Tag: ek Politics

So, just a single week after a sound electoral thumping because they pissed off their base (CBS Exit Polling, Independents, Unions, and Gays- More Exit Polls), the Very Serious Leaders of the Democratic Party shot themselves in the foot again yesterday, not once, not twice, but three times!

Genius.  I’ll start with the Korean Free Trade Agreement since that’s the one you’ve probably heard least about-

Korea Free Trade, Here We Come

By: Jane Hamsher Wednesday November 10, 2010 9:46 pm

According to pollsters, opposing NAFTA-style trade agreements and defending Social Security were the two strongest issues Democrats had in 2010. There were 220 television ads run by Democrats in competitive races in 2010 opposing the outsourcing of jobs and “free trade” agreements…

…

The trade deal is seen as a sop to Korea so the US can maintain a military presence in the region. … (O)nce again, more middle class jobs would be sacrificed for the sake of militarism and interventionism.

It would be a truly horrific blow to whatever is left of American manufacturing at a time when unemployment is rampant.  But from a political standpoint, fighting for another so-called “free trade” agreement right now has got to represent some kind of death wish for the Democratic party.  I don’t have any other way to explain it.

Then there is Obama’s cave on Tax Cuts for the Rich-

David Axelrod’s Quaint Idea of Middle Class "Security"

By: emptywheel Wednesday November 10, 2010 11:52 pm

Axe is defining “security for the middle class” as tax cuts. Not “jobs.” Not “access to health care, not just insurance.” Not “a guarantee a bankster can’t just foreclose on their house with a trumped up piece of paper.” Not “some basic safety net for retirement.” But “tax cuts.”

According to Axe, we have to shovel even more money on the already rich so as to ensure the “security” of the middle class by giving them a tax cut.

And while I agree that raising middle class tax cuts at this point would be bad for the economy, it’s not the worst thing that could happen to the economy.

In fact, the worst thing that could happen to this economy may well be passing legislation that continues to hollow out of the middle class and with it increasing the massive income inequality that continues to subject the American people to the craven demands of a few very rich people. That is, precisely what Axe and Obama have now agreed to do.

These men either don’t know or don’t give a damn about the security of the middle class.

And then there is Obama’s Cat Food Commission recommending drastic cuts to Social Security WHILE ALSO Cutting Taxes for the Rich and Corporations-

Cutting Social Security Would Prove Disastrous for Democrats at Polls

By: Jon Walker Wednesday November 10, 2010 6:56 pm

In this last election, Democrats performed terribly with senior citizen voters. National House exit polling shows only 38 percent of those over 65 voted for Democrats while 59 percent votes for Republicans. This is the worst showing for Democrats among seniors in decades and a big part of why Dems lost so many House seats.

…

The Republicans absolutely hammered Democrats with what the GOP labeled as a $500 billion cut in Medicare as part of the new health care law. The fairly misleading message clearly resonated with seniors who really don’t want their entitlements cut.

…

Cutting Social Security will be dramatically worse for Democrats

With that in mind, a Democratic plan to cut Social Security would likely be even more politically destructive to Democrats among senior citizens. Unlike with Medicare, there is no real waste or overpayments to private insurance companies in Social Security to trim. Any cost saving reforms to Social Security must actually be straight-up cuts in benefits.

…

Social Security is called the third rail of politics for a reason. If Obama touches it, he will destroy the Democratic party in 2012.

After looking at the senior vote in 2010, one can only conclude that any attempt by President Obama or Democrats to reduce Social Security benefits would be a political disaster. Polling indicates that a majority of Americans strong oppose (.pdf) raising the retirement age, and I can only assume the idea is even less popular among those about to retire.

Democrats attempted to simply reduce waste in Medicare as part of health care reform, and it caused voters over 65 to reject them en masse because it was framed by Republicans as a cut in Medicare benefits. If Democrats promote actually cutting people’s Social Security benefits, I have every reason to believe their losses among seniors citizens in 2012 will make their historically poor performance in 2010 look small in comparison.

What I will point out about these arguments is that they’re NOT based on some namby pamby kumbayah theory of Social Justice and Compassion-

They are based on hard nosed realpolitik facts about how to win elections.

Anyone who claims to care about “electoral victory” is a LIAR!

And anyone still buying into the “11 Dimensional Chess” Theory of Barack Hussein Obama and his Administration is a member of a cult of personality–

The Obama Movement

Posted on November 10, 2010 by myiq2xu, The Confluence

Remember those stories about the “Cult of Obama?” They started because of something called “Camp Obama.”

…

A summer camp for young adults where they sat around campfires sipping Kool-aid and chanting “Fired up! Ready to go!” and “O-bama! O-bama! O-bama!”

Okay, there were no campfires because the “camps” were held in office buildings and auditoriums, but the principle is the same. Read up on Camp Obama and you might notice a dearth of policy discussions.

It was all about the O

That “telling stories” stuff? The Christian fundamentalists call it “witnessing.”

…

Obama gets $99 million dollars in 2007 from Wall Street, health insurance executives and oil companies. He uses that money to organize Cult Camp Obama. He wins in the red states and caucus states but loses almost all of the big states and swing states.

…

Then once he’s in office he immediately starts dismantling the very organizations that helped him get there. and co-opts or “vertically integrates” all the left-wing activist groups within the Democratic party.

He even arranges for the Democratic party headquarters to be relocated to Chicago.

It sounds to me like he knew his followers were gonna be really disappointed and he didn’t want to leave them anywhere else to go. I guess it never occurred to him they might just stay home.

(h/t lambert @ Corrente)

This is primarily a political post about why this is bad politics.  I’ll explain why it’s bad policy later.

Now some of you may think I watch waaaaay too much TV and you’re absolutely right.  Since the 60s I’ve always had my choice of at least 2 of every network including PBS and a handful of independents.  My TV is constantly on, even when I’m napping, and I’m sure I absorb it osmotically (yes I do know that means movement of a solvent through a semi-permeable membrane and I deliberately chose it instead of ‘subliminally’ which is not only less felicitous but also hypnotic hocus pocus and not what I mean at all).

Now that we have vocabulary covered and a proper understanding of how marinated in media I am, I’d like to draw your attention to Greenwald on O’Donnell discussing the Democratic Party that you might have missed but through the miracle of the tubz you can experience at your leisure and convenience.

If Larry is a Socialist, I’m the freaking King of Siam.

The perniciousness of Blue Dogs

By Glenn Greenwald, Salon.com

Wednesday, Nov 10, 2010 07:11 ET

I thought the West Wing clip at the end was simply masturbatory self indulgence.  You’re no Socialist Larry, you’re just another delusional Versailles Villager pretending to be a ‘Real American’ like Marie Antoinette pretended to be a milk maid on her play farm.

For context, the setup.

Am I becoming a Video Blogger?  No.  Frankly it’s a pain in the ass, much harder than real words.

Matt Bai is a Moron

By 2006 I’d been blogging for about a year and while I did not attend the initial Netroots Nation I well remember the sensation caused by Mark Warner’s Chocolate Fountain.  Indeed, it inspired me to write what I consider one of my very best (and least noticed) pieces ever- My Las Vegas Convention- A Happy Story.

At 6:06 the doors opened on this ballroom that occupied the entire floor.  The view was spectacular, all up and down the Strip.  There were 2 Champagne Fountains and 2 Chocolate Dippers.  There were buffet tables and carving stations.  THERE WAS AN OPEN BAR!  Four of them, it’s a fun club.

So basically there were 20 people there.  And me.  And my sweetheart.  All sweaty and flushed and tired, our credentials flopping around our necks.

Remember the scene in the Wizard of Oz where Dorothy and company go down the hall?  It was kind of like that, only bigger and longer.  At the end of (no kidding) about a quarter of a mile was the DJ.  We wandered up and said hi and he said- “So is there anything you want to hear?”  I let her pick the song.  It was slow and sappy and we grabbed each other and spun around, alone on acres of dance floor, on top of the world.

The operative part is “2 Champagne Fountains and 2 Chocolate Dippers”.

The moral of that piece I’ll leave you to judge, but you’ll understand I’m not easily impressed.

Mark Warner’s Chocolate Fountain Remorse

By: emptywheel Tuesday November 9, 2010 5:36 am

Once upon a time in 2006, a dirty fucking hippie blogger had an opportunity to ask aspiring presidential candidate Mark Warner a few questions. Mark Warner had just dedicated part of a speech to talking about how Iran was the biggest WMD threat. So with her questions, the dirty fucking hippie blogger asked Mark Warner how, if the NIE had said Iran was years away from having nukes whereas Pakistan and its al Qaeda favoring Generals and unstable government already had nukes, Iran could be the biggest WMD threat. Warner then listed three reasons why Iran was the biggest WMD threat: its support of Hezbollah and Hamas, its nutty president, and its aspirations for hegemony in the Middle East. “But none of those things are WMD,” the blogger said.

Matt Bai, who observed the entire exchange, would later blame the dirty fucking hippie’s questions (which, after all, proved correct on several counts and served mostly to highlight to Warner how blindly he had embraced a popular talking point) for single-handedly driving nice moderate Mark Warner from the presidential race and with him potentially the ability to succeed as a party.

The dirty fucking hippie blogger took from that exchange the following: 1) Mark Warner doesn’t have the analytic ability to understand what threatens this country 2) Matt Bai tends to spout stupid centrist ideology even when reality proves him wrong.

…

Now, Mark Warner and his friends that maintain the deficit as a bigger threat than a stagnant economy are precisely what we dirty fucking hippie bloggers point to as the problem with the last two years. Because these centrists put their own pet theories ahead of real analysis of what our country needed, the legislation they passed failed to do the job. It’s the economy, stupid, and the economy is still so shitty at least partly because deficit scolds like Mark Warner cut the already too-small stimulus package back when it could do some good.

Which is what Matt Bai fails to understand with his piece trying to refute the theory that Democrats failed because they catered to people like Mark Warner.

…

What Bai and Warner choose not to understand is that centrism is an ideology even more stubborn than the left or right they love to attack, but an ideology that got us into the mess we’re in now, both fiscally and electorally.

Matt Bai thinks Ronald Wilson Reagan was the bestest President ever.

Background- Ireland is in some ways a model of the current state of the U.S. economy in miniature.  Same Real Estate bubble fueled by the same fraud, 3 big banks now all insolvent but bailed out.  Ireland eagerly embraced an austerity program early on.  How is that working out?

“Morgan Kelly is Professor of Economics at University College Dublin.”

If you thought the bank bailout was bad, wait until the mortgage defaults hit home

Morgan Kelly, The Irish Times

Monday, November 8, 2010

WHEN I wrote in The Irish Times last May showing how the bank guarantee would lead to national insolvency, I did not expect the financial collapse to be anywhere near as swift or as deep as has now occurred. During September, the Irish Republic quietly ceased to exist as an autonomous fiscal entity, and became a ward of the European Central Bank.

It is a testament to the cool and resolute handling of the crisis over the last six months by the Government and Central Bank that markets now put Irish sovereign debt in the same risk group as Ukraine and Pakistan, two notches above the junk level of Argentina, Greece and Venezuela.

…

With the €55 billion repaid, the possibility of resolving the bank crisis by sharing costs with the bondholders is now water under the bridge. Instead of the unpleasant showdown with the European Central Bank that a bank resolution would have entailed, everyone is a winner. Or everyone who matters, at least.

The German and French banks whose solvency is the overriding concern of the ECB get their money back. Senior Irish policymakers get to roll over and have their tummies tickled by their European overlords and be told what good sports they have been. And best of all, apart from some token departures of executives too old and rich to care less, the senior management of the banks that caused this crisis continue to enjoy their richly earned rewards. The only difficulty is that the Government’s open-ended commitment to cover the bank losses far exceeds the fiscal capacity of the Irish State.

…

This €70 billion bill for the banks dwarfs the €15 billion in spending cuts now agonised over, and reduces the necessary cuts in Government spending to an exercise in futility. What is the point of rearranging the spending deckchairs, when the iceberg of bank losses is going to sink us anyway?

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As a taxpayer, what does a bailout bill of €70 billion mean? It means that every cent of income tax that you pay for the next two to three years will go to repay Anglo’s losses, every cent for the following two years will go on AIB, and every cent for the next year and a half on the others. In other words, the Irish State is insolvent: its liabilities far exceed any realistic means of repaying them.

…

Banks have been relying on two dams to block the torrent of defaults – house prices and social stigma – but both have started to crumble alarmingly.

People are going to extraordinary lengths – not paying other bills and borrowing heavily from their parents – to meet mortgage repayments, both out of fear of losing their homes and to avoid the stigma of admitting that they are broke. In a society like ours, where a person’s moral worth is judged – by themselves as much as by others – by the car they drive and the house they own, the idea of admitting that you cannot afford your mortgage is unspeakably shameful.

That will change. The perception growing among borrowers is that while they played by the rules, the banks certainly did not, cynically persuading them into mortgages that they had no hope of affording. Facing a choice between obligations to the banks and to their families – mortgage or food – growing numbers are choosing the latter.

…

The gathering mortgage crisis puts Ireland on the cusp of a social conflict on the scale of the Land War, but with one crucial difference. Whereas the Land War faced tenant farmers against a relative handful of mostly foreign landlords, the looming Mortgage War will pit recent house buyers against the majority of families who feel they worked hard and made sacrifices to pay off their mortgages, or else decided not to buy during the bubble, and who think those with mortgages should be made to pay them off. Any relief to struggling mortgage-holders will come not out of bank profits – there is no longer any such thing – but from the pockets of other taxpayers.

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By next year Ireland will have run out of cash, and the terms of a formal bailout will have to be agreed. Our bill will be totted up and presented to us, along with terms for repayment. On these terms hangs our future as a nation. We can only hope that, in return for being such good sports about the whole bondholder business and repaying European banks whose idea of a sound investment was lending billions to Gleeson, Fitzpatrick and Fingleton, the Government can negotiate a low rate of interest.

…

Ireland faced a painful choice between imposing a resolution on banks that were too big to save or becoming insolvent, and, for whatever reason, chose the latter. Sovereign nations get to make policy choices, and we are no longer a sovereign nation in any meaningful sense of that term.

(h/t dday, Kevin Drum, and Tyler Cowen)

How’s that austerity thing working out for you? by ek hornbeck, 11/8/10

Standing For Nothing.

Look, if Democrats can’t repeal a policy more than two thirds of the American people, including a majority of conservatives want gone then they can’t expect people to vote for them. Preserving DADT is rank absurdity, even in 1993 the RAND study commissioned by the government showed that combat effectiveness would not be harmed by allowing openly gay servicemembers to serve, and the fact that DADT investigations are sometimes delayed when servicemembers are deployed undermines the notion that openly gay servicemembers harm the war effort.

The plain fact of the matter is that DADT undermines the military by forcing discharges of servicemembers with critical skills and walling off an entire section of the population from recruitment. The only remaining arguments for preserving DADT are premised on archaic cultural attitudes towards homosexuality, and Republicans’ insistence on undermining the military by preserving repeal is vanity, a projection of their own superficial prejudices onto the very servicemembers they claim to respect.

(h/t Atrios)

Because she fucks with the Villagers’ heads.

How Pelosi’s determination could hamper Obama

Dan Balz, The Washington Post

Saturday, November 6, 2010

The question is whether she has significantly complicated life for Obama as he prepares to deal with the Republican majority in the House and Senate Republicans led by someone who spent the week hurling thunderbolts at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. From outside reports, the White House was conflicted about whether it wanted her to stay or go, torn between loyalty to the speaker for all she did during the past two years and its own political needs in the wake of Tuesday’s loss.

Pelosi would be a symbol of resistance and liberal opposition to the Republicans. If Obama wants a House leader who will help draw bright lines of distinction with the new House majority, Pelosi could be exactly the right person to lead House Democrats. If he wants more room to maneuver, to make deals with Republicans as well as confront them, she might not be at all what he wants.

…

A Democrat with wide experience in the House agreed that Pelosi’s decision to stay on could cause problems for the president. “The problem for the party and the president is that Obama needs someone in Congress who can help him get things done and reposition himself,” this Democrat said. “She will be there to stoke up the left, and that’s what he doesn’t need.”

…

“A Pelosi-Clyburn team, with Steny Hoyer out, would mean a click to the left by a caucus already perceived as too liberal,” former Republican representative Vin Weber said. “I don’t think this president can triangulate against his base. If this is what happens, it will be the same as stimulus and health care. The progressive Democrats are doubling down once again.”

That is a huge risk for Obama, given what the voters seemed to be saying Tuesday. If the vote was not a clear embrace of the Republican agenda, it was at a minimum a call to check the Democrats’ impulses to keep enlarging government’s cost and reach. With Pelosi still at the helm in the House, voters may wonder what’s changed with the Democrats.

So yesterday I highlighted Black and Wray’s counter response to Bank of America and today Part 2 is available, but before I get to that I’d like to provide some context.

You’ll remember that PIMCO, Blackrock, Freddie Mac, and The Federal Reserve Bank of New York had requested that Bank of America repurchase some $47 Billion Mortgage Backed Securities that violated the performance and disclosure provisions of the contracts they were sold under.  You might also recognize these names as financial players every bit as big and powerful as Bank of America itself.

Well, yesterday BoA rejected that request.  As Atrios says- It’s On.

But you shouldn’t think that Bank of America is the only one with these problems.  Although it is the biggest, JPMorgan Chase & Co, Wells Fargo & Co, Citigroup Inc, US Bancorp and PNC Financial Services Group have $43 Billion or more in exposure to the same types of losses.

While some of Black and Wray’s Part 2 touches on that exposure, what it’s mostly about is the story of Bank of America’s purchase of Countrywide Financial.

An interesting factoid about BoA’s purchase of Countrywide (from the Jonathan Weil, Bloomberg article cited yesterday)-

Here’s how Bank of America allocated the purchase price for that deal. First, it determined that the fair value of the liabilities at Countrywide exceeded the mortgage lender’s assets by $200 million. Then it recorded $4.4 billion of goodwill, a ledger entry representing the difference between Countrywide’s net asset value and the purchase price.

That’s right. Countrywide’s goodwill supposedly was worth more than Countrywide itself. In other words, Bank of America paid $4.2 billion for the company, even though it thought the value there was less than zero.

Since completing that acquisition, Bank of America has dropped the Countrywide brand. The company’s home-loan division has reported $13.5 billion of pretax losses. Yet Bank of America still hasn’t written off any of its Countrywide goodwill.

What genius!  Surely these Masters of the Universe are worth every penny they’re paid, but, it being a free market capitalist system and all, I can’t help myself from pointing out that I personally am willing to lose $17.7 Billion for a much more reasonable rate of compensation.  Since they’re great believers in the efficiency of markets I expect an offer any time.

Let’s Set the Record Straight on Bank of America, Part 2: Eliminating Foreclosure Fraud

William K. Black and L. Randall Wray, The Huffington Post

Posted: November 5, 2010 01:23 PM

Bank of America did not purchase Countrywide for the good of the public. It purchased a notorious lender to feed the ego of their CEO, who wanted to run the biggest bank in America rather than the best bank in America. They certainly knew at the time of the purchase that is was buying an institution whose business model was based on fraud, and it had to have known that a substantial portion of Countrywide’s assets were toxic and fraudulent (since Bank of America’s own balance sheet contained similar assets and it could reasonably expect that Countrywide’s own standards were even worse). The response does not contest the depth of the bank’s insolvency problems should it be required to recognize its liability for losses caused by its frauds.

…

Bank of America’s response to our articles ignores its foreclosure fraud, which we detailed in our articles. News reports claim that the bank sent a 60 person “due diligence” team into Countrywide for at least four weeks. The Countrywide sales staff were notorious, having prompted multiple fraud investigations by the SEC and various State attorneys general. The SEC fraud complaint against Countrywide emphasized the games it played with the computer system. Countrywide had a terrible reputation for its nonprime lending. Nonprime loans were already collapsing at the time of the due diligence, the FBI had warned about the epidemic of mortgage fraud, and the lending profession’s anti-fraud firm had warned that liar’s loans were endemically fraudulent. Is it really possible that Bank of America’s due diligence team missed all of this and that the CEO thought even months later that the Countrywide lending personnel and Countrywide’s computer systems were exceptionally desirable assets?

…

As we explained, fraud begets fraud. Bank of America created over $4 billion in “goodwill” and placed it on its books as an asset when it paid money to acquire Countrywide at a time when it was deeply insolvent on a market value basis. Instead of acquiring an asset, they got thousands of fraudulent employees and officers, a failed computer system and catastrophic losses. So, we have a question for Bank of America, its auditors, and the SEC: why haven’t you written off that entire goodwill account?

And why aren’t people in jail or bankrupted by shareholder and bondholder lawsuits (yet)?

Obama’s Problem Simply Defined: It Was the Banks

James K. Galbraith, The Huffington Post

Posted: November 5, 2010 04:16 PM

(O)ne cannot defend the actions of Team Obama on taking office. Law, policy and politics all pointed in one direction: turn the systemically dangerous banks over to Sheila Bair and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. Insure the depositors, replace the management, fire the lobbyists, audit the books, prosecute the frauds, and restructure and downsize the institutions. The financial system would have been cleaned up. And the big bankers would have been beaten as a political force.

Team Obama did none of these things. Instead they announced “stress tests,” plainly designed so as to obscure the banks’ true condition. They pressured the Federal Accounting Standards Board to permit the banks to ignore the market value of their toxic assets. Management stayed in place. They prosecuted no one. The Fed cut the cost of funds to zero. The President justified all this by repeating, many times, that the goal of policy was “to get credit flowing again.”

…

With free funds, the banks could make money with no risk, by lending back to the Treasury. They could boom the stock market. They could make a mint on proprietary trading. Their losses on mortgages were concealed — until the fact came out that they’d so neglected basic mortgage paperwork, as to be unable to foreclose in many cases, without the help of forged documents and perjured affidavits.

But new loans? The big banks had given up on that. They no longer did real underwriting. And anyway, who could qualify? Businesses mostly had no investment plans. And homeowners were, to an increasing degree, upside-down on their mortgages and therefore unqualified to refinance.

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To counter calls for more action, Team Obama produced sunny forecasts. Their program was right-sized, because anyway unemployment would peak at 8 percent in 2009. So Larry Summers said. In making that forecast, the Obama White House took responsibility for the entire excess of joblessness above eight percent. They made it impossible to blame the ongoing disaster on George W. Bush. If this wasn’t rank incompetence, it was sabotage.

Remember “Recovery Summer(s)“?  Nothing has changed.  And until people go to jail for their fraud and the “To Big To Fail” Banks are placed into FDIC Receivership, their incompetent management tossed out on their asses, and broken up, nothing will.

Barack Hussein Obama and the Democratic Party have no one to blame but themselves.

As a follow up to yesterday’s CBS News Exit Polling

Greg Sargent–

(The Progressive Change Campaign Committee) set to release new polling from the respected Dem firm Public Policy Polling that is meant to buttress this case (“that indys who backed Obama in 2008 stayed home, because they were unsatisfied with Obama’s half-baked reform agenda, while McCain-supporting indys turned out in big numbers”). The Progressive Change Campaign Committee commissioned the poll and sent some results my way.

The key finding: PPP asked independents who did vote in 2010 who they had supported in 2008. The results: Fifty one percent of independents who voted this time supported McCain last time, versus only 42 percent who backed Obama last time. In 2008, Obama won indies by eight percent.

That means the complexion of indies who turned out this time is far different from last time around, argues Adam Green of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee. His case: Dem-leaning indys stayed home this time while GOP-leaning ones came out — proof, he insists, that the Dems’ primary problem is they failed to inspire indys who are inclined to support them.

“The dumbest thing Democrats could do right now is listen to those like Third Way who urge Democrats to repeat their mistake by caving to Republicans and corporations instead of fighting boldly for popular progressive reforms and reminding Americans why they were inspired in 2008,” Green says.

Note: Sargent doesn’t endorse this view, merely reports it.

Taylor Marsh quotes The Wall Street Journal–

Union households, a key Democratic voting bloc, turned out in force last night and accounted for a quarter of the vote in the battlegrounds of Pennsylvania and Ohio, exit poll showed.

The problem: They didn’t always vote for Democrats, despite six-figure ad campaigns and get-out-the-vote efforts by their unions encouraging them to do so.

In the Pennsylvania Senate contest, for example, exit polls showed that 44% of union household members who voted Tuesday picked Republican Pat Toomey, rather than Democratic Rep. Joe Sestak. Mr. Toomey narrowly won, 51% to 49%, according the latest numbers from the Associated Press.

What’s going on? Nearly half, 45%, of Pennsylvania’s union household voters said someone in their house had been laid off in the past two years. President Barack Obama carried this state by 10 points in 2008, and campaigned there repeatedly this fall. But on Tuesday, 36% of the state’s electorate said they voted to register their discontent with Mr. Obama.

Marsh’s conclusion?  “You think this is bad? Just wait until Pres. Obama cuts a deal on education.”

Finally John Aravosis cites this Yahoo News analysis–

Exit polling commissioned by the major cable news networks has found that 31 percent of people who identified as gay, lesbian or bisexual voted for Republicans on Election Day. That represents a big uptick from the 24 percent of gays who voted for the GOP in 2006 and from only 19 percent who did so in 2008. The trend appears to bear out pre-Election Day predictions from gay rights organizers that gay voters were angry and disenchanted with Democrats for not delivering on promises to the community.

…

After reviewing the full data, Sherrill says there was a disproportionate drop in Democratic support among LGB voters compared to Hispanic, black, and young voters. Though the sample size is still very small and thus there’s a large margin of error, Sherrill now says the drop may be attributed to “dissatisfaction with the pace of change on LGB rights over the past two years.”

Which John correctly identifies as validation for his initial data set–

The best comparison is from one mid-term election to the next mid-term election, since turn out is usually lower in the off years.  Gay voters went from 75% Democratic in the 2006 House races to 68% Democratic in 2010 – i.e., a 7 point drop in gay support for Democrats (and a 7 point increase in support for Republicans), which translates to a 9.3% change.  It was an even greater drop if you look at the percentage of the gay vote that went Democratic in the 2008 House races, 80%, as compared to 68% this year.  That’s a 12 point drop, which translates to a 15% decrease.

My conclusion?  Pissing off your base loses elections.  Duh.

Anyone who claims to care about “electoral victory” is a LIAR!

Update: Amanda Terkel

So a couple of weeks ago I highlighted 2 posts by Bill Black and Randall Wray on how Title Fraud, Securities Fraud, and Accounting Fraud (which they call Control Fraud) had the potential to force Bank of America into receivership and contending that was the proper course of action.

Bank of America has issued a response (also on The Huffington Post) and today Black and Wray published the first part of a 2 part counter-response.

I thought it might be of interest.

Let’s Set the Record Straight on Bank of America: Open the Books!

William K. Black and L. Randall Wray, The Huffington Post

Posted: November 4, 2010 06:06 PM

The demands by investors that Bank of America repurchase loans and securities sold under false “reps and warranties” may cause exceptional losses if those making the demands document the broader fraud by the lenders. The article “Bank of America Resists Rebuying Bad Loans” shows that Bank of America’s potential loss exposure to Fannie and Freddie is staggering: “[Bank of America] said it sold $1.2 trillion in loans to the government-controlled housing giants from 2004 to 2008 and has thus far received $18 billion in repurchase claims on those loans.”

…

As argued in a recent article by Jonathon Weil, the bank is nearing a “tipping point” as markets recognize it is “cooking the books,” vastly overstating the value of its assets as it refuses to recognize the true scale of losses on its purchase of Countrywide. Ironically, it still carries on its books $4.4 billion of fictional “goodwill” value created by overpaying for Countrywide (a notorious control fraud), as well as $142 billion of home equity loans that are worth far less. A more honest accounting of “good will” and of the value of home equity loans would take a big bite out of Bank of America’s market capitalization ($116 billion), which has lost 41 percent of its value since April 15. The markets are moving ever closer to shutting down the institution, but Moynihan is not “putting up with” the demand by investors for Bank of America to come clean on its fraudulent practices.

…

The bank’s response primarily criticizes its borrowers as deadbeats, yet the data it provides support points we have made in our prior posts, including Bill Black’s posts about the banks working with the Chamber of Commerce and Chairman Bernanke to extort the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) in order to destroy the integrity of the accounting rules requiring banks to recognize losses on their bad loans. We have explained why the fraudulent officers controlling many lenders followed a strategy of making bad loans at premium yields in order to maximize (fictional) accounting income and their bonuses. This dynamic drove the current crisis. These frauds hyper-inflated the housing bubble and caused trillions of dollars of losses.

My particular family is the Corleones, not as big and powerful as the Barzinis, but respected because we believe and practice the old ways.

Not that we don’t have our problems.  A while back we had 2 consecutive bad leaders.  The first one stopped running the business and played favorites so we threatened them with impeachment and they had the good grace to resign.

The second one ran the business but stole from it, which is not acceptable, so we had Tom Hagen explain to them just what would happen in prison.

After this we took a long hard look at our procedures for changing leadership and decided on some new ones.

The Don can be voted out at any meeting of the capos by a simple majority.  The reasoning behind that is if you’re so unpopular that people want to get rid of you, and you’re too stupid to realize that and make sure you have a majority at the meeting…

Well, then you’re just too stupid to be Don.

Consider this a parable.

(inspired by paradox @ The Left Coaster)