Mitch Turtles Up, Part 2

My own Senator, Mitch The Turtle McConnell apparently has some sort of mild dementia or something, because he just can't remember his own massive obstruction of any of President Obama's agenda over the last three years.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) has embraced the argument that President Obama was able to pass every bit of his legislative agenda in his first two years thanks to large Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress. It’s intended as a counterpoint to the President’s re-election strategy of attacking the congressional GOP as do-nothing obstructionists. But it’s also a revisionist history of the 111th Congress, during which McConnell more than any other Republican in Washington stood athwart Obama’s agenda to great effect.

The White House has “been trying to pretend like the President just showed up yesterday, just got sworn in and started fresh,” McConnell declared Sunday on CNN’s State of the Union. “In fact, he’s been in office for three years. He got everything he wanted from a completely compliant Congress for two of those three years… We are living in the Obama economy.”

This isn’t a new claim for McConnell, but it’s audacious even by Washington’s lax standards. It was McConnell, after all, who led Senate Republicans in serial filibusters — a record-setting number — successfully thwarting large chunks of Obama’s agenda.

Mitch pretending like Republicans had nothing to do with Congress for the last three years is insulting and stupid.  Senate Republicans filibustered the DREAM Act, the American Jobs Act, The Paycheck Fairness Act, climate change legislation, immigration reform legislation, they blocked the President's appointments to the bench and to cabinet positions, and they stripped provisions from the stimulus, the budget appropriation bills, held the country hostage over payroll taxes, unemployment benefit extensions and the debt ceiling.  Multiple times.

But President Obama "got everything he wanted"?  Really?  That's ridiculous on a number of levels...just like McConnell is.  McConnell owns a big chunk of Congress's 9% approval rating, and he knows it.

Underpants Gnomes

Remember when Democratic party operatives made up crazy British news stories about Laura Bush, Barbara Bush, and Nancy Reagan buying 50 grand in lingerie?  No?  I guess for some reason that sort of thing only happens when Republicans warm up the Pretty Hate Machine for Michelle Obama.

Several funny “news” outlets published claims that our fancypants Michelle Obama spent what we guess is about $50,000 on actual fancy pants.

Michelle Obama is reportedly sexing up the White House after blowing £32,000 on saucy underwear.

America’s First Lady splashed the cash in ONE DAY during a shopping spree in New York’s Agent Provocateur store.

She bought posh pants and a £900 corset while out with the Queen of Qatar, Sheikha Mozah.

We can just imagine all the fun they must have had in the dressing room, giggling about cosmopolitans and Sharia law! The White House is rejecting the story, but it would make for an excellent plot line in an eventual FLOTUS comic series, in which she would most likely be dressed in lingerie (and a cape) and fighting off Rush Limbaugh with her magic garden shears. [The Mirror]

It really does get terribly old.  But she's fair game, of course.  Why, First Ladies have always been fair game, right?

Local Stupidity: Drinking Game Fail

JOPLIN, Mo. (AP) — A Joplin man who was accused of challenging his 11-year-old nephew to a drinking game has pleaded guilty in the boy’s alcohol-poisoning death.

Twenty-nine-year-old Dale Phillips had been scheduled for trial next month on charges of second-degree murder and endangering the welfare of a child. KOAM-TV reports (http://bit.ly/xwUzb8 ) that Phillips pleaded guilty to those charges Monday.

Phillips’ nephew, Tyler Fecko, was found dead in July 2009 at his uncle’s apartment, where the boy had been staying. Authorities said the boy died after taking part in a drinking game with Phillips and his girlfriend.

This stupid crap happens everywhere.  Adults are no smarter than kids.  You can lay out the rules, explain why it's a bad idea, and you will still have some freaking idiot who has no better judgment than this.  That little boy (wrongly) assumed this man wouldn't let any harm come to him, and he died an ugly death at age eleven.  Eleven.

Santorum Fails Simple Ethics And Vocabulary Test

Rick Santorum is saying medical malpractice payouts should be capped at $250,000.  He says anything more "unnecessarily" drives up health care costs.  There's just one problem: he testified on behalf of his wife when she tried to sue for $500,000.  For whose who can't do math any better than he can, that's twice what he thinks our pain and suffering is worth.

Then taking a routine fail to epic levels, he than argues that his wife didn't sue for pain and suffering, which is what he wants to cap.  Well um, not quite.  The judge in their case called the $350,000 payout the eventually got excessive, and in fact it was for pain and suffering.  Santorum calls it "emotional and physical toll" instead of pain and suffering, because he can't add any better than he can utilize a thesaurus.

And in a final death rattle of stupidity, he says there is no conflict in his testimony on his wife's behalf and the cap he intends to push.  Which is just another way of saying when it's him it matters, when it's the common folk then he can't be bothered.

Phones Ring Down Mexico Way

Here in the states they tell us "Bigger is better!" when it comes to mobile phone carriers.  AT&T found out the hard way that there is such a thing as too big, and if you want an example of what lack of competition means to consumers, you have to look no further than Carlos Slim, the world's richest man, and what his domination of Mexico's mobile industry has wrought.

Mexico’s phone industry, dominated by billionaire Carlos Slim’s carriers, overcharged customers $13.4 billion a year from 2005 to 2009, hurting the nation’s economy, according to a report.

The overcharging combined with the potential loss of business caused by high prices equaled 1.8 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product, the Organization for Economic Cooperation & Development said today in a report.

Latin America’s second-biggest economy should eliminate restrictions on foreign investment in telecommunications and should strengthen the powers of its phone regulator, the OECD said. The 70 percent market share of Slim’s America Movil SAB (AMXL) in the mobile-phone business is “extremely high,” the OECD said. 

Yeah.  One guy's company owns 70% of Mexico's entire mobile industry.  As a result,  Mexican mobile users were overcharged to the tune of nearly 2% of the country's entire GDP.  In US terms, that would be like Wal-Mart buying out AT&T, Verizon, and Sprint, then doubling America's mobile phone bills or something and then overcharging us 1.8% of our GDP or so, the equivalent being $270 billion a year, give or take.

You think those kind of numbers would get attention here in the states if one guy had that kind of power here?  And yet that's exactly the endpoint of the GOP model, Mexico today.  Eliminate "burdensome" regulation and oversight and let the market leverage the power of networks and technology, right?  Enough to give one massive conglomerate 70% of the US mobile market share?

Capitalism does have its drawbacks at the extremist end, you know.

Texas Is All Hot, No Cattle

Once again the inconvenient specter of climate change rears its ugly head deep in the heart of you-know-where as year number two of the Lone Star State's worst drought in a century is forcing cattle ranchers to drive their herds out of the state to find pasture in numbers that are redefining the country's entire cattle industry. 

While some Texas ranchers hang on, selling off their stock at an unprecedented pace that has reduced America's cattle herd to the smallest in 60 years, many are carving new homesteads out of some of the richest grassland in North America, a bid for survival that falls somewhere between surrender and hope.

In cattle-car convoys that wind along routes cowboys used in the 1800s, this migration is also a stark illustration of the myriad threats facing the world's future food supply: intense competition for land; increasing demands on limited water resources; and the growing threat of volatile weather.

The size and speed of the shrinkage in the U.S. cattle herd has left the industry reeling. As the national cattle and calf inventory fell 2 percent from a year ago to its smallest since 1952, the herd in Texas dropped 11 percent or 1.4 million head, the biggest decline in nearly 150 years of recorded data.

But Nebraska's herd increased 4 percent or 250,000 head in the year to January 1, the most of any state, placing it ahead of Kansas as the country's second-largest cattle producer, according to the Department of Agriculture's bi-annual survey released on Friday.

Today, 7.1 percent of the country's cattle is in Nebraska - the state's largest share of the national herd since the federal government began collecting data in 1867. At 13 percent, Texas now has the smallest share since 1986.

And as climate change continues to play havoc with water systems, grassland expanses and just-in-time delivery to the supermarket shelf, this is only going to get more convoluted, more dangerous, and more expensive for Americans to consume.  Big Ag has already hyper-automated the meat process in this country to ludicrous levels.  With Mother Nature deciding not to play ball, all those plans are starting to come apart.  What's going on in Texas is going to be repeated in places across the world as more extreme weather events and climate patterns change the entire planet.

Earth of course will survive.  Whether or not we will is the question.

StupidiNews!

• Florida primary voters take to the ballot box today to determine the biggest prize so far in delegates for the Republican presidential nomination.
• GOP Sen. Scott Brown of Massachusetts is gathering Senate support for his STOCK Act which would end insider trading by Congress.
• Four more US states could approve gay marriage in 2012 bringing the total to ten, but much more will still have to happen.
• German unemployment continues to fall, the country's jobless rate is now at a two-decade low of 6.7%.
• Big e-mail providers are working with on-line payment sites for a new anti-phishing standard to prevent e-mail fraud.

Last Call

Having taken over Washington Monthly's Political Animal blog for Steve Benen (now part of the Maddow team at MSNBC, and more power to him there, he's badly needed), Ed Kilgore is doing a pretty solid job so far.  He flags this article from The Hill written by FOX News punching bag Juan Williams and immediately asks the correct question: How long will Juan Williams now last at FOX after stating the obvious about the network's racial dog-whistle language?  Williams states:

The language of GOP racial politics is heavy on euphemisms that allow the speaker to deny any responsibility for the racial content of his message. The code words in this game are “entitlement society” — as used by Mitt Romney — and “poor work ethic” and “food stamp president” — as used by Newt Gingrich. References to a lack of respect for the “Founding Fathers” and the “Constitution” also make certain ears perk up by demonizing anyone supposedly threatening core “old-fashioned American values.”

One has to wonder then why Williams is hanging out at FOX News, arguably the number one source for disseminating these code words.  I have zero sympathy for the guy, he made his choices and he has to live with them.  But Kilgore immediately grasps the issue:

When Newt Gingrich turned Juan Williams into the perfect foil during the January 19 Republican candidate debate in Myrtle Beach, SC, ironic symbolism certainly abounded. Aside from the fact that Newt vaulted himself into the lead by beating up on an African-American journalist on MLK Day in the Cradle of the Confederacy, there was the additional fact that Williams is a Fox News panelist who briefly became a conservative celebrity after NPR fired him for on-air remarks deemed insensitive to Muslims. The debate audience didn’t know or care, presumably viewing Williams as just another “race-card” player who needed to be slapped down for suggesting anyone railing against the work ethic of food stamp recipients might be appealing to atavistic motives. 

Now, I think Kilgore is on the right track, but my cynical side wants to move the grubby, Cheeto crud-covered GOP chess pieces forward a few moves and says Williams lobbed such a fat, tasty curveball over the plate of Gingrich in South Carolina for a reason, and that is to make a horse race out of the coronation of Marquis du Mittens as long as possible to keep the faithful glued to the primary noise machine.  With Newt down in Florida and big by most accounts, he's pitched another juicy one right into Gingrich's ego wheelhouse with the primary just hours away.

Just the kind of scrum FOX excels at creating and running with.  Williams knows damn well what he's doing now, just like he damn well knew what he was doing in South Carolina, people.

Like I said, zero sympathy for this phony simp's symphony.

Turn On The Lights, Watch The Roaches Scatter Part 85

Foreclosuregate is the hell that remains fresh each new day, it seems.  ProPublica's Jesse Eisinger and NPR's Chris Arnold drop this bunker buster on Freddie Mac, and there are some ugly, ugly questions that need to be answered as a result.

Freddie Mac, the taxpayer-owned mortgage giant, has placed multibillion-dollar bets that pay off if homeowners stay trapped in expensive mortgages with interest rates well above current rates.

Freddie began increasing these bets dramatically in late 2010, the same time that the company was making it harder for homeowners to get out of such high-interest mortgages.

No evidence has emerged that these decisions were coordinated. The company is a key gatekeeper for home loans but says its traders are “walled off” from the officials who have restricted homeowners from taking advantage of historically low interest rates by imposing higher fees and new rules.

Freddie’s charter calls for the company to make home loans more accessible. Its chief executive, Charles Haldeman Jr., recently told Congress that his company is “helping financially strapped families reduce their mortgage costs through refinancing their mortgages.”

But the trades, uncovered for the first time in an investigation by ProPublica and NPR, give Freddie a powerful incentive to do the opposite, highlighting a conflict of interest at the heart of the company. In addition to being an instrument of government policy dedicated to making home loans more accessible, Freddie also has giant investment portfolios and could lose substantial amounts of money if too many borrowers refinance.

“We were actually shocked they did this,” says Scott Simon, who as the head of the giant bond fund PIMCO’s mortgage-backed securities team is one of the world’s biggest mortgage bond traders. “It seemed so out of line with their mission.”

The trades “put them squarely against the homeowner,” he says.

Those homeowners have a lot at stake, too. Many of them could cut their interest payments by thousands of dollars a year.

Even if Freddie Mac was following its charter, the optics on this are pretty much "salted and scorched earth after getting blasted into glass craters" where the American housing market used to be.  If the entire reason the housing depression has continued is because Freddie Mac is making it so homeowners can't refinance, then it's not that somebody's head will roll, it's a question of whose cranium goes for a spin 'round the block.

HousingWire's Jacob Gaffney is already calling the piece a "witch hunt", saying that there's "no new evidence" that Freddie is doing anything bad, and that the entire point of Fannie and Freddie existing is to make money in order to stay in business, they're just hedging their bets that the credit markets will remain tight for the foreseeable future.

So far, that's been a very profitable bet.  But that still brings us back to the optics question and in an election year to boot, and the reason why the optics are bad is that Freddie is big enough to influence the entire mortgage market into something of a self-fulfilling prophecy, especially given the rule changes Freddie has made to issuing mortgages, making them tougher to refinance.

The much larger issue is that in order to fix the housing depression (now in year number five) we need something outside the current Fannie/Freddie/Ginnie Mae system, and that's for Congress and the President to step in with principal reductions and cramdowns.  There's still millions of foreclosed homes on the market, with another 1.9 million new foreclosures in 2011.  While that's down from earlier highs, 2012 is expected to be over 2 million more easily.

It's going to take decades at this rate to work through the foreclosures.  And Freddie Mac isn't helping in the least.  But the bigger problem is until something massive is done about the equally massive bloc of foreclosures on the market, the economy will continue to do the dead, smelly fish thing all over the country.

Getting Serious On Syria, Part 4

The UN is apparently looking to play the power sharing card in Syria, with a draft resolution that would reportedly ask President Bashar al-Assad to step down peacefully.  As fighting intensifies on the streets of Damascus, the push to get Assad to exit is gaining steam.

The U.N. Security Council will take up a draft resolution this week that calls on Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to step down and transfer power.


The move follows news that the Arab League suspended a mission to monitor whether al-Assad was abiding by an agreement to end a brutal crackdown against anti-government protesters.

Arab League Secretary General Nabil el-Araby arrived Monday in New York where he was scheduled to deliver the monitoring mission's findings to the Security Council the following day.

The news came amid opposition reports of renewed fighting Monday between Syrian forces and the rebel Free Syria Army in suburbs of the capital city of Damascus, where Syria forces have been battling to take back neighborhoods in Saqba and Maleiha.

The question then becomes "what's the motivational mechanism to enforce this", but given the Arab Spring so far, things may get far bloodier before they get better.

Honor: I Do Not Think It Means What You Think It Means

Mohammed Shafia, 58; his wife, Tooba Mohammad Yahya, 42; and their son, Hamed, 21, were found guilty of first-degree murder in the deaths of Shafia's three teenage daughters and his first wife in his polygamous marriage. Sunday's verdicts followed a three-month trial, in which jurors heard wiretaps of Shafia referring to his daughters as "whores" and ranting about their behavior.

All three were sentenced to life in prison immediately after their convictions, with no chance of parole for 25 years.

"This is a good day for Canadian justice. Our democratic society protects the rights of all," Gerard Laarhuis, the chief prosecutor in the case, told reporters outside the courthouse in Kingston. "It's a very bad day, because this jury found that four strong, vivacious and freedom-loving women were murdered by their own family."

Shafia and Yahya admitted on the stand that they were upset with Zainab for running off to marry a Pakistani man they hated, that Sahar wore revealing clothes and had secret boyfriends, and Geeti was failing in school and calling social workers to get her out of a home in turmoil.

In the three-month-long trial, Shafia testified, "My children did a lot of cruelty toward me," as he wept openly on the stand. He went on to say he believed his children "betrayed" him by dating and he did not hide his anger, saying a father would never expect that kind of behavior from this daughters.

In taking the stand, Shafia swore to tell the truth on the Quran and he again invoked the holy book to say Islam does not condone killing people to preserve a family's honor.

In a direct response to a question from prosecutor Laurie Lacelle, Shafia said, "To kill someone, you can't regain your respect and honor. Respected lady, you should know that. In our religion, a person who kills his wife or daughter, there is nothing more dishonorable. How is it possible that someone would do that to their children, respected lady?"

"You might do it," Lacelle calmly replied, "if you thought they were whores."

I'm not even going to write too much about this. As intelligent folks, you can see the obvious. I do want to say that as much as I complain about gender equality, I am again reminded how lucky I am to be from the United States, where I can control my own destiny. These people's last thoughts revolved around knowing their own husband / father was killing them. Death is awful, death at the hands of someone that is supposed to love you is as bad as it gets.

Though, they surely knew he was a bastard, I doubt they knew just what kind of a bastard until it was too late.

Science Awesomeness

One of our readers linked to this, and it was too good not to share.

A ten-year-old girl randomly arranged some oxygen, carbon and nitrogen atoms.  In the process, she discovered a new molecule, one that has the ability to store and release energy in ways they haven't fully explored.  The girl, Clara Lazen, has been credited in the paper on the discovery.  The school is in Kansas City, Missouri.

This is what makes science so exciting.  Anyone who works hard can wow the entire world.  Some of our most amazing discoveries have come from the well studied, polished minds of disciplined science.  Others come from accidents or random observations that reveal something new.  Clara has accomplished the latter, let us hope she pursues science so she can continue to surprise us.

Home, Home I'm Deranged, Part 28

President Obama is finally relaxing requirements for federal aid to underwater mortgage holders, and it couldn't come any sooner.

The Obama administration, seeking to help more homeowners lower their interest rates and shed mortgage debt, will relax the rules on a federal loan- modification program and triple its incentives to banks.

The revised Home Affordable Modification Program, or HAMP, also would pay Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (FMCC) to forgive debt on homes that have lost value. The government-owned companies, citing cost, don’t reduce principal, a policy that has limited HAMP’s reach because they own or guarantee nearly half of U.S. home loans.

Housing and Urban Development Secretary Shaun Donovan, Assistant Treasury Secretary Tim Massad, and White House National Economic Council Director Gene Sperling announced the program changes yesterday in a phone call with reporters.

“This will expand the reach of HAMP,” Massad said.

The HAMP program changes are separate from a new refinancing plan that President Barack Obama promised to deliver in his State of the Union speech on Jan. 24, Sperling said. That effort will be detailed in coming weeks. 

It took an election year to do it (not to mention several false starts) but it looks like the President is pushing ahead with refinancing aid to those who need it, and many more homeowners will qualify than the pitiful percentage when HAMP was first announced.  The problem remains however that any meaningful amount of homeowner mortgage relief will be completely blocked by the GOP.

One has to wonder if that's the point.  If anything is to improve, you'd better make your voice known in November for a Congress not controlled by the Republicans.

Greek Fire, Part 49

After months of meetings, it appears European leaders finally have an agreement on bailouts and a permanent EU facility fund, Reuters reports...and it will include a balanced budget for all Eurozone countries.  But the question of Greece is still very much up in the air.

Negotiations between the Greek government and private bondholders over the restructuring of 200 billion euros of Greek debt made progress over the weekend, but are not expected to conclude before the summit begins at 9:00 a.m. EST.

Until there is a deal between Greece and its private bondholders, EU leaders cannot move forward with a second, 130 billion euro rescue program for Athens, which they originally agreed to at a summit last October.

Instead, they will sign a treaty creating the European Stability Mechanism (ESM), a 500-billion-euro permanent bailout fund that is due to become operational in July, a year earlier than first planned. And they are likely to agree the terms of a 'fiscal treaty' tightening budget rules for those that sign up.

The larger issue of course is the balanced budget requirement.  This means that the individual Eurozone countries would have to give up individual sovereign budget control to the EU in order to meet the new rules.  And of course the first country that everyone wants to cede budgetary control to the EU is Greece.

Greece must surrender control of its budget policy to outside institutions if it cannot implement reforms attached to euro zone rescue measures, the German economy minister was quoted as saying on Sunday.

Philipp Roesler became the first German cabinet member to openly endorse a proposal for Greece to surrender budget control after Reuters quoted a European source on Friday as saying Berlin wants Athens to give up budget control.

"We need more leadership and monitoring when it comes to implementing the reform course," Roesler, also vice chancellor, told Bild newspaper, according to an advance of an interview to be published on Monday.

And if you think Greece is the only country that will have to give up control of their budget to the EU, you haven't been paying attention.  The Greek Fire is unquenchable, and it may burn through the fiscal sovereignty of the entire eurozone before it's done.

StupidiNews!

• With an aging population and an extremely low birthrate on top of the effects from the Fukushima nuclear disaster, Japan's population in 2060 may drop by 30%.
• After losing a recall election, former Arizona state Senator and immigration bill architect Russell Pearce has been elected vice-chairman of the state's Republican party.
• Charlotte-based Shaw Power Group will be the first company to build nuclear power plants in the US in over 30 years as they prepare to build in SC and GA.
• Spain's 4th quarter GDP shrank by 0.3%, raising the possibility that the country will enter its second recession in 3 years.
• A pro-Syrian hacker group supporting the Assad regime has attacked Al Jazeera's news website twice now in protest of the network's coverage of the Syrian uprising.