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Dec 11 2010

Prime Time

No Larry tonight, just Prison Porn.

A true enough story- my brewing buddy started throwing massive Halloween parties to show off his incredible sound system long before he started brewing.  At the very first one we set up a bunch of stations with vintage computer and game systems and a projection TV.  The concept was that he’d do some music video mixing and people would dance, but we made the mistake of showing the first 10 minutes of Raiders to ‘demonstrate the capabilities’ (it really was the best 10 minutes in movies until it was recently supplanted by Saving Private Ryan’s 27 minute opening).

Needless to say what we ended up doing was planting everyone on couches for the entire evening in drooling worship to the Hypnotoad.

In later years we not only ditched the TV, but also started limiting the seating.

It’s not the years, it’s the mileage.

Later-

Dave hosts Reese Witherspoon and Colin Quinn.  

Why, Mr. Anderson? Why do you do it? Why get up? Why keep fighting? Do you believe you’re fighting for something? For more than your survival? Can you tell me what it is? Do you even know? Is it freedom? Or truth? Perhaps peace? Yes? No? Could it be for love? Illusions, Mr. Anderson. Vagaries of perception. The temporary constructs of a feeble human intellect trying desperately to justify an existence that is without meaning or purpose. And all of them as artificial as the Matrix itself, although only a human mind could invent something as insipid as love. You must be able to see it, Mr. Anderson. You must know it by now. You can’t win. It’s pointless to keep fighting. Why, Mr. Anderson? Why? Why do you persist?

Because I choose to.

Zap2it TV Listings, Yahoo TV Listings

Dec 11 2010

Evening Edition

Evening Edition is an Open Thread

Well, this is odd, AFP hasn’t updated their feed since yesterday.  No new News there.

From Yahoo News Top Stories

1 Jailed Chinese dissident awarded Nobel

By Wojciech Moskwa and Walter Gibbs, Reuters

42 mins ago

OSLO (Reuters) – Jailed Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in a ceremony where he was represented by an empty chair and he dedicated it from prison to the “lost souls” of the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown.

China called the award in Oslo a “political farce.”

President Barack Obama, a Peace Prize laureate last year, called for the prompt release of 54-year-old Liu, who was jailed last year for 11 years for subversion.

Dec 10 2010

Operation Broken Trust

The Obama Administration’s Financial-Fraud Stunt Backfires

The press shows the feds’ numbers are phony and asks where the whales are.

By Ryan Chittum, The Columbia Journalism Review

December 9, 2010 10:20 AM

Boy, the Obama administration’s slapdash PR effort to show it’s cracking down on financial fraud sure looks to be failing-and getting some serious blowback.

Jesse Eisinger has a column in today’s New York Times noting that the feds’ insider-trading investigation, while important, misses the bigger issue: prosecuting those who caused the crisis.

The New York Times’s Andrew Ross Sorkin called out Eric Holder’s Justice Department on Monday, noting that the 343 criminal defendants it said it’s prosecuting in a sweep it lamely calls Operation Broken Trust are small fry. No executive from the major corporations (like, oh, AIG, Lehman Brothers, Washington Mutual, Countrywide, Ameriquest, etc.) has yet been charged.

…

I suppose if there’s one good thing that comes out of this headslapper, it’s that maybe the Obama administration’s laughable attempt to show it’s tough on financial fraud will cause enough of a backlash in the press that it forces them to actually do something about the people who took down the financial system in order to make tens or hundreds of millions of dollars.

Dec 10 2010

Your Korean ‘Free Trade’ Agreement Update

From Firedog Lake of course since they’re the ones giving the best coverage.

Dec 10 2010

Gullible isn’t in the Dictionary

You could look it up.

I spotted this when I was feeling much more charitable than I am at the moment so calibrate your ourage meter.

Krugman: White House Blowing the Stimulus, Again

By: Scarecrow, Thursday December 9, 2010 8:08 am

The White House is moving heaven and earth, and enlisting everyone from Vice President Biden to the Mayor of Gullible (remember this next time the White House says they can’t get something the public actually supports, because they can’t get the votes) to convince Congressional Democrats the nation’s economic survival depends on passing the Obama-McConnell Tax Gifts for the Rich Act of 2010.

(And if you don’t think this is a massive gift to the rich, check out this graphic from David Dayen. Those big black dots will be Obama’s record.)

But instead of focusing on what the bill actually is, a massive give away to the wealthiest people in America combined with an openly admitted threat to Social Security funding, the White House has pulled out its biggest economic guns to convince skeptics that it’s the economic stimulus from the various measures that are absolutely essential. If so, then the question becomes, will the stimulus measures do what the White House claims?

…

Yesterday, Obama’s chief economic adviser, Larry Summers reversed a year of White House assurances to tell us the economy was at risk of a double-dip recession which would become more likely if Congress failed to pass this package. This is the first time the White House has said this, and since the Republicans are likely to increase the risks with their promised punitive spending cuts, we need to take this seriously.

It behooves the White House to do more than hand Congress a take-it-or-leave it package that’s poorly designed and misguided, based again on a flawed analysis of where we are and what’s needed. For once, this White House should be talking to people who got it right instead of continually listening to those who failed. And until they do, no Democrat has any business voting for this mess.

Dec 10 2010

Working Poor?

Just for reference, US Median Household Income is $44,389.  Median means 50% make more than that, and 50% make less.

Who Loses Under Obama’s GOP Tax Compromise? The Working Poor

By CHARLES WALLACE, AOL Daily Finance

Posted 6:30 AM 12/09/10

“Single working people with earnings below $20,000 and married couples with earnings below $40,000 are worse off under the payroll tax cut proposals in the compromise between the president and the Republicans,” explains Bob Williams, a senior fellow at the Washington, D.C.-based Tax Policy Center.

Here’s why: The Obama proposal substitutes a Social Security payroll tax cut for the Making Work Pay credit, which was targeted to do the most good for low-income families. Under current rules, the working poor receive $400 when they earn at least $6,452 a year through the Making Work Pay credit. Married couples with earnings above $12,900 get $800 under the program.

The compromise cuts the Social Security payroll tax from 6.2% to 4.2%, so a couple wold have to earn $40,000 to get the same $800 tax benefit. Every working-class couple earning less than that will get less than $800, meaning they lose money under the Obama proposal.

…

The rich, however, do really well. A worker earning $106,800, the maximum amount of income subject to Social Security tax, stands to save $2,136 in payroll taxes. A married couple with both spouses making over $100,000 will actually save $4,272.

Obama had been saying for months that he wanted to increase the tax burden on the wealthy while keeping it the same for the middle class. But the new plan actually increases the tax burden on the lowest-income working families. “If you are worried about who needs the money and are trying to help people, targeting the cuts to the wealthy who don’t need it seems the wrong way to go,” Williams says.

So Barack Hussein Obama’s “Tax Compromise” is actually a TAX HIKE for almost 50% of Americans.

Way to sell-out a campaign promise Mr. “I’ll never raise taxes on those earning less that $250,000”.

And just to benefit the richest 2%.

What a disgusting liar.

Dec 10 2010

The Title Fraud Smoking Gun

I’ll cut right to the chase.  What this means is that if you have financed or re-financed a home since 1999, you no longer have clear title to your property and nobody else does either.

If you own a Mortgage Backed Security it’s a worthless scrap of paper.

Municipal, County, and State Governments have been defrauded of $10s of Billions of legally obligated filing fees by the banksters.

Anatomy of Mortgage Fraud: MERS’s Smoking Gun, Part I

L. Randall Wray, The Huffingtom Post

December 9, 2010 06:04 PM

I think we have finally found the smoking gun. An interested reader alerted me to MERS’s instruction manual, “MERS Recommended Foreclosure Procedures — State by State”, originally written in 1999, updated in 2002 and available on MERS’s website (accessed by clicking on: Recommended Foreclosure Procedures).

The first thing to note is the date. Folks, this strategy was formulated in 1999. The second thing to note is these documents demonstrate that failure to properly endorse the notes and transfer them to the REMIC trustee was not an occasional mistake, but rather was MERS’s business model. As we will see, MERS planned from the get-go to defraud the counties, and the IRS, and the homeowners, and the buyers of the mortgage-backed securities.
…
The foreclosure manual establishes three key points that we have long suspected:

  1. Mortgage notes were not typically transferred to the trusts, as required by law. Further, there is no clear “chain of title” for these notes–which are actually presented for endorsement only on foreclosure (if then).
  2. MERS recommended that mortgage servicers retain the notes.
  3. MERS “deputized” employees of the servicers, pretending that these became MERS employees. This allowed the fiction that MERS had the notes so that it could foreclose.

…
In the document, MERS claims that its recommended procedures are “customary”. In fact, there are several hundred years of “custom” that requires endorsement of notes at the time of transfer, with a clear chain of title to ensure that anyone who claims to be a creditor, and who tries to seize someone’s home, has clear documentary proof of entitlement. What MERS proposes in this document is to break the chain of title, to eliminate the protection that debtors need to prevent mortgage servicers and MERS from illegally stealing their property through the use of robo-signers and the manufacture of fake documents. In other words, both law and custom were formulated to prevent the sort of foreclosure fraud that has become normal business practice — what the MERS document calls “customary”.

(I)f the servicers hold the notes, why on earth can’t they find them–why do they need to file “lost note affidavits”? In a word, fraud. If they now produce the notes, it will be clear that they were not properly endorsed each time the mortgages were transferred. And they were never held by the REMIC trusts. As I will explain, that means mortgage backed securities are fraudulent and the banks are on the hook for hundreds of billions of dollars. And that the banks holding the mortgages cannot legally foreclose. That is why they are destroying the documents, and hiring robo-signers to forge new ones.

Smoking Gun?  More like a Smoking Cannon.  Every one of the Too Big To Fail Banks is insolvent.

Dec 10 2010

Prime Time

Shrek the Halls and Disney Prep & Landing.  Barbara Walters.  Mostly premiers except for Great Performances’ Peter and the Wolf which is the only thing on broadcast I’d waste my eyeballs on.

If you haven’t stopped watching Lawrence O’Donnell you should stop watching him now.  Oh and I might mention the myth Obama wanted the Mythbusters to revisit was Archimedes’ Ship Burning Mirror Shields.

It failed.  Again.

Busted.

We gotta run. We’ve got a schedule to keep.

Yeah. See, we plan ahead, that way we don’t do anything right now. Earl explained it to me.

Later-

Dave hosts O’lielly and Phosphorescent.  Jon has James Franco, Stephen Julie Taymor.  Conan hosts Sarah Silverman, Michio Kaku, and She & Him.

Broke into the wrong God damn rec room, didn’t ya you bastard!

Zap2it TV Listings, Yahoo TV Listings

Dec 10 2010

Evening Edition

Evening Edition is an Open Thread

From Yahoo News Top Stories

1 Putin leads backlash over WikiLeaks boss detention

by Maria Antonova, AFP

42 mins ago

MOSCOW (AFP) – Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin Thursday led growing support from some world leaders for the beleaguered WikiLeaks founder, describing his detention in Britain as “undemocratic”.

The wave of support for Julian Assange, currently in a British jail as Sweden seeks his extradition on rape charges, came as hackers — dubbed “hack-tivists” — stepped up cyber attacks on those opposed to WikiLeaks.

But after taking down the websites of Visa, Mastercard and others, supporters of the whistleblower website tried but failed to knock online retail giant Amazon.com offline.

Dec 09 2010

“Let historians not record”

November 3, 1969–

I believe that one of the reasons for the deep division about Vietnam is that many Americans have lost confidence in what their Government has told them about our policy. The American people cannot and should not be asked to support a policy which involves the overriding issues of war and peace unless they know the truth about that policy.

…

Let historians not record that when America was the most powerful nation in the world we passed on the other side of the road and allowed the last hopes for peace and freedom of millions of people to be suffocated by the forces of totalitarianism.

And so tonight-to you, the great silent majority of my fellow Americans-I ask for your support.

So what does the “silent majority” want today?

The New Silent Majority

Richard (RJ) Eskow, The Huffington Post

December 9, 2010 03:50 AM

Only 4% of people polled by CBS News after November’s election thought that Congress should focus on deficits, and only 2% thought Washington should make taxes its highest priority. … Politicians and the media obsessed over them and ignored the topic that 56% of the public considered its highest priority: jobs and the economy.

…

Now it’s on everybody’s lips – conveniently enough, just as it could be applied to extending tax cuts for the wealthy. That part of yesterday’s deal was opposed by 64% of the American public.

Is it any surprise that over 70% of those polled by CBS were either “dissatisfied” or “angry” with the way Washington works?

…

When asked how we should cut the deficit, the public would rather raise taxes on the wealthy than cut Social Security – by more than two to one.

That includes 71% of independents, 77% of Republicans–and 76% of Tea Party supporters. That’s the populist face of the New Silent Majority.

…

What else does the “new silent majority” stand for, besides jobs, protecting Social Security, and taxes for the rich?

  • 72% want the government to crack down on Wall Street more than it has.
  • 81% want the government to do more to reduce poverty.
  • Eight out of ten oppose cutting Medicare.

Despite the widespread support for these views by members of both parties (bipartisanship at last!), the political and media landscapes are dominated by journalists and politicians who keep telling us these positions are “extremist” and politically unrealistic.

…

Historians will marvel someday at our current president’s iron-willed refusal to fight for policies that are both widely popular and broadly considered by experts to be the best solutions: stimulus spending to achieve jobs and growth, more regulation to reign in reckless and greedy banking, and ironclad protections for core social benefit plans. They’ll wonder why deficits were given higher priority than the bleeding wounds of a jobless economy, while the deficit-busting costs of military spending and an overly privatized health care system were considered off-limits.

…

And yet President Obama doesn’t just fail to fight for the New Silent Majority and its positions. He gets visibly angry when he’s asked about about it. The president known for keeping his cool loses it whenever the subject comes up. Why?

Part of the answer may lie in this line in an article by Matt Bai (this leads to a bad link, the one Eskow intended is here): “Privately, Mr. Obama has described himself, at times, as essentially a Blue Dog Democrat.”

Unfortunately for Mr. Obama, his administration, and Democrats, ‘The New Silent Majority’ doesn’t like ‘Blue Dog’ policies, only the Versailles Village Idiots do.

As was amply proven in November when 50% of the ‘Blue Dogs’ lost their jobs.

And as will be proven again in 2012.

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