego that she thinks she will win anyway? Sweetheart, even Superman isn't gonna bust through that glass ceiling.

No one side is right all the time, and it's our duty to listen and try to do the right thing. Make the party that wants to win actually have to do the right thing to earn votes. It's how we control this country, and get rid of the "it's us or them" mindset. It works to their benefit, not ours. Generally, the people who refuse to listen are afraid their ideas will flounder in the face of criticism. The people who are willing to listen and change when faced with new information change the world.

Zandar's Thought Of The Day

Unless President Obama gets a handle on the TSA this week, Republicans are going to make sure he gets blamed for their overreach, even though it was the Republicans who created this agency to begin with.

Joe Biden's response to this?

Vice President Joe Biden is defending the Transportation Security Administration's (TSA) controversial new pat-down technique, calling it a "necessary policy."

Biden acknowledged people have concerns that the TSA's use of full-body scanners and pat-downs are frustrating and intrusive but argued they are crucial to prevent another incident like the attempted Christmas Day airline bombing. 

It's not necessary if you're A) a Washington politician, and B) if you openly choose never to fly again because of the policy.  Best part is when airline ticket sales plummet because of these horror stories, they will be the first to ask for a government handout.

And what does Obama do today?  Back up Joe Biden.

President Barack Obama on Saturday acknowledged some travelers' "frustrations" with having to go through full-body pat-downs and scans at airports, but he said the enhanced security measures are necessary to keep America safe. 

No, they're not.  Humiliating people to the point where they don't want to fly is in no way "necessary".  The next time you'll see a terrorist attempt (and all they have to do is attempt) to board a plane with some ridiculous getup, prosthetic, hidden container, or swallow a condom full of explosive and we'll be on to mandatory body cavity strip searches in six months, because the terrorists can count on us overreacting every time.

Sacrifice a few pawns in order to cause complete chaos and cause millions of Americans not to fly because they despise their government that much.

That's what I call a win for the bad guys.  The President is on the wrong side of this one, morally and practically, and it's going to cost him.

Those Are Somebody Else's Centrifuges, I've Never Seen Them Before

North Korea continues to think they are fooling people.

A State Department team is traveling to South Korea Sunday, after a U.S. scientist reported that North Korea has a new uranium enrichment facility.


North Korean officials said the facility is operating and producing low-enriched uranium, according to Stanford University professor Siegfried S. Hecker. The scientist posted a report of his November 12 visit to the Yongbyon, North Korea, facility on the university's website Saturday.

The enrichment program claim is "yet another provocative act of defiance and, if true, contradicts its own pledges and commitments," a senior official in U.S. President Barack Obama's administration said.

The State Department team departed for Asia to "begin to coordinate on a response to this news," the official said.

"We have long suspected North Korea of having this kind of capability, and we have regularly raised it with them directly and with our partners in this effort. North Korea has tried to use missiles and nuclear tests to threaten the international community and extract concessions," the administration official said.

The enrichment facility is comprised of 2,000 centrifuges, according to Hecker's report.

They appear to be designed for nuclear power production, "not to boost North Korea's military capability," Hecker says.

That may be all fine and good, but the point is we're supposed to know about it, and of course North Korea had a separate facility with plausible deniability all this time.  You would thinking dealing with Republicans negotiating in bad faith would prepare the Obama administration to handle the Norks, but I guess not.

Part of me is hoping Kim Jong Il's son takes over in a rapid fashion and starts acting like an adult.  The father clearly can't.

Last Call

And going back to Bon's post earlier today on a breast cancer survivor who was made to take off her prosthetic bra by TSA agents, we have this lovely story of another cancer survivor.

A retired special education teacher on his way to a wedding in Orlando, Fla., said he was left humiliated, crying and covered with his own urine after an enhanced pat-down by TSA officers recently at Detroit Metropolitan Airport.

“I was absolutely humiliated, I couldn’t even speak,” said Thomas D. “Tom” Sawyer, 61, of Lansing, Mich.

Sawyer is a bladder cancer survivor who now wears a urostomy bag, which collects his urine from a stoma, or opening in his stomach. “I have to wear special clothes and in order to mount the bag I have to seal a wafer to my stomach and then attach the bag. If the seal is broken, urine can leak all over my body and clothes.”

On Nov. 7, Sawyer said he went through the security scanner at Detroit Metropolitan Airport. “Evidently the scanner picked up on my urostomy bag, because I was chosen for a pat-down procedure.”

Due to his medical condition, Sawyer asked to be screened in private. “One officer looked at another, rolled his eyes and said that they really didn’t have any place to take me,” said Sawyer. “After I said again that I’d like privacy, they took me to an office.”

Sawyer wears pants two sizes too large in order to accommodate the medical equipment he wears. He’d taken off his belt to go through the scanner and once in the office with security personnel, his pants fell down around his ankles. “I had to ask twice if it was OK to pull up my shorts,” said Sawyer, “And every time I tried to tell them about my medical condition, they said they didn’t need to know about that.”

Something needs to be done about the TSA.  I think something will be done, and done very, very quickly, especially based on this story.

Representative John A. Boehner, soon to be the Speaker of the House, has pledged to fly commercial airlines back to his home district in Ohio. But that does not mean that he will be subjected to the hassles of ordinary passengers, including the controversial security pat-downs.


As he left Washington on Friday, Mr. Boehner headed across the Potomac River to Reagan National Airport, which was bustling with afternoon travelers. But there was no waiting in line for Mr. Boehner, who was escorted around the metal detectors and body scanners, and taken directly to the gate.

Mr. Boehner, who was wearing a casual yellow sweater and tan slacks, carried his own bags and smiled pleasantly at passengers who were leaving the security checkpoint inside the airport terminal. It was unclear whether any passengers waiting in the security line, including Representative Allen Boyd, a Florida Democrat who lost his re-election bid, saw Mr. Boehner.

I believe the TSA is going to find itself facing some rather interesting oversight committees very, very soon.

Wall Street Gets Flat Busted

Finally, some three years after the Big Casino events that led up to the financial crisis and the current economic nightmare we're stuck in (and one of the major reasons why I began this blog), criminal investigations against Wall Street banks are about to break wide open.

Insider-trading charges are being prepared against a vast network of consultants and traders across the US financial industry in a years-long probe that a report suggests will reveal a pervasive culture of backroom dealing.


The investigation could be the largest insider-trading probe in US history, The Wall Street Journal said Saturday citing people close to the issue, with federal officials examining if multiple, organized insider-trading rings reaped illegal profits of tens of millions of dollars.

Some charges could be brought before the end of the year, the Journal said.

The criminal probe is examining some three dozen companies in the probe, which is examining the "expert networks" to clients such as hedge funds and mutual funds, which connected managers of companies with investors in a bid to offer inside tracks on financial deals, according to the report.

And behind these consulting firms and the culture of insider trading that led to Big Casino are the biggest names on Wall Street, including the guys at the top of the pyramid.

Among those being investigated, the newspaper said prosecutors were examining whether bankers with the Goldman Sachs Group leaked information about transactions, including health-care mergers, in a bid to benefit investors.

Inside traders are generally known to profit after being tipped off on deals ahead of time -- for example, giving them an opportunity to buy stocks before acquisitions, and then selling them after the shares rise in value.

As well as large financial firms like Goldman Sachs, the investigation is also examining independent analysts and research houses for providing non-public information to hedge funds. The report suggest the three-year probe has involved wiretapping the telephone conversations between consultants and investors.

A culture of people who clearly believed the amount of money involved made them invincible to prosecution have just discovered how wrong they were.  And to all the folks that said Obama was a tool of the banksters, do you think President McCain would have lifted a finger to even look at these guys?  The probe in 2007 would have been killed in January 2008, guaranteed.

This is potentially huge.  Much more on this from Tyler Durden and the Zero Hedge crew.

Over a year ago, Zero Hedge published an expose in three parts (two of them in the form of direct letters to Andrew Cuomo) discussing the possibility that so-called "expert networks" are nothing less than legalized insider trading rings for the uber-wealthy, operating largely unsupervised, and leaking selective information to preferred clients. For those who may be new to this topic, we suggest catching up on Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3. Subsequently, we also suggested that expert networks would be implicated in the bust of Galleon Partners, the Goldman "Huddle", the collapse of FrontPoint Partners and, most recently, that expert networks may have been directly or indirectly involved in facilitating the record historical P&L of such hedge fund "titans" as SAC Capital. Today, via the Wall Street Journal, we realize that not only have the good folks at the SEC been diligently reading us for the past 13 months, but that we may have been right all along (once again).

If you thought the banks were in trouble before, the real show is about to begin.

Absolutely Positively On Purpose

Steve Benen asks the kind of question more people should be thinking about.

Budget expert Stan Collender has predicted that Republicans perceive "economic hardship as the path to election glory." Paul Krugman noted in his column yesterday that Republicans "want the economy to stay weak as long as there's a Democrat in the White House."

As best as I can tell, none of this analysis -- all from prominent observers -- generated significant pushback. The notion of GOP officials deliberately damaging the economy didn't, for example, spark widespread outrage or calls for apologies from Matt or anyone else.

And that, in and of itself, strikes me as remarkable. We're talking about a major political party, which will control much of Congress next year, possibly undermining the strength of the country -- on purpose, in public, without apology or shame -- for no other reason than to give themselves a campaign advantage in 2012.

Maybe now would be a good time to pause and ask a straightforward question: are Americans O.K. with this?

And for the most part they are, because they've been convinced that Obama will do the opposite:  make the economy better for everyone else except them, and at their specific expense.  Obama, we learn, says he wants to make the economy better.  It's not better for a lot of Americans, therefore what Obama must have done over the last two years is made the economy better for everyone except me.

It's a load of crap, of course.  But depending on how cynical your worldview is, Obama's economic policies range from incompetent to being a purposeful tool of the bankers to being a Socialist revolutionary.  It's hard to dispel these myths without the economy actually getting better, so all the Republicans have to do is to make sure that doesn't happen.

Block all efforts to improve the economy, and you get rewarded for it.  I've been saying this, literally, for years now.  This year's midterms are proof this plan can work.  But people besides me are finally arriving at this conclusion.  The Republican scorched earth campaign has a cost, and we're the ones paying.  If America falls apart, the Republicans will gain power.

Only when they have regained the power they lost in 2006 will they suddenly begin to do the things for the economy that need to be done in order to maintain power.

To a point.  After all, it's pretty easy to do these days when all you have to do is say the First Lady is a radical racial revolutionary for disagreeing with you.  It's like falling off a log.

[UPDATE]  BooMan has some additional thoughts on this.

There are smart people in the Republican Party who know that the economy is going to suck for the next two years and that people are going to suffer. Some of them know that the federal government can do something about it and that cutting taxes on the wealthiest Americans isn't going to help. They might even be worried that the American people will punish them if they refuse to do anything or to work with the president in any constructive way. But they're helpless to change course because they've poisoned the minds' of their base. And, it's not only their base, because I think most incoming freshmen are true-believing dittoheads.

So, Benen is correct. If you wanted to design a party to destroy America's economy, you couldn't do much better than the current GOP. But, are they going to do it for purely cynical reasons or because they're crazy? The answer is: a little of each. The top echelon...the movers and shakers...have never been social conservatives and the only ideology they're wedded to is keeping as much cash for themselves as possible. They probably don't want the U.S. economy to suck for the next two years, although most of them are smart enough to win at the casino either way. But the lower level Republicans, including a good percentage of their caucuses? They're going to fuck everything up because they're crazy. 

And that's pretty much it.

The Unmeasured Angle

I'm in complete agreement with Steve M.  This unaired Sharron Angle ad really is terrible.



And I'm positive Sharron Angle would have won if she had run this ad just after the primary.  Mock it at your own peril, because while it really does have the production values of a 3 AM public access channel, that's entirely the point.  Democrats would have seen the ad and gone after Angle as a rube, which would have been a fatal mistake and sealed the "Angle is one of us and Harry Reid is the smart-ass elitist" thing for good.  Steve's absolutely right, it would have gone viral, the people in the ad would have gotten interviews and press, and we would have seen a bunch of scared and pissed off older Nevadans saying "We need to fire Harry Reid's ass."  Hell, I would have agreed with them.

The only reason we're not talking about Senator-elect Sharron Angle right now is because Angle ran arguably the worst campaigns in the modern history of Senate elections (compared to Harry Reid's second worst campaign in the modern history of the Senate elections), and that she bought into the hype that the political suits sold her.  If she had stuck to her message discipline of attacking Harry Reid instead of going off half-cocked, especially on Nevada's unemployed, undocumented immigrants, and stating she would deny an abortion to a rape victim in the most heartless fashion imaginable, thus allowing Harry Reid to go on offense, she would have won by double digits.

This ad would have absolutely helped her, because the Dems would have fallen into the Palin trap of attacking the messenger, not the message and then completely fallen apart trying to apologize to Nevada seniors about yes, we understand you have concerns about Social Security.  By then it would have been too late.  Instead, Angle sank herself by playing the lunatic card on her own campaign by doing Harry Reid's work for him.  And since Angle was the one who brought up her crazy ideas on Social Security first, they became fair game.

So laugh at this goofy ad all you want, just remember that if Angle had used it properly, she'd be Senator in January.  The next time, we won't get that lucky.

Witness Rand Paul, for example.

The Fall Of The House Of Gates Part II

It's all in the clouds.

Microsoft is making a huge scramble to get their bluff in on the cloud, because there is no doubt that is where we are headed. For those of you who do not know what this means, click here to find out. The short definition is the cloud is web-based processing, instead of the traditional computer storage and processing we use today.

Why should Gates be quaking? This is the crumbling of his empire. Once upon a time, if it didn't run on Windows, a program was dead in the water. Because Microsoft Windows shaped the growth of the personal computer, Gates had the programmers in his pocket. That is no longer the case. Cloud computing is the inevitable blend of computing and the Internet, meaning you will not have to carry your digital life with you everywhere you go. You will log in to your documents and kitten pictures from anywhere. And if you decide to keep Microsoft, they will take a major financial hit because they won't be able to charge a per-computer licensing fee. You will own the right to use Microsoft, or you won't, but long gone will be the days of purchasing a license for every machine in the household.

With products like OpenOffice, and the universal Internet browser, casual computer users can accomplish just about everything they want using a free product. Google Docs has made collaborating easy, and Ubuntu offers a user friendly operating system, all for free. The current economy is going to hasten the inevitable, and people are going to start asking why they would spend $299 on a CD. The stink of Windows ME still haunts my generation, but Vista will be the stinker of the newcomers. Microsoft's technology has not become extinct, but our need for it has. People are wanting to take control over their computers, and Microsoft's "dummy proof at the right of being able to own your system" approach is stale. And not so dummy proof, after all.


At this point, the best Gates can do is take his place as a pioneer of the world's digital age. And rightfully so, the man isn't a slacker who stumbled across a lucky idea. He is one of the most generous billionaires in history, and has helped millions in need. Gates has a lot to offer the world, both as a brilliant geek and a role model for the wealthy. But we won't be paying him an outrageous fee for the right to use computers now. People are going to have choices, and the bluff that you can only do it with Microsoft products has been called.

What A Boob

(CBS) A flight attendant and cancer survivor said she was forced to remove and show her prosthetic breast to a TSA agent during a security pat-down.

The link above takes you to the full article, I'm just going to skip to the horrific part.

"She put her full hand on my breast and said, 'What is this?' Bossi recalled. "And I said, 'It's my prosthesis because I've had breast cancer.' And she said, 'Well, you'll need to show me that.'"

Now, the security debate is a hot topic. You can Google a thousand sides that are all different. The one thing I hope that all sides keep in check is that there are people involved. Real, breathing, honest to goodness people. Not cattle. Hell, even cattle should be treated with more courtesy and sensitivity than this.

It's this stupidity that will force this issue to blow up. Not whether it's necessary, or the best solution, but how people are treated. You can do something that is necessary and still maintain your humanity. Airlines are still a business, and their customers are (at least mostly) voluntary.

I work in customer service. I have managed and trained in customer service. The one thing I never failed to repeat is that we should remember that ever person we deal with, no matter how aggravating or rude, how stubborn or difficult, is somebody's son or daughter. They are someone's lover, best friend, long lost uncle, and they matter. You do not earn the right to be treated with kindness and dignity, that should be offered freely.

Too bad they didn't get that memo. Never underestimate the power of the angry customer, not in the days of the Internet.

Impossible Moose-ion

The Republican pushback against Sarah Palin's expected bid for Obama's job in 2012 has now begun in earnest.  Ever since word of her interview where she declared she could beat him two years from now, the GOP has been scrambling to find a way to cut her off.  This weekend she faces some harsh truth from the right, starting with Townhall's Mona Charen.

After the 2008 campaign revealed her weaknesses on substance, Palin was advised by those who admire her natural gifts to bone up on policy and devote herself to governing Alaska successfully. Instead, she quit her job as governor after two and a half years, published a book (another is due next week), and seemed to chase money and empty celebrity. Now, rather than being able to highlight the accomplishments of Sarah Palin's Alaska, we get "Sarah Palin's Alaska," another cheesy entrant in the reality show genre. She'd so much rather be out dog sledding than in some "dull political office," she tells the audience. File that.

She is wildly popular with a swath of the Republican electorate, it's true. And, as a conservative woman politician told me, the consultants (who get paid the big bucks win or lose) will doubtless descend upon her with game plans showing how she can win in Iowa and then cruise to the nomination. Maybe. But the general election would be a problem, since 53 percent of independent voters view Palin unfavorably, according to a recent Gallup poll, along with 81 percent of Democrats.

There is no denying that Sarah Palin has been harshly, sometimes even brutally treated by the press and the news/entertainment gaggle. But any prominent Republican must expect some of that and be able to transcend it. She compares herself to Reagan. But Reagan didn't mud wrestle with the press. Palin seems consumed and obsessed by it, as her rapid Twitter finger attests, and thus encourages the sniping. She should be presiding over meetings on oil and gas leases in the North Slope, or devising alternatives to Obamacare. Every public spat with Dave Letterman or Politico, or the "lamestream media," or God help us, Levi Johnston, diminishes her.

Speaking of television, sorry, this must be mentioned. Have you watched "Dancing With the Stars"? Cheesy would be several steps up for this one. Perhaps the former governor should not be blamed for the decisions of her adult daughter. Yet there in the audience we see Sarah and Todd Palin, mugging for the camera and cheering on their unwed-mother daughter as she bumps and grinds to the tune of "Mamma Told Me (Not to Come)." Her parents had advised her, the 20-year-old Bristol told an interviewer, that she had to stay "in character" if she expected to win. Being "in character" apparently meant descending to the vulgarity that "DWTS" peddles on a weekly basis. The momma grizzly was apparently unfazed by -- or, equally disturbing, unaware of -- the indignity. And this is supposed to be a conservative culture warrior?

And while Charen is absolutely right, I have to say that the pundits and press on the right created Sarah Palin in the first place.  May I remind Mona Charen of her words some 26 months ago:

Sarah Palin is not perfect -- she's just the most exciting, authentic, fresh, and talented politician to debut in a generation. 

Really.  And because Charen and other conservative columnists and pundits gave Sarah Palin a free ride in 2008, and brutally attacked anyone who dared to voice the same legitimate criticisms Charen brings up now as misogynist elitists who couldn't possibly have a real reason to doubt Palin's credibility for higher office, because the right couldn't bring themselves to be intellectually honest about Palin's failures, you now have an imminent civil war brewing between those who see Palin as the messianic figure Republicans accused Obama of being in 2008, and those who know Palin would lose by double digits to Obama in 2012.

And to you, I say "you reap what you sew."  Enjoy your little scuffle here, because if you thought the tensions between the Obama and Hillary Clinton factions of the Dems were bad, you have no idea what's coming.

I plan to enjoy every minute of it.  You helped make her.  Now she's going to help unmake the GOP.

StupidiNews, Weekend Edition!

• Scores are dead after flooding in Columbia has displaced hundreds of thousands and President Juan Manuel Santos has declared a national emergency.
• Ten years after the case was settled by the government, black farmers will finally receive payment for discrimination over farm loans.
• Scientists are starting to put together the depth of the problems in the Gulf of Mexico after the BP oil spill.
• The royal wedding of Britain's Prince William to Kate Middleton may add some $1 billion to the UK's economy in tourism.
• Oregon Dem Sen. Ron Wyden is taking aim at a new internet censorship bill he calls a "bunker-busting cluster bomb" of a law.