Turn On The Lights, Watch The Roaches Scatter Part 69

The battle over Foreclosuregate continues.  I've mentioned before that the banks are looking for a settlement agreement that gets them off the hook for defrauding millions of homeowners on their mortgages, and while the federal settlement looks to be very much in the banks' favor, the 50 state collective lawsuit is running afoul of the states very, very badly needing the cash and wanting very much to rightfully collect.

Attorneys general negotiating a settlement of a 50-state investigation of foreclosure practices have reached agreements with lenders on some terms while failing so far to reach an accord on potential monetary payments by the banks, said a person familiar with the talks.

The probe was triggered by claims of faulty foreclosure practices following the housing collapse which law enforcement officials said may violate state law. Significant progress has been made on a deal with lenders, which include Bank of America Corp. (BAC) and JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM), with agreements in principle reached on several issues, said the person, who didn’t specify the areas of accord as they may change as talks proceed.

It may take at least two months to reach a final agreement, said the person, who declined to be identified because the talks are private. An accord remains out of reach because states want principal reductions for borrowers, which is more than banks agreed to in deals reached with U.S. regulators last week, said Allison Schoenthal, a lawyer at Hogan Lovells in New York.

“Principal reductions I don’t think are going to be agreed to by banks, and I don’t think the banks see a need for a penalty when, in their view, they haven’t done anything wrong,” said Schoenthal, who represents lenders and servicers and isn’t involved in the talks. 

Nothing wrong except, you know, destroy the economy in a blizzard of fraud and hang the multi-trillion dollar bill for it around the necks of the US taxpayer.  The state AGs aren't stupid, either.  They know that without principal reductions, the banks are going to get the money and the property and actually end up in far better financial shape than they were in 2007...and the states are going to get stuck with the clean up and lost tax base as property values continue to drop.  They want the banks to eat the pile of crap they made so that housing prices can start to recover again.

Little chance of that happening, of course.

An Anniversary We'd Like To Forget

Wednesday marks one year after the deadly Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion that sank the rig and spewed millions of gallons of oil into the ocean.  From Texas to Florida, the Gulf Coast is still flooded with uncertainty about the safety of the waters.

About 40 surfers paddled off St. Pete beach Sunday with a dozen roses in hand to mark the one-year anniversary of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

"It's sad to see that we're naïve to think that because it happened, we have all the answers," said Thomas Paterek, chairman of the Surfrider Foundation's Suncoast chapter. "Truth be told: We don't have any of the answers yet."

The nonprofit environmental group organized the event, during which surfers paddled out about 100 yards and tossed 11 roses into the water, remembering the 11 members of the Deepwater Horizon crew who died when the oil rig exploded off the Louisiana coast on April 20, 2010. The final rose represented wildlife impacted by the spill.

"This disaster is enormous, and there's still oil out there," said Dave Rauschkolb, founder of Hands Across the Sand, which opposes offshore oil drilling along Florida's coastline. "No one can be sure the sand and the Gulf (are safe). We're hearing that it is, but those of us who live up there who've been affected by this ... it's still scary for us."

Rauschkolb lives in Seaside, a coastal community east of Pensacola, and owns three restaurants, one of which serves seafood.

"We're buying our seafood from the eastern Gulf because I don't feel comfortable with the seafood that's coming towards the west coast further west from us."

And very few Americans do.   Do you blame the guy?  I don't.  Maybe because as Mac McClelland reports, the oil's still washing up on shore.

At the entrance to Grand Isle State Park, we're issued the same warning DW was, that the beach is closed to the press and everyone else because there are workers on it. That doesn't seem like that good of a reason to keep a reporter off a beach, and in any case it is a lie. Last August, when I walked out of sight of the park staffer at the entrance and onto the beach, two private guards escorted me away. This time, the beach is deserted of rent-a-cops and cleanup workers alike. It's covered in tarballs, little and sometimes not-so-little brown blemishes all over the sand. They're shiny and smell like gas when you break them open.

After a while, some workers arrive. Five of them. One shows me how they get the tarballs. He's holding a broken-off rake handle; he's taped a lens from a pair of sunglasses to the end of it, which he uses to scoop up the tar. He was originally issued a shovel, but the workers, finding this wildly inefficient, now make their own tools. In his other hand he's got a rake with too much space between the tines to pick up smaller pieces of tar. He affixed mesh to the inside of it. "I've had this job since May," he says. There's a laminated "Ten Ways To Be A Successful Husband" card in the pocket of his denim shirt. "We're just grateful for the work."

Asked if any of this oil is from the new, non-BP spill that started washing up on Grand Isle last week, he says no, that's already all been cleaned up, anything that's left over is still Deepwater Horizon oil. A group of Coast Guard guys I ran into earlier said the same thing. BP spokesperson Blake Scott also confirms this after I make it through security at central command.

We still have a major problem in the Gulf of Mexico, and it's one I'll be highlighting this week.

Mean Old Scary Black President Guy Is Back

Via Alan Colmes this morning, we learn whenever President Obama holds the line to defend Democratic party and American values, we always get back to the GOP default position that he is mean, belligerent, disrespectful, intemperate and most of all angry black guy. 

Odds are we will see more of this meaner side of the Obama persona in the months ahead because, as columnist and former GOP presidential aide Pete Wehner notes, "now that he finds himself intellectually outmatched by Paul Ryan, chairman of the House Budget Committee, and in a precarious situation when it comes to his re-election, Obama is dropping his past civility sermons down the memory hole. Decency and respect for others has suddenly become passe. Talking about our disagreements without being disagreeable has been overtaken by events. Not impugning the character of the opposition is fine as long as it's convenient, but it's to be ignored whenever necessary." In other words, we're now seeing the real Obama in what promises to be an ugly campaign.

If there were any more projection from the right here, you could read that Moonie Times editorial clearly on the side of the moon at night.  Please observe how the editorial hits all the low notes:  Obama is rage-filled, disrespectful towards "real America" and "intellectually outmatched" by the GOP (instead of their usual attacks on Obama claiming he's too detached, too politically correct and too much of an egghead, while the Tea Party is celebrated as passionate, authentic, and common sense, see how all this works?)

The barely unspoken message here is that Obama is a stupid, angry black guy, along with all the connotative baggage that goes along with that image over the decades.  This attack doesn't get pulled out by the right unless they are extraordinarily desperate to try to make everything about Obama, rather than about whatever con the Republicans are trying to pull on the American people, so blowing that dog whistle of "Paul Ryan is clearly smarter, but what did you expect" is the way forward.

And as I noted above, the Republicans have spent the last several years reveling in ignorance, saying that doubting things the elitist science guys tell you about climate or evolution or anything for that matter is really the intellectual superiority of the "open mind".  Now they are projecting that same state onto Obama after years of saying he's basically Tuvok from Star Trek: Voyager by now saying Obama clearly hasn't done his homework, got "outsmarted" by the GOP, and is now resorting to being angry and mean.

The whiplash alone on that 180 should have flipped the GOP clown car, but apparently it rolled over enough times to land on those little wheels.  Whenever the Republicans go after Obama personally like this, you know they've admitted that they've lost the argument on the merits of fact and are now scrambling to drag things as deep into the mud as possible.

All while Obama remains as cool as a spring breeze over an iceberg.  He drives them nuts, you know.

StupidiNews!

• The five coalition soldiers who were killed over the weekend in Afghanistan by a suicide bomber were US troops from the Army's 101st Airborne Division, officials say.
• Ivory Coast President Alassane Outtara is ordering the country's civil service workers back to work in order to try to get the country back on track.
• California wildlife officials and environmental groups are warning that widespread use of new rat poisons are causing harm to more than just rats.
• In a major reversal, formed Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan is now saying the Bush tax cuts should be allowed to expire.
• Oracle is giving up on a commercial version of OpenOffice as the open source community presses on with the consumer version.

Last Call

Back home in North Carolina, the state got walloped by a series of tornadoes this weekend that left 22 dead and dozens injured from Raleigh to the Albamarle Sound.

Half of the North Carolina fatalities were in Bertie County, a rural county about 120 miles northeast of Raleigh that has just 21,000 residents.

Two suspected tornadoes cut a wide swath across the county, flattening houses and tossing around farm equipment and vehicles, said Zee Lamb, Bertie’s county manager.

“There are homes that are just totally leveled,” he said. “Anybody who was in those homes could not have survived.”

Among the dead were several elderly residents of an assisted-living facility that was caught in the path of the storm, Lamb said.

Similar scenes of destruction could be found in elsewhere in the state, notable in Wake County, Sanford and Dunn.

In Northeast Raleigh, three children were killed when the mobile home they lived in was crushed by a falling tree. A fourth child, a six-month old girl, is in critical condition.

The scene left neighbors of the victims screaming in vain to help them get their babies out from under the tree.

In the neighborhoods just east and south of downtown Raleigh, there was substantial wind damage, but remarkably no one was killed. Shaw University, founded in 1865 as the first historically black college in the South, announced Saturday it would remain closed for the remainder of the semester because of the damage.

The city of Raleigh had roughly 30 teams out working to clear away debris.

I have friends out that way who so far have checked in and say they are alright, but they all tell me that this is the worse storm damage since Hugo in 1989.  We just don't get tornadoes in the eastern part of NC.  And yet when we do get them, they are devastating.

No Dealing On The Debt Ceiling, Part 3

For once, I actually have to grudgingly praise Tim Geithner for not being a fool.  He's saying on TV what needs to be said about it:  Congress will raise the debt ceiling.

Appearing on This Week, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner said: "Well, I want to make it perfectly clear that Congress will raise the debt ceiling." When asked by Christiane Amanpour whether he was sure about that, Geithner responded: "Absolutely. And they recognize it, and they told the president that on Wednesday in the White House. And I sat there with them, and they said, we recognize we have to do this. And we're not going to play around with it. Because we know -- we know that the risk would be catastrophic."

If the debt ceiling is not raised, we go into a depression, period.

Also during his appearance on This Week, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner warned of what would happen if the debt ceiling were not raised. "What will happen is that we'd have to stop making payments to our seniors -- Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security. We'd have to stop paying veterans' benefits," said Geithner. "We'd have to stop paying all the other payments on all the other things the government does. And then we would risk default on our interest payments. If we did that, we'd tip the U.S. economy and the world economy back into recession, depression."

Are Republicans really this stupid?  Somebody might want to clue in Rep. Paul Ryan.

Appearing on Face The Nation, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) said that Republicans would not agree to an increase in the debt ceiling without concessions on spending. "Nobody wants to play around with the country's credit rating. Nobody wants to see defaults happening - but we also think it's important to get a handle on future borrowing as we deal with raising the debt limit," said Ryan. He also added: "We shouldn't accept the premise that we have to rubber stamp a debt increase without any spending controls."

But that's exactly what Republicans have done in the past.  The difference is this particular game of chicken risks harming the real people in charge of the Republican party:  Wall Street.  The banksters like having near zero-cost loans.  It's one thing screwing with senior citizens, minorities, and the poor.  But the Republicans will not be allowed to pull the plug on the debt ceiling.  The second the market gets truly spooked that the GOP will let the country miss payments, it all comes crashing down, and the fat cats know it.

Do you really think the Republicans will seriously be allowed to threaten the Fed's gravy train for the banksters?  Do you really think the Republicans will be allowed to blow up the bond market for the next decade?  Not me.

Ryan and the Tea Party kids will get smacked down again soon enough.  The real people in charge aren't going to let these idiots wreck their Big Casino games.

And With A Loud Jangle, My BS Detector Went Off... Again

It's too bad soap operas are coming to a close.  Perhaps already missing the drama, it seems actors are out drumming up their own madness.

First, we have Charlie Sheen.  There's just too much to link to.  But seriously, he's either going to be found in a bathtub dead of an overdose with a few hookers, or this has been an attempt to drum up some publicity.  Whether on the part of Sheen or the network it's hard to guess.

But now, now we have Nicholas Cage arrested.  If you piece it together from TMZ, he got in a dispute with his wife over the address of a place they rent.  Then the cops show up and see him grab her, and he's in the slammer.  Nic's a nutty fellow, so this isn't too much of a surprise.  But bailed out by Dog the Bounty Hunter?  I smell some major BS.

Epic Fail: Deja Vu Edition

The Federal Aviation Administration said the unnamed controller slept for five hours intentionally during the midnight shift on Feb. 19 in Knoxville, Tenn.

It's the second incident in as many months that an FAA controller fell asleep during a midnight shift. A supervisor working alone at Washington's Reagan National Airport fell asleep for at least 24 minutes shortly after midnight on March 23.

The difference is the first guy dozed in his chair, while the second fellow apparently made a makeshift bed.  At least one emergency situation was delayed while he slept.   I have worked night shifts, some lonely and quiet.  I know how tiring it can be, and how tempting a tiny little nap can seem when there is nobody around to know the difference.  But perhaps it's time to review some policies for changes and up the bar a little, what do you say?

Land Of The Rising Core Temperature, Part 27

It looks like Operation Concrete Coffin is now on in Japan, and it may take years to finish it.

Engineers will need up to nine months to fully shut down the damaged reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, the scene of the worst nuclear accident since Chernobyl, its owners announced Sunday.


It would take three months to bring down radiation levels and restore normal cooling systems at the plant, Tsunehisa Katsumata, the chairman of the Tokyo Electric Power Co., told reporters.
An additional three to six months would be needed before the reactors reach their cold shutdown point, he said.

The plan announced Sunday is the first timetable that Tokyo Electric has disclosed for reining in the crisis at Fukushima Daiichi, which was swamped by the tsunami that followed Japan's March 11 earthquake.

It comes five days after Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan called for Tokyo Electric to develop a timeline for bringing the disaster to an end.

The ultimate plan for the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant involves the construction of a giant concrete box around all damaged reactors, according to the timeline. Design for the box should begin within nine months.

So if everything goes to plan, Fukushima Daiichi will be spewing out radioactive mess for several months, be wound down over the second half of the year...and then the concrete box project will extend well into 2012 or longer.

This is the best case scenario.  Another three months of radioactivity.  How much damage will that do to the people, the environment, and the economy?  And it's not like the best case scenario is happening, as new problems continue to spring up.

Workers stopped a severe leak of contaminated water into the Pacific Ocean on April 6, but elevated levels of the short-lived nuclear waste iodine-131 recorded over the weekend could indicate a new problem, a Japanese safety official announced Saturday.

Iodine-131 has a radioactive half-life of eight days, and a more than fivefold increase in iodine concentrations in seawater behind the intake for the No. 2 reactor could be either from a fresh leak or from sediment stirred up while placing steel panels around the intakes, said Hidehiko Nishiyama, the top spokesman for Japan's Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency.

"They will continue to monitor this carefully," Nishiyama said. "At this point, they have not visually found any leakage of any water into the ocean, and it is hard to check the conditions around No. 2 due to high radiation levels."

And on and on it goes.

Musical Chairs

The Philadelphia Orchestra survived the entire 20th century, two world wars, the Great Depression and Hooked on Bach.  It did not survive Goldman Sachs.

The Philadelphia Orchestra filed for bankruptcy protection after 111 years of operation to restructure leases, contracts and agreements.

The company listed both assets and debt of as much as $50 million in a Chapter 11 petition filed yesterday in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Philadelphia.

“Revenues and going concern value have steadily declined over the past several years, like countless other performing arts enterprises,” attorneys for the orchestra said in court papers.

The orchestra, founded in 1900, said its board voted to seek bankruptcy. Affiliates including the Academy of Music and Encore Series, also sought protection.

The orchestra operates at a loss because of declining ticket revenues, decreased donations, eroding endowment income, pension obligations, contractual agreements, and increased operational costs, it said in a press release. Last night’s performance of Mahler’s Symphony No. 4 went on as scheduled, and no performances have been canceled. 

For now, anyway.  That will change, I'm betting.  But more and more art, musical, and cultural venues like this are going by the wayside.  Cities, counties, and states are saying "we can't afford this" and saying "let's cut taxes!" instead.

So what are the people who can afford it doing?

Bon, who is an orchestra geek herself, will cover more of this tomorrow.

Birthers Get A Trump Card, Part 7

The Donald will not go gently into that good night with his birther idiocy, but he is 100% right when he says "people love this issue especially in the Republican Party."

Pushing back against calls from Republicans to abandon his new-found birther quest, Donald Trump snapped back Saturday at party leaders like House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) who accuse him of being less than serious about his presidential ambitions, warning Republicans that abandoning the conspiracy theories surrounding President Obama's birth certificate will harm the party.


In an exclusive interview with TPM recorded before Trump spoke to what those in attendance called a record crowd at the Palm Beach County Tax Day Tea Party rally, Trump said Republicans like Cantor dismiss the birther issue at their peril.

"I think it's a very bad thing for Cantor to have done," Trump said, "because I'll tell you, people love this issue especially in the Republican Party. And there's something to what we're saying." 

One thing's for sure:  none of the GOP candidates are going to be able to run away from the birther crowd.  And that's nobody's fault but the Republicans themselves.  They started this nonsense and have kept it going for years now.  And here's where they begin to pay the price.

The birther stupidity is an absolute loser in the general election.  All Obama has to do is say "Instead of debating the issues, the Republicans have nothing better to talk about than my birth certificate."  A majority of Republicans have some doubts about it, even though it was proven years ago.  And the more they bring this up, the more it's going to kill them in the election.

If I didn't know better, I'd say Trump was a secret Howard Dean plant.  Like Steve M. says, Trump is pushing all the right buttons, and he knows how to sell, sell, sell.

You're Doing It Wrong, Jeff

Meet GOP freshman Rep. Jeff Dunham of California.  He's on the transportation, interior, and veteran's affairs committees, but like most lawmakers in the House, he's already fundraising for 2012.  The problem is that Jeff here is particularly bad at that part.

A freshman California lawmaker made a big splash but barely broke even at a glitzy and controversial January GOP fundraiser featuring country singer LeAnn Rimes, new campaign filings show.


Celebrity, it seems, comes at a cost.

Rimes and her entourage made out well at the Jan. 4 fundraiser that served as Republican Rep. Jeff Denham's big political debut in Washington. Between assorted fees, flowers, catering and other costs, Denham's special fundraising committee reported spending $212,250 on the Rimes event.

The committee, meanwhile, raised only $212,900 from outside contributors.

Add it all up, and Denham's special committee spent nearly a quarter of a million dollars to net a grand total of $650 in outside contributions.

"It's an industrial-strength waste of money, and the people who gave the money are going to resent it," said Michael Fraioli, a longtime Democratic fundraising expert.

Denham didn't respond Friday to requests for comment.

Dunham's district includes the suburbs of Fresno and Modesto and a median household income of $51,000 or so, so it's not like he's in a bad place to be raising cash as a California Republican, especially with Dunham being an Air Force veteran in an important aerospace state.  Yosemite National Park is in his district too (CA-19) so being on a couple of environmental committees gives him some important purple district cred as well.

The problem is Jeff here seems to be really, really bad at math or at suckering rubes into giving him money.  Either one is a serious liability if you're pretending to be Tea Party freshman and you're a purple district moderate.  Even worse, he dragged in some 11 other Republicans into his big fundraiser...and they walked away with chicken feed.  Oh, and I'm betting Jeff isn't too popular around the "No Socialists Allowed" couch fort the Tea Party kids have in the House basement, either.

Why The Ryan Unicorn Plan Was Doomed From The Start

The more I see the GOP House eager to stab Tea Party seniors in the back, the more I shake my head and wonder why they are going down the road of oblivion.  The fact that Republicans will destroy anyone and everyone in their quest for political power isn't news, but I honestly don't see what the point of the Ryan Unicorn Plan vote is.  There are a number of reasons the Medicare provisions in particular are done for, and reason number one is the insurance companies themselves.

At first glance, Paul Ryan's plan to send millions of seniors into the free market with dwindling vouchers in hand might seem a boon to the private insurance industry. But would companies even want to participate?

Unlike the Affordable Care Act, which mandated that millions of young and healthy Americans purchase insurance with government subsidies, the Paul Ryan plan would instead bring the oldest, sickest, and least profitable demographic to the table. And with the CBO projecting that the average senior would be on the hook for over two-thirds of their health care costs within just 10 years of the plan's adoption -- a proportion that is projected to worsen in the long run --- the government subsidies backing them up may not bring in enough profitable customers to make things worthwhile.

"If reimbursement rates are too low to provide basic benefits, they'll tell the government, 'You do it,'" one insurance lobbyist told TPM. "I don't think they can require they lose money, they'd just pull out."

They'd stop insuring seniors.  After all, the whole point of the insurance industry is to make a profit, not to provide health care coverage.  You take government out of the picture with the voucher plan that won't cover costs, and the insurance companies are stuck with the bill.  They of course would either pass along the costs to the rest of us, or just refuse to provide coverage at all for seniors.  That would in turn raise rates on everyone else.

Maybe that's Ryan's real point.  I'm betting however that the insurance industry loves getting big money from the government, and they want more customers, not fewer ones with less money.

I'll Have That Steak Well Done, Please

(Reuters) - Meat found on grocery store shelves often contains high levels of bacteria, with more than half of the bacteria resistant to multiple types of antibiotics, a study released on Friday said.

Price said the most significant finding is not the level of bacteria on the meats, but rather how the bacteria are becoming strongly resistant to antibiotics used to treat animals before slaughter.

The study found that in 96 percent of the meats with staph bacteria, the bacteria were resistant to at least one type of antibiotic, and 52 percent were resistant to three or more types.

This is cause for some serious follow-up studies.  When antibiotics changed the face of medicine forever, it was immediately taken for granted.  For a dash of surprise (at least on my part), when the meats were listed in order of what was safest, chicken won the prize. But seriously, folks.  Everybody strays from the safety practices once in a while.  This is a solemn reminder to prep food safely and be aware of what can happen when we lapse.

Royal Flush-Up Of The Week

The founders of the three largest online poker sites were indicted on Friday in what could serve as a death blow to a thriving industry.
Eleven executives at PokerStars, Full Tilt Poker, Absolute Poker and a number of their affiliates were charged with bank fraud and money laundering in an indictment unsealed in a Manhattan court. Two of the defendants were arrested on Friday morning in Utah and Nevada. Federal agents are searching for the others.

Prosecutors are seeking to immediately shut down the sites and to eventually send the executives to jail and to recover $3 billion from the companies. By Friday afternoon Full Tilt Poker’s site displayed a message explaining that “this domain name has been seized by the F.B.I. pursuant to an Arrest Warrant.”

I'm not sure who didn't see this coming, but it's still dramatic and fun to follow.  My greatest surprise is that  they were able to last for so long.  So the next time you want to throw money away, see the tip jar.  At least you will know for sure where it's going.