Yankees @ Rangers.  Their aces aren’t going to pitch against each other unless the series goes deep and then the Rangers will be on short rest.  The Yankees will look to get an easy away victory tonight so they can close out at home.  I predict Yankees in 5 because their offense is clearly superior.  My offensive observation is I don’t think their pitchers are any better than the Phillies (with the exception of Rivera) and like all Junior League clubs they’re longball prima donnas who were never taught how to put to put together an inning with base hits and running nor stop one with their glove work.

Designated hitter my ass.

There are other things on TV but why would you want to watch them?

• AMC– Deep Blue Sea, Ghost Ship
• Disney– Suite Life, Wizards, Fish Hooks (premiers), Phineas and Ferb (Wizard of Oz)
• Discovery– Swamp Loggers (last week’s and new), Beyond Survival With Les Stroud (premier)
• ESPN– College Throwball, Cincinnati at Louisville
• ESPN2– Turn Left Racing, Dollar General 300
• Food– New Meat and Potatoes (get a wiki accout you lazy bastards)
• FX– Big Momma’s House, Big Momma’s House 2 (oh joy)
• Lifetime– Reba marathon
• National Geographic– Dog Whisperer (premier)
• Nick– Big Time Rush (premier)
• Oxygen– Miss Congeniality 2: Armed and Fabulous x 2
• Sci Fi– Season Premier of Sanctuary (actually fabulous!)
• Turner Classic– The Mummy, The Curse of the Mummy’s Tomb
• TLC– Say Yes to the Dress marathon (with premier)
• TNT– The Holiday, Two Weeks Notice
• TrueTV– Conspiracy Theory With Jesse Ventura marathon (with premier)
• USA– House marathon
• Toon– Sym-Bionic Titan, Generator Rex, Clone Wars (premiers)

Later-

• AMC– Virus
• Bravo– Real Housewives marathon
• Disney– Mostly Wizards, with a repeat of Phineas and Ferb
• FX– It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia ], [The League (yesterday’s premiers)
• Oxygen– Rumour Has It
• Sci Fi– The Event marathon (incuding Series Premier)
• Turner Classic– The Mummy’s Shroud The Mummy’s Shroud], [Blood From the Mummy’s Tomb
• TNT– Runaway Bride
• Toon– Childrens Hospital (this week’s), The Office (the good British one)

Dave has David Duchovny and Amy Sedaris.

Zap2it TV Listings, Yahoo TV Listings

Evening Edition is an Open Thread

1 Sarkozy sends in riot police to break fuel blockade

AFP

43 mins ago

Shadow Elite: The "Inside Job" That Toppled Iceland’s Economy

Robert Wade and Silla Sigurgeirsdóttir

Posted: October 14, 2010 07:12 AM

Iceland’s flex net operated on the edge of and partly in opposition to a traditional elite, a bloc of some 14 families known popularly as the Octopus, which dominated Icelandic capitalism from the start. In the early 70’s, some university students took over a journal called The Locomotive  to promote free-market ideas–and, not least, to open up career opportunities for themselves, rather than wait for Octopus patronage. The two future PM’s, Oddsson and Haarde, were members.

They were devoted to neoliberal policies, and privatized publicly-owned enterprises, to the benefit of their Locomotive cronies. In 1991 Oddsson began his reign–not too strong a word–as PM, explicitly invoking Reagan and Thatcher as models and drawing on the same ideas of “New Public Management,” which sanctioned large-scale outsourcing of government work to private actors. Then he set in motion the dramatic growth of Iceland’s financial sector, before installing himself as Central Bank Governor in 2005. Finance Minister Haarde took over as PM shortly after.

…

With near-exclusive access to information, power brokers can also brand it for the media and public to suit their own purposes, with only a few able to counter them. The Oddsson and later Haarde government proved masterful at this. They relied primarily on the banks’ research departments for economic analysis. Iceland’s National Economic Institute had built a reputation for independent thinking and, at times, published unwelcome reports, warning that the economy’s management was going haywire. Oddsson abolished it in 2002. Statistics Iceland, the public data agency, was notably cowed into suppressing unfavourable information. And the University of Iceland bowed to pressures to make its Economic and Social Research centres self-funding–that is, to rely on finding buyers for commissioned research–with the convenient result that they no longer published big-picture reports with a critical edge.

…

Even Parliament’s recommendation last week to indict Geir Haarde is a letdown for those demanding real accountability: the parliament voted to charge Haarde, but not three others facing similar charges. The former ministers who prescribed the policies of the bubble economy, i.e. David Oddsson and his then partner in a coalition government, face no charges whatsoever because of a 3 year statute of limitations. Meanwhile the current leadership is unable to avoid one thing: popular outrage – misleadingly directed at it rather than at the previous leaders responsible. The Guardian reported that politicians had to flee 2,000 angry protestors at the recent Parliament opening. Polls show that “trust in parliament” is running at about 10%. One can hope that those responsible for Iceland’s implosion will face more consequences than hurled eggs, but Geir Haarde, for one, is undaunted at the prospect of being the first world leader indicted for economic mismanagement. He told Bloomberg News two weeks ago that he will be “completely vindicated”, and called the charges “absurd.”

Well, the Islanders lost last night.  Go figure.  Broadcast- mostly premiers.  A good night to read a book.

• ABC Family– Liar Liar x 2
• AMC– The Mummy
• Bravo– Real Housewives marathon (2 premiers)
• Comedy– Futurama (Series Premier repeat), also Ugly Americans
• Disney– Wizards of Waverly Place The Movie (if you’re a big DeLouise family fan)
• Discovery– More Storm Chasers (with premier)
• ESPN– College Throwball, South Florida @ West Virginia
• ESPN2– Turn Left Racing, High School Throwball from Texas- Abilene @ Midland Lee
• Food– Alton gives a double dose of Oats (second one a premier), new Food Feuds
• FX– It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, The League (premiers)
• Lifetime– Project Runway (last week’s and new)
• Oxygen– Barbershop x 2
• TBS– Family Guy, American Dad block
• Turner Classic– Incendiary Blonde, Murder, He Says
• TLC– Sr. v. Jr. (last week’s Season Finale repeat)
• TNT– My Big Fat Greek Wedding
• Travel– Man v. Food marathon (thank goodness)
• Vs.– Lightning @ Flyers

Later-

• AMC– Mad Men (this week’s)
• Turner Classic– Murder, She Said (Miss Marple), The Band Wagon
• Toon– New Delocated

Dave hosts Wanda Sykes, Rick Fox, and Pete Yorn.  Jon has David Rakoff, Stephen Bill Bryson.  No Alton.

If you don’t shut those windows you’ll be fired.

In that case I shall require four weeks’ wages in lieu of notice.

Get out of my sight, woman!

With pleasure!

…

Cod’s as good as lobster any day, and much cheaper.

Well, that depends on whether or not one has a palate unsullied by cheap opiates.

If you mean what I think you mean, I’ll have you know this cheroot cost two shillings!

Yes. Quite.

Zap2it TV Listings, Yahoo TV Listings

Evening Edition is an Open Thread

1 French strike sparks street clashes, fuel warnings

by Roland Lloyd-Parry, AFP

37 mins ago

What digby said–

God, I hope this is just bullshit spin and not what he really thinks:

…

He’s going to need Christine O’Donnell to cast a spell on the Teabag Republicans because that’s the only way they are going to do anything remotely bipartisan. Even if he agreed to reduce millionaires’ tax to zero and barnstorm against gay marriage and abortion, they would not help him. They want to beat him, not govern.

If Obama goes too far in trying to appease these people, he’d better hope to hell the Republicans run the Palin/Paladino ticket because that will be his only hope for reelection.

I don’t think he’s a dumb person so I’m hopeful that this is pre-election spin designed for political purposes. I’m not sure what those are, but I simply can’t believe that he’s serious after what we’ve seen.

Latest Obama talking point: If we don’t appeal DADT & DOMA, Rs will kill health care reform and hate crimes law

Posted by John Aravosis (DC) at 10/13/2010 11:46:00 AM

There’s increased chatter, as the spies would say, from the Obama administration and from administration apologists about the notion that the President simply has to appeal our DADT & DOMA victories in court lest a future Republican president refuse to appeal legal challenges to Obama’s health care reform bill or the Hate Crimes bill.

The naiveté, or utter duplicity, of such an argument is breathtaking.

At its core, the argument comes down to this: A future Republican administration – let’s call it the Palin administration – is going to look to former President Obama for guidance when deciding how evil it wants to be.

That sort of logic encapsulates the problem we face as a community, and the broader problem Democrats face, with our less-than-fierce advocate. The President is either incredibly naive about Republican motivations, or he’s lying to us in order to get us to back down.

It’s tough to know which is motivating the President, as both theories have precedent. The President’s near fanatical desire for “bipartisanship at all costs” is by now legendary. He seriously seems to believe that by giving something to the GOP for nothing, the Republicans will at some future date return the favor. And, not surprising to anyone born before yesterday, they never do. But he keeps trying. He keeps scaling back his promises, keeps caving on key legislative provisions at the drop of a hat, keeps putting conservative Ds and Rs in charge of his major policy priorities, from health care reform to the budget deficit, and keeps ceding more and more power to his Secretary of Defense on DADT, as though Robert Gates were the boss of Barack Obama – all in the hopes that maybe, just maybe, one of these opponents will be nice to him since he was nice to them.

But it hasn’t worked out very well because life doesn’t work that way, at least not in Washington, DC. The Republicans are never “nice” to Democrats because Democrats ceded ground first. To a Republican, you didn’t give them a peace offering, you conveyed weakness. How many campaign promises does he have to self-sabotage before the President understands that the goody-two-shoes school of political diplomacy simply doesn’t work in this town?

The notion that President Sarah Palin is going to look to Barack Obama for guidance on what to do on health care reform is laughable. And the notion that any Republican is going to give a damn about Obama’s positions on gay rights when deciding whether to once again bash the gays is preposterous.

It’s beyond naive. It’s downright scary if this is truly what the Obama administration continues to believe: that the Republicans won’t use every opportunity at their disposal to undercut the Democratic agenda. And they do believe it, or they’re lying.

Either way: not very fierce.

If this is not enough to convince you, just where will you set the bar?

I have an early comment (about #5) I’ll quote (but I have no idea how to link given the terrible commenting system)-

ek hornbeck

So when, digby, exactly will you believe?  

He’s serious.

So the Rangers didn’t choke after all which puts me 3 of 4 on my brackets and should be a relief to my mom Emily who is a great Yankees fan because in my opinion the Rays matched up somewhat better against the Pinstriped Playoff Machine.

On the other hand, no Baseball tonight.  Starting Friday Junior League with the funny rules will be on TBS while real Baseball will wait until Saturday night and appear on Faux (sigh).

This is too bad since all you have is your usual broadcast premiers and-

• Bravo– New Top Chef
• Discovery– A night of Mythbusters premiers including crossover episodes with Storm Chasers (Season Premier)
• ESPN– College Throwball, Central Florida at Marshall
• Food– Repeat of this week’s Next
• FX– Baby Mama (again), Terriers (premier)
• History– Goes Medieval
• Lifetime– Swimfan x 2
• Oxygen– The Wedding Planner x 2
• Turner Classic– The General (shhh, Buster Keaton), Smiles of a Summer Night (a comedy about mate swapping from, believe it or not, Ingmar)
• Toon– Regular Show, MAD (this week’s repeats)
• Travel– Man v. Food marathon (thank goodness)
• USA– NCIS marathon
• Vs.– Islanders @ Caps (go Islanders!)

Later-

• AMC– Rubicon (this week’s), The Man in the Iron Mask (not terrible for a DiCaprio movie)
• Sci Fi– Friday the 13th: The Series
• Turner Classic– Something Wild (rape and nudity!), He Ran All the Way (Communist John Garfield’s last film, also Shelly Winters)
• USA– Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End

Dave hosts Hilary Swank, Mike & Mike.  Jon has Condoleezza Rice (ugh), Stephen Austan Goolsbee (ugh).  No Alton.

Boondocks– The Itis.

Cuttlefish. Eh? Let us not, dear friends, forget our dear friends the cuttlefish… flipping glorious little sausages. Pen them up together, and they will devour each other without a second thought… Human nature, in’it? Ooor… fish nature… So yes… we could hold up here, well-provisioned and well-armed, and half of us would be dead within the month! Which seems grim to me any way you slice it! Or… ahh… as my learned colleague so naively suggests, we can release Calypso, and we can pray that she will be merciful… I rather doubt it. Can we, in fact, pretend that she is anything other than a woman scorned, like which fury Hell hath no? We cannot. Res ipsa loquitur, tabula in naufragio, we are left with but one option. I agree with, and I cannot believe the words are coming out of me mouth… Captain Swann. We must fight.

Evening Edition is an Open Thread

1 Six US soldiers killed in Afghanistan

by Sardar Ahmad, AFP

46 mins ago

This WaPo article is a revealing look at how Barack Hussein Obama is willing to sell out key principles, campaign promises, and core constituencies for…

Underpants.

How politics spilled into policy

By Michael Leahy and Juliet Eilperin, The Washington Post

Wednesday, October 13, 2010

Behind closed doors with his Democratic Senate colleagues, a frustrated Nelson was making no secret of his unhappiness with the administration’s deal making. Drilling advocates were getting concessions, while the climate-change bill appeared to be going nowhere. What sort of bargain was that? At a meeting on the bill in March, Nelson challenged Lindsey Graham.

Whose votes are you bringing with you? Nelson demanded.

“Only me,” Graham replied.

Nelson pressed him: You’re selling the gulf and you’re only getting yourself?

Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), who liked the idea of his state receiving royalties from drilling, stood in defense of Graham. “It isn’t just Lindsey Graham who wants offshore drilling,” Warner said, according to Graham and others who were there. “I’m a coastal-state Democrat, and I support drilling.”

On the day before Obama’s March 31 drilling announcement, Interior officials began calling influential Democrats to give them advance notice. Salazar left phone messages for some of his old Senate friends.

“I took care of you, Bobby,” he said in a voice mail to Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.), an apparent reference to the plan’s protection of New Jersey’s coastal area.

But Menendez was still upset by Obama’s decision to open Mid-Atlantic zones to possible exploration. A spill off Virginia, for example, might spread north with potentially devastating consequences for New Jersey’s waters and tourism.

“You’ve lost a vote for climate change,” Menendez told Salazar in a return voice mail.

And Obama is still doing it and is doing it again today.

He has the trustworthiness of Richard Milhouse Nixon without any of the political acumen.

Atrios and some other people have been collecting a few links, the most recent of which are gratifyingly starting to realize the gravity of systemic Title Fraud to home owners everywhere.

Since almost everyone else does I’ll start off with the 5 part Rortybomb series-

• Foreclosure Fraud For Dummies, 1: The Chains and the Stakes
• Foreclosure Fraud For Dummies, 2: What is a Note, and Why is it So Important?
• Foreclosure Fraud For Dummies, 3: Why Are Servicers So Bad At Their Job?
• Foreclosure Fraud For Dummies, 4: How Could This Explode into a Systemic Crisis?
• Foreclosure Fraud For Dummies, 5: The Necessity of Government Action and Ways Out of The Crisis

This piece from Salon references some of the Rortybomb coverage (another piece by John Carney is frequently cited as a one piece introduction)-

Obama’s foreclosure nightmare

By Andrew Leonard, Salon.com, Tuesday, Oct 12, 2010 13:45 ET

But the key facts are these: In the process of making mortgage loans, transferring ownership of those loans,  slicing and dicing them into securities and, finally, initiating foreclosure proceedings on loans in default, banks, lenders and mortgage servicers engaged in illegal activity on a large scale. The legally mandated procedures put into place to ensure that no errors are ever made with respect to the transfer of property  simply weren’t followed. Key documents necessary to prove ownership — to prove that a bank, for example, has the legal right to begin foreclosure proceedings, cannot be located and may not even exist.

Whether you want to dismiss this debacle as a concatenation of paperwork errors made while seeking economies of scale, or out-and-out calculated fraud by the mortgage industry against homeowners, is in some ways an irrelevant game of semantics. When legally mandated procedures aren’t followed, courts get upset, investors start wondering if they’ve been sold a bill of goods, and the litigation floodgates fly open. Bank of America and GMAC and other lenders have declared their own foreclosure moratoriums because they have suddenly realized that they are looking at potentially devastating legal liabilities.

Progressives can be excused for feeling an almost unlimited sense of schadenfreude at the suddenly scrambling banks. For many people, on the left and right, there would be nothing more pleasurable than the sight of, say, Citigroup, bankrupted by a sea of mortgage-related lawsuits. It is also of course enormously important to take advantage of this opportunity to completely rethink the government’s approach to the foreclosure crisis, and find a way to keep people in their homes with mortgages that are more appropriate to their current financial wherewithal. By itself, however, a national foreclosure moratorium isn’t going achieve that — it will just postpone resolution of the problem, and in the process conceivably create some dangerous new risks.

And here’s where Obama’s problem lies. The foreclosure crisis isn’t just about banks playing fast and loose with people’s homes. The recklessness with which banks and mortgage servicers handled their business has thrown into question the entire architecture of securities assembled from mortgages. All that toxic waste just turned a Hungarian sludge shade of bright flashing orange. If and when the owners of those securities start their own legal actions or demand that the issuers of the securities take them back, the biggest financial institutions in the United States will once again teeter on the brink — and threaten to bring all the rest of us down with them. There are systemic risk implications to this “paperwork” lollapalooza.

…

My guess is that the White House economic brain trust is fully aware of how bad this could get, and that their caution on endorsing a national foreclosure moratorium is connected to the uncertainty as to what the systemic implications of bringing the entire mortgage industry to a screeching halt might be. That’s fine, but it’s not enough. If Wall Street is once again teetering on the brink, then the Obama administration has leverage — leverage to make a deal that keeps Americans in their homes, defuses the foreclosure pandemic and ensures that the interests of average citizens are protected, along with the integrity (such as it is) of the larger financial system. Any kind of solution that attempts to address the gaping legal hole at the heart of the foreclosure mess must be paired with relief for distressed homeowners. It’s that simple.

Here’s a CNBC piece you may have missed-

Foreclosure Fraud: It’s Worse Than You Think

By: Diana Olick, CNBC Real Estate Reporter, Published: Tuesday, 12 Oct 2010 | 1:14 PM ET

A source of mine pointed me to a recent conference call Citigroup had with investors/clients.  It featured Adam Levitin, a Georgetown University Law professor who specializes in, among many other financial regulatory issues, mortgage finance. Levitin says the documentation problems involved in the mortgage mess have the potential “to cloud title on not just foreclosed mortgages but on performing mortgages.”

And one from AP-

Robo-signers: Mortgage experience not necessary

Banks hired hair stylists, teens to process foreclosure documents, workers’ testimony shows

Michelle Conlin, AP Real Estate Writer, Tuesday October 12, 2010, 9:21 pm  

NEW YORK (AP) — In an effort to rush through thousands of home foreclosures since 2007, financial institutions and their mortgage servicing departments hired hair stylists, Walmart floor workers and people who had worked on assembly lines and installed them in “foreclosure expert” jobs with no formal training, a Florida lawyer says.

In depositions released Tuesday, many of those workers testified that they barely knew what a mortgage was. Some couldn’t define the word “affidavit.” Others didn’t know what a complaint was, or even what was meant by personal property. Most troubling, several said they knew they were lying when they signed the foreclosure affidavits and that they agreed with the defense lawyers’ accusations about document fraud.

…

Though some have chalked up the foreclosure debacle to an overblown case of paperwork bungling, the underlying legal issues are far more serious. Yes, swearing that you’ve reviewed documents you’ve never seen is a legal offense. But at the center of the foreclosure scandal looms something much larger: the question of who actually owns the loans and who has the right to foreclose upon them. The paperwork issues being raised by lawyers and attorneys generals have the potential to blight not just the titles of foreclosed properties but also those belonging to homeowners who have never missed a mortgage payment.