Turn On The Lights, Watch The Roaches Scatter, Part 57

An avalanche begins with a few small pebbles.

US Bancorp and Wells Fargo & Co. lost a foreclosure case in Massachusetts’s highest court that will guide lower courts in that state and may influence others in the clash between bank practices and state real estate law. The ruling drove down bank stocks.

The state Supreme Judicial Court today upheld a judge’s decision saying two foreclosures were invalid because the banks didn’t prove they owned the mortgages, which he said were improperly transferred into two mortgage-backed trusts.

“We agree with the judge that the plaintiffs, who were not the original mortgagees, failed to make the required showing that they were the holders of the mortgages at the time of foreclosure,” Justice Ralph D. Gants wrote.

Foreclosuregate has now officially become a Major Problem for the banks, ladies and gentlemen.  Bank stocks got hammered today as a result. 

Now things get ugly.

The Mask Slips Again

And Republicans show their bigotry towards Latinos, this time in Missouri.

One of the five planks of House Speaker Steve Tilley’s Show Me Solutions Initiative priorities list is to end new driver testing in languages other than English.

In the section of his speech to the House calling for more accountability in government yesterday, Tilley said the state had the duty to require anyone wanting a Missouri driver’s license to pass it in the state’s official language.

You'd think you want people to fully understand the driving laws of the land so that they don't hurt people while driving, but apparently that's not the public safety issue here.

The Missouri State Highway Patrol conducts written tests of would-be drivers in 12 languages, including English, said Capt. Tim Hull, director of the public education and information office. The languages include major European languages such as Spanish, French, Italian and German, as well as Chinese, Greek, Korean, Russian, Vietnamese, Japanese and Bosnian.

If a driver cannot pass the road test, they may hire, at their expense, an interpreter from a state-approved list, Hull said.

With road sign colors and symbols based on an international standard, Hull said, the patrol sees no safety issues for drivers who are not well-versed in English.

So even the Missouri state troopers agree with this.  They want people informed of the laws, and the whole point of shapes and colors on road signs is to make them recognizable without having to read them.  In fact, part of the written test in just about any state is to recognize the signs without lettering on them, so Tilley's legislation is a moot point from a public safety issue.  And let's not pretend everybody driving a car in Missouri (or any state for that matter) is 100% literate, either.  That's why the signs are shaped and colored like they are.

Again, this is a moot point.  So what's Tilley's real game here?  The mask slips again thanks to a fellow Republican:

Rep. John Cauthorn, R-Mexico, said he likes the idea and thinks his constituents will, too.

“The average guy on the street hates Spanish, and it is everywhere,” Cauthorn said. “To the average guy, that is important. We are almost to the point of losing our identity as a nation.

“If folks are going to come here and work, they need to work toward learning the English language,” he said.

Ding ding ding!

In State Rep. Cauthorn's world, the average guy "hates Spanish" and presumably hates those who speak it, too.  Those who speak other languages than English are robbing America of its identity, according to him.  They're not American.  They don't count.

Cauthorn seems to think the average Missourian is a nationalist racist asshole...and he's proud of this.  Fascinating.

Zandar's Thought Of The Day

If this is the new normal for the Tea Party right (and every indication that these inmates are indeed well ensconced in administration and day-to-day affairs of the asylum) then the next two years are going to be awesome.

An apparent member of the birther movement seated in the gallery of the House of Representatives on Thursday interrupted a reading of the Constitution. The woman yelled out "Except Obama, except Obama, help us Jesus!" as Rep. Frank Pallone (D-NJ) read the "natural born citizen" clause of the Constitution.

The woman screamed out from the House Gallery as Pallone read Section 1 of Article Two of the United States Constitution, which reads that "No person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President." 

Steve M. has much more on this particular World Nut Daily all-star, Theresa Cao, Professional Birther.

The monster the wingers created is now quite loose in DC.

Bon's List Of Things To Track In 2011

Everyone has their favorite topics and points of view.  I plan to do some lengthy follow-ups on a few things, and some patterns have emerged.  I see a lot of things going on, but they all come back to civil rights and the way fear is being used to coerce citizens into giving up their rights.  For this, I am going to introduce a new tag: Civil Stupidity.

Here are some things you may see referenced under this tag:

Privacy -  We are losing our right to privacy and our freedom to make decisions for ourselves.  Some of this started with Bush's failures by allowing calls to be tapped without a warrant, and has continued with Obama.  Internet privacy is going to become a hot topic while ISPs fight for customers.

Women's rights - Over the past few years, women have had some successes with equal treatment, but they are the exception to the rule.  Equal pay in the workforce was killed by Republicans, and recently it was suggested that women may not be guaranteed protection and equality in the Constitution.  The latter was in contradiction to a unanimous ruling, but the fact that it was even uttered is cause for alarm.

LGBT issues - Dont Ask Don't Tell, gay marriage, the ability for two consenting adults to live how they please.  Why is this anyone's business?  Why does anyone feel they have the right to dictate how others should live?  I proudly performed my first same-sex wedding ceremony, and I hope to report some breakthroughs on this front in 2011.

On Facebook and in the comments, readers are always welcome to throw in their two cents.  Please feel free to chip in your opinions, and if you see an article that you think is of interest to to Civil Stupidity, please drop me a line here, or at my site (www.bonthegeek.com).

Rudy Awakening For 2012

Here's my question about this:

Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani (R) denied on Friday reports he is rounding up staff to explore a run for president in 2012.

Giuliani, the former 2008 presidential candidate, denied a New York Post report that he was gearing up to run again in 2012. 

"I haven't done that. I haven't rounded up my political advisers," Giuliani said on MSNBC.

He said that a coming trip to New Hampshire, a key primary state, came without political intentions, too.

"I go to New Hampshire a lot; I don't have anything scheduled right now," he said.

Why would anyone even consider that Giuliani, after his complete freakin' disaster of a run in 2008, would ever try again in 2012? Exactly what has changed between now and then for Rudy in particular to be even remotely considered a viable candidate for President?

Nothing.  The guy's a joke.  I actually consider him a rung down the 2012 GOP list from people like Gingrich and John Bolton's mustache, for crying out loud.

Go away Rudy, nobody cares.  I don't even have a tag for your useless ass.

Environment For Deconstructing An Agency

House Republicans are wasting little time in immediately going after the EPA's energy company pollution rules.

That didn't take long. On the first day of the 112th Congress, a group of Republican members—and one Democrat—offered a bill to block the Environmental Protection Agency from regulating planet-warming gases under the Clean Air Act.

E2 Wire flagged a note in the Congressional Register that Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) yesterday introduced a bill to amend the Clean Air Act, though the description didn't include much detail. A spokesman for the representative confirmed to Mother Jones that the new bill is exactly the same as HR 391, which Blackburn and others filed in January 2009. She's introduced a measure just like it, though the new text isn't posted yet.

The measure is just over one page in length, and would alter the Clean Air Act to specifically exclude greenhouse gases from regulation. It goes so far as to specify that carbon dioxide should not be considered pollution at all. "The term 'air pollutant' shall not include carbon dioxide, water vapor, methane, nitrous oxide, hydrofluorocarbons, perfluorocarbons, or sulfur hexafluoride," the bill states.

In case that wasn't enough, it goes on: "Nothing in the Clean Air Act shall be treated as authorizing or requiring the regulation of climate change or global warming." The measure has 45 Republican co-sponsors and one Democrat, Rep. Dan Boren of Oklahoma.

Once again, any legislation that the House passes here has to get by a Presidential veto.  I'd also like every co-sponsor of this bill to submit themselves and their families to one hour per day in a room filled with carbon dioxide, water vapor, methane, nitrous oxide, hydrofluorocarbons, perfluorocarbons, and sulfur hexafluoride since these aren't pollutants.

Let's see how long that lasts.  Both the judicial and the executive are on the side of the environment here, and that the EPA has the authority.  This question is settled law.

Jobapalooza

October and November job gains revised upward 70K and a 103K job gain in December dropped the unemployment rate to 9.4% last month, but of course Helicopter Ben will keep his hands on the throttle.

Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke speaks on the economic outlook before the Senate Budget Committee at 9:30 a.m.

Analysts say the Fed's focus is on unemployment and expect it to complete the bond-buying plan.

"Gains in payrolls won't be enough to spark a change in Fed policy until the gains either accumulate for many, many months or are accompanied by gains in inflation expectations," said Tony Crescenzi, a strategist at bond fund PIMCO.

The economy usually needs to create at least 125,000 jobs a month to keep the unemployment rate from rising, but a faster pace might be needed now since so many discouraged workers are sitting on the sidelines. As job growth picks up, these workers could re-enter the labor force, keeping upward pressure on the jobless rate.

Employment gains in December were led by the private services sector, which saw payrolls rising 115,000 after gaining 84,000 in November. Retail jobs increased 12,000 after a surprise 19,400 slump in November when retailers reported their best sales in years.

Temporary hiring, seen as a harbinger of permanent employment, increased 15,900 after 31,100 in November.

The U-6 number is down to 16.7%, and we're headed in the right direction, but that just means we're breaking even instead of losing jobs.  We'll need a almost a decade of 250K job growth months just to get back to 2007 employment highs, let alone to improve on them.

The Price Of Moral Hazard: $450 Million And Counting

Simon Johnson has an excellent point:  why are taxpayers backstopping Goldman Sachs' $450 million investment in Facebook?

On the face of it, this might seem just like what the financial sector is supposed to be doing – channeling money into productive enterprise. The Securities and Exchange Commission is reportedly looking at the way private investors will be involved, but there are more deeply unsettling factors at work here.

Remember that Goldman Sachs is now a bank-holding company – a status it received in September 2008, at the height of the financial crisis, in order to avoid collapse (see Andrew Ross Sorkin’s blow-by-blow account in “Too Big to Fail” for the details.)

This means that it has essentially unfettered access to the Federal Reserve’s discount window – that is, it can borrow against all kinds of assets in its portfolio, effectively ensuring it has government-provided liquidity at any time.

Any financial institution with such access to such government support is likely to take on excessive risk – this is the heart of what is commonly referred to as the problem of “moral hazard.” If you are fully insured against adverse events, you will be less careful.

Goldman Sachs is undoubtedly too big to fail – in the sense that if it were on the brink of failure now or in the near future, it would receive extraordinary government support and its creditors (at the very least) would be fully protected.

In all likelihood, under the current administration and its foreseeable successors, shareholders, executives, and traders would also receive generous help at the moment of duress. No one wants to experience another “Lehman moment.”

In other words, because Goldman is too big to fail, and can borrow as much money as it wants to in order to play Big Casino games, it's busy creating the next bubble to try to profit from:  Dot-Com, Part 2.

Take a look at stocks like Netflix and Apple.  Apple stock has nearly quadrupled since its March 2009 lows, from $85 to almost $340.  Netflix has gone from $20 a share two years ago to nearly $200 in the last month or so.  Now Goldman Sachs may make a nearly $2 billion investment in Facebook in order to keep the social networking's potential profits all to itself as a private company.

It's the biggest Big Casino game in the world, and Goldman just bought the high rollers room all to itself.  And in case this new rush in internet companies goes south again, guess who's picking up the check?

Gotta love it.

StupidiNews!

• An Ohio man has plead guilty to murdering and dismembering two women and one of the women's 11 year old son, receiving life without parole.
• The Earth's population will cross the 7 billion mark sometime in 2011.
• Despite talk of tens of billions of dollars in cuts in the Pentagon budget, overall defense spending will rise in 2011.
• US corporations appear to be headed for the most profitable quarter on record for Q4 2010.
• Over 30 teams are set to compete for the $30 million Google Lunar X prize for putting a private spacecraft on the moon.

Last Call

And as conservatives like FOX News legal analyst Peter Johnson Jr. here call for a "second class of citizenship" for children born to undocumented workers, you have to wonder how long it will take before they call for minorities, gays, women and non-Christians to be given the same second-class status as well, because "that's what the Founders were really saying".



The main difference between conservatives and liberals on the Constitution is that liberals ask "How can the Constitution expand rights to the many?", and conservatives ask "How can the Constitution restrict rights to the few?"

Zandar's Thought Of The Day

Paul Volcker's out at the White House.

Former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker plans to leave his role as head of a panel of experts advising President Barack Obama on the economy, sources familiar with the decision said on Wednesday.

The departure of Volcker, 83, from the President's Economic Recovery Advisory Board is among a series of changes Obama is planning to announce soon.

The decision to leave the board was Volcker's. A source close to him said he was ready to continue to advise Obama on an informal basis as often as the president would like.

The one guy who knew what he was doing as far as the economy is leaving.  Meanwhile Helicopter Ben and Timmy get to stay, and Obama has just picked up JP Morgan Chase exec Bill Daley as his new Chief of Staff, because apparently Rahmbo didn't have enough corporate ties.

This is one of those times where I think Obama is doing the wrong thing to the point of outright stupidity.  All you need to know about Bill Daley?  Larry Kudlow loves the guy.

President Obama marks another milestone in his post-election move to the center by appointing pro-business Democrat William E. Daley to the powerful post of White House chief of staff. If there are any doubts that Obama wants to repair his business-bashing image, this should dispel them.

It’s an excellent appointment. 

Which means here in reality, it's as lousy as they come.

Secession Depression

Via JM Ashby over at Bob Cesca's place comes yet another example of Democratic madness here in Kentucky.  Remember, a Kentucky Democrat in any other state is a Republican.

There’s some states rights talk floating around Frankfort, aimed at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.


"Secession is an option," Rep. Jim Gooch, D-Providence, who has long been the Democrat’s top guy on the environment in the Kentucky House of Representatives, told me recently as I interviewed him for a story previewing what the Kentucky General Assembly might do on the environment this winter.

Now he wasn’t predicting that the General Assembly was going to vote to leave the Union. But the committee chairman of many years who expects to be returned to his natural resources committee post this week, was making the case for a strongly worded resolution against the EPA. Such a resolution would not have any force of law but it could perhaps embolden federal legislators to trim the sails of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Gooch wanted me to know how frustrated some of his constituents are with the EPA, which has mounted a crackdown on pollution from mining across Appalachia and has tried to shrink the footprint of mountaintop removal mining.

Lawsuits like the ones filed last year against the EPA by the pro-coal Beshear administration and the Kentucky Coal Association are a first step, he told me. They object to tighter permit conditions to protect water quality in a region where many stretches of rivers and streams fail to meet federal water quality standards for fishing and swimming. The science, says environmental lawyer Tom FitzGerald, has now linked mining with polluted waterways, and the EPA, he says, is doing its job enforcing the Clean Water Act.

Gooch, who is a vice president of a western Kentucky steel company that does business with coal companies, and has taken provocative positions on the environment before, said he wanted Kentucky residents to know that secession was "an option," even as he described that as sounding "radical."

"If you keep pushing us, we are not going to let you totally destroy us," Gooch said of the federal government.

Right.  But maybe we should take up an armed insurrection against the federal government for the tyranny of...making energy companies regulate their carbon emissions.  Secede.  Really.

If you're willing to take up arms and die for a coal company to pollute your air, then there's no hope for you.  Of course Rep. Gooch here doesn't mean it, he's just trying to pull the normal Tea Party bull.  It doesn't mean it's in any way responsible.

My state is full of buffoons.

Turn On The Lights, Watch The Roaches Scatter, Part 56

The possible settlement by all 50 state AGs with the banks on Foreclosuregate may have just run into a concrete barrier in the Bay State.

Massachusetts’s highest court is poised to rule on whether foreclosures in the state should be undone because securitization-industry practices violate real- estate law governing how mortgages may be transferred.

The fight between homeowners and banks before the Supreme Judicial Court in Boston turns on whether a mortgage can be transferred without naming the recipient, a common securitization practice. Also at issue is whether the right to a mortgage follows the promissory note it secures when the note is sold, as the industry argues.

A victory for the homeowners may invalidate some foreclosures and force loan originators to buy back mortgages wrongly transferred into loan pools. Such a ruling may also be cited in other state courts handling litigation related to the foreclosure crisis. 

“This is the first time the securitization paradigm is squarely before a high court,” said Marie McDonnell, a mortgage-fraud analyst in Orleans, Massachusetts, who wrote a friend-of-the-court brief in favor of borrowers. The state court, under its practices, is likely to rule by next month. 

It's that third paragraph that has mortgage execs awake and sweating at nights.  We're talking a precedent here that could turn into a tidal wave of buybacks...potentially hundreds of billions of dollars worth.  It will rip the banks apart, considering they're still leveraged to the hilt.  It'll also throw the value of the mortgage loan holdings of all MERS banks into chaos.

No wonder the banks are so eager to settle now and make MERS the final word on mortgage paperwork legitimacy.  They're running out of time.

Tidal Forces, How Do They Work? It's A $^@*#* Miracle

Bill-O fails at science again.

"I'll tell you why [religion is] not a scam," he said. "In my opinion -- alright? Tide goes in, tide goes out. Never a miscommunication. You can't explain that. You can't explain why the tide goes in." 

It makes my head hurt sometimes.  You know Bill, I know astrophysicists.  They're pretty normal guys.  One I know is a very spiritual dude (and a hell of a guitar player.)  It is possible to combine science and faith without looking an idiot on national television.

Try it sometime.

StupidiNews: Bon Is Worried

Straight from the headlines and into my list of things to stew on at night when I can't sleep. 

(CNN) -- A large number of dead birds were found in the city of Falköping, Sweden, on Tuesday night and Wednesday morning, according to the Swedish National Veterinary Institute.

That has me worried.  That some are trying to dismiss this as firework trauma or similar has me even more worried.

(CNN) -- Authorities in Maryland are investigating the deaths of about 2 million fish in Chesapeake Bay.

Okay, something is going on here.  This is more than a weird coincidence.  Right now, we don't even know if it is natural or done by man.  Fish and birds are related in the food chain, but right now we don't even know if the food chain is related to this.  

(AP) LONDON – The first study to link a childhood vaccine to autism was based on doctored information about the children involved, according to a new report on the widely discredited research.

This will impact the globe if these diseases are ever introduced into the population, starting with us.  Concerned parents took steps to protect their children, but it has put a community of children at risk of exposure.  The article says immunization rates have never recovered.  The study itself was called "an elaborate fraud" by colleagues.