The Big Fake

We now know who Obama's real constituency is, and it isn't the American people. The fact the NY Attorney General is trying to go after the crooks and Obama is trying to prevent it should tell all.

These banksters need prison time and their assets seized, NOT be part of a "settlement."

News, Etc.

Of course companies are going to drop health care coverage for their employees once the "reform"
takes effect.

Let's be cynical and say this was the intent of the legislation in the first place, and that is to simply give corporations a way out of paying health care benefits at all.

Just as companies took advantage of loopholes in ERISA to gut pensions and force employees on worthless defined contribution plans like 401(k)s.
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If this deal about foreclosures isn't proof Barack Obama is a corrupt son of a bitch, I don't know what is:

The idea behind this federally-guided “settlement” is to concentrate and centralize all the legal exposure accrued by this generation of grotesque banker corruption in one place, put one single price tag on it that everyone can live with, and then stuff the details into a titanium canister before shooting it into deep space.

This is all about protecting the banks from future enforcement actions on both the civil and criminal sides. The plan is to provide year-after-year, repeat-offending banks like Bank of America with cost certainty, so that they know exactly how much they’ll have to pay in fines (trust me, it will end up being a tiny fraction of what they made off the fraudulent practices) and will also get to know for sure that there are no more criminal investigations in the pipeline.

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Which is Worse?

Is it the deadbeat homeowner who defaulted on his or her obligations, or is it the bankster who made it all happen?

The answer is here.

News, Etc.

The foreclosure business is doing better than ever.
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Education "reformers" absolutely hate low income students, or else they wouldn't push to have shitty curriculum and unqualified or underqualified teachers in the classroom.

The goal, of course, is to limit higher education access, including high school.
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You don't need a Ph.D. in economics to know the whole point of the downturn is to drastically lower wages and thus opportunities for millions of people.

The downturn is a result of deliberate policy, thanks to our corrupt "representatives" in Washington in both parties.
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I thought I'd link this little "appreciation" piece of David Nelson. It sums up nicely his contribution to the success of The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet.

Something Drastic Needs to Be Done

regarding the housing/foreclosure crisis, but naturally Obama, being the neoliberal shill he is, doesn't plan to do anything constructive about it.

The problem of course is some years ago the banksters and their ilk began peddling the propaganda of buying houses as  "investments," instead of as  places to live, and therefore if one could buy at the "right time," the "owner" could sell it at some outrageously inflated price later on and thus pay for his or her retirement.  The trouble is it didn't take long for housing prices to become completely out of whack of what wages and salaries were.  It got to the point where even having two adults working fulltime would not pay the mortgage.

And why in the hell are people stuck with 30-year mortgages and in most cases never actually own their own houses?  In my parents' day, they saved until they could afford not just a down payment on a house, but they could be able to pay cash for a house outright.  We need to go back to those days where one average wage earner could save enough money to own a house free and clear.  Mobile homes don't count because most of the time one has to pay space rent.

Houses for $150,000 or more are way out of line for what jobs are paying for a single wage earner.  No house in the country, save for a tiny number of communities and those grotesque mansions or houses with significant acreage, should sell for more than $50,000 or $60,000 tops, including the lot.

I Think Paul Krugman

is slowly waking up to the fact Obama really doesn't give a shit about helping people and is more concerned for the banksters and others who are stealing the people blind.

We ain't seen anything yet when it comes to the foreclosure fraud.

Krugman:

True to form, the Obama administration’s response has been to oppose any action that might upset the banks, like a temporary moratorium on foreclosures while some of the issues are resolved. Instead, it is asking the banks, very nicely, to behave better and clean up their act. I mean, that’s worked so well in the past, right?

The response from the right is, however, even worse. Republicans in Congress are lying low, but conservative commentators like those at The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page have come out dismissing the lack of proper documents as a triviality. In effect, they’re saying that if a bank says it owns your house, we should just take its word. To me, this evokes the days when noblemen felt free to take whatever they wanted, knowing that peasants had no standing in the courts. But then, I suspect that some people regard those as the good old days.

News, Etc.

The Elko Daily Free Press, which endorsed John McCain for president two years ago, has decided to endorse Senator Harry Reid for re-election.

As if there were really a choice.

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Obama has probably signed his political death warrant by refusing to put a moratorium on foreclosures.

If there had ever been any doubt whose side he is really on, there shouldn't be now.
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News, Etc.

With "Democrats" like this administration who seem to be hellbent on propping up the banksters no matter what, it's little wonder the party in general is vulnerable in next month's elections.

While senior Congressional Democrats join the calls for a national moratorium on foreclosures, the White House once again is arguing against punishing the industry, just as it did in 2009 amid the outcry over the unbreakable habit of paying large bonuses.

“Irresponsible banks need to be held accountable, but if we have not found a problem with a bank’s process we do not believe that we should impose a moratorium where that can hurt the market and hurt individual buyers,” said Shaun Donovan, secretary of Housing and Urban Development.

This is nothing but putting off the inevitable.

It's certainly gratifying to note the administration wants to cover for the greatest swindle in world history:

Watch live streaming video from ceplive at livestream.com

link
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Sharron Angle decides to rewrite her positions on a variety of issues long after she has been exposed as a dipshit extremist. Not to mention she is completely untrustworthy.
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Obituaries: Champion racehorse Pleasant Tap, 23, was euthanized October 8 because of laminitis.
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The dog that wouldn't die:

News, Etc.

The shit is gonna hit the fan over this foreclosure mess.
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I am shocked, SHOCKED over the possibility NYC schools were gaming the system when it came to standardized tests.
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Yep.

Once this foreclosure mess is finally shaken out, it will be the biggest scandal not just of capital markets, but the biggest scandal ever to hit the United States and threatens to completely ruin the economy.

link

Meanwhile, the latest job report was just more bad news, with 95,000 more jobs shed last month and the "official" unemployment rate stuck at 9.6 percent.

News, Etc.

If somebody broke into my place and stole my paycheck, he or she would be doing jail time.  So should this charter school, which docked money this teacher had already EARNED through the year.  As one commenter said, it is "deferred compensation."  Teachers are typically paid year round while working ten months so as to be able to have steady income during the ten weeks they are off during the summer (or during track breaks).

You BET that school should have its ass sued.

Two days pay docked may be reasonable, but two months is outright theft.
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Daisy the dog has been finally freed from death row.

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Coincidentally, Congress passed without a peep a bill that would actually justify or condone the current megascandal of forged foreclosure documents.  Obama will "pocket veto" this two-page bill, since Congress will be going on yet another vacation, no doubt the reason representatives and senators couldn't be bothered to slog through a two-page piece of legislation.

This isn't the first time Congress has passed legislation they never bothered to read.
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Sharron Angle's pastor is working overtime to make sure she never gets elected to the United States Senate.
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Roger Ebert likes  Secretariat.  He informs us he has been a longtime friend of author and Secretariat's biographer Bill Nack for many years.
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The Giant Foreclosure Scandal

is explained in plain English in this article from Alternet.

A snip:

Banks intentionally skimped on their mortgage paperwork during the housing bubble—it cut their costs and made the sale of mortgage-backed securities more profitable. A basic, standardized part of the mortgage process at many banks included forging or destroying key documents, or never bothering to write them up in the first place. Those reckless procedures have been applied to millions of mortgages issued over the past decade, and allowed inflated bonus checks to be written for years. But things are about to get very ugly for the banks.

Mortgage documentation has been so shoddy that banks can’t actually prove that they own the mortgages they want to foreclose on. This isn’t a small scandal, it isn’t a minor clerical issue, and it isn’t a problem that banks deserve help from taxpayers to solve. Wall Street has simply not performed the basic tasks necessary to track ownership of its assets. Imagine a car manufacturer being unable to document the sale of automobiles. The basic business has broken.
 

As the writer says, these people who perpetrated this theft, this fraud, should be going to prison.  It's that serious.

There is an Interesting Statistic

which says 1 house in 80 in Nevada is currently in foreclosure. The state has the highest foreclosure rate in the country while California has the highest number of foreclosures.

Misc

I can't believe the whole thing:

Willoughby said she thought they would be able to return for the animals, and that she had arranged with a neighbor to bring them food and water.

But Willoughby departed in January, over nine months ago, and Willoughby's dogs have been the subject of much discussion. 17-year-old neighbor Brittany Henson said some of the dogs have died from neglect.

"There used to be 10 ... in there, and there's like three or four now. There were puppies that me and my boyfriend tried to rescue, but they ended up dying," said Henson.

Another neighbor said that there were multiple plastic bags on the property with dead dogs in them, but Willoughby said she hadn't heard about anything like that. She said she had asked a neighbor to check on the dogs just an hour ago, and had been told that there were no dead dogs currently on the property, and that the dogs were fine had food and water.

Willoughby did admit some animals have died, however.

This woman should have called an animal rescue group at the very beginning. ALL of the dogs would have survived and lived in good homes.

This just pisses me off.
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Actress Kim Novak and her husband resolved a two-year problem after failing in getting federal permits to place large rocks along the Rogue River to help ease erosion.
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Bigotry about body size (sizeism or fatism) is fashionable in this country; some people think they are so goddamned superior.

Most of it is directed at women, of course, who aren't valued for anything other than their bodies.

This spells it out, I think:

Fatness has always been seen as a slight on the American character. Ours is a nation that values hard work and discipline, and it's hard for us to accept that weight could be not just a struggle of will, even when the bulk of the research—and often our own personal experience—shows that the factors leading to weight gain are much more than just simple gluttony. "There's this general perception that weight can be controlled if you have enough willpower, that it's just about calories in and calories out," says Dr. Glen Gaesser, professor of exercise and wellness at Arizona State University and author of BigFat Lies: The Truth About Your Weight and Your Health, and that perception leads the nonfat to believe that the overweight are not just unhealthy, but weak and lazy. Even though research suggests that there is a genetic propensity for obesity, and even though some obese people are technically healthier than their skinnier counterparts, the perception remains "[that] it's a failure to control ourselves. It violates everything we have learned about self control from a very young age," says Gaesser.

In a country that still prides itself on its Puritanical ideals, the fat self is the "bad self," the epitome of greed, gluttony, and sloth. "There's a widespread belief that fat is controllable," says Linda Bacon, author of Health at Every Size: The Surprising Truth About Your Weight. "So then it's unlike a disability where you can have compassion; now you can blame the individual and attribute all kinds of mean qualities to them. Then consider the thinner people that are always watching what they eat carefully—fat people are symbols of what they can become if they weren't so virtuous."

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Surprise, Surprise

Nevada has the highest foreclosure rate in the United States, with one in 68 homes in foreclosure.

Obama

wants to help alleviate the foreclosure crisis, but is it enough?

All of these things he's trying to do are well meaning, but there needs to be a halt to the upward distribution of wealth which is destroying everybody underneath, and a complete reversal of tax policy heavily benefiting the rich. As I said, tax rates need to go back to 1950s levels, combined with strict regulations and penalties on companies which outsource jobs and universal health care, and the economic problems would reverse very quickly.

It's political will that is the problem. We have all of these legislators who are on the take from the same financial and corporate interests, and they are afraid of losing contributions if they do the right thing.

Obama's Next Move

Now that he has signed the stimulus package, Obama is now looking to fix the foreclosure crisis, a crisis which helped precipitate the current economic mess.

The Foreclosure Crisis

No longer is the crisis limited to just the low-income who defaulted; ALL income levels are being affected.

It's hard to sympathize with those who have or had million dollar homes, but the mess is affecting as well.
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Another Culprit in the Mortgage Meltdown

It's called the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005, that filthy piece of legislation that was designed to be a handout to credit card companies by forcing more middle income households into Chapter 13s instead of Chapter 7s. With Chapter 7s, getting rid of credit card debt by having it discharged in court freed up money to pay mortgages, but with the new law, households could no longer do that. This caused more foreclosures.

Miscellaneous News from All Over

The White House continues to smear Joseph Wilson.
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When you act as your own attorney, don't expect judges to rule in your favor.
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A Sparks, Nevada, couple with 12 kids, 11 of whom are adopted, have received donations after word got out their home was about to be foreclosed. One of the donors is well-known painter Sean Scully.
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The Obama supporters' campaign against Larry Sinclair is in full force as his current website has been shut down.

More details are here.

And there's this:

This is my last post. Host Monster, the server where I had moved the blog www.larrysinclair0926.com to has deleted the site from their servers and will not host my web site any longer. Host Monster explained to me that they will cooperate with me and Mr. Sibley and provide Mr. Sibley with all information on those who visited the site and all attempts made to access the files and controls on the site. I am faxing the release authorization as I type this. Host Monster states that they do not wish to continue to Host my site as they have spent more time on complaints in the short period of time I was on that server than they have in the time they have been in business.

Host Monster stated it is not worth the harassment and resources expended.

Ladies and Gentlemen, welcome to the “Barack Obama’s US of A”

I will end this post with a thought, if what I have said is untrue, then why is it that every blog and web site I have had has been attacked and the servers pressured into shutting them down? Why has so much time, effort and money been put into threatening, attacking me and my family? Why is it that Barack Obama does not have the guts to say I am lying?

He just said on the Roger Fredinburg show he is getting a new server and expects to be back up in about a week.
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There's one more Republican we need to throw out of the Senate.

Coburn's been nicknamed "Dr. No."
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So why has there been a recent wave of triathlete deaths?
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It's no surprise there were violations in hiring in the Justice Department.
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It's very sad news for columnist Bob Novak, 77. He has been diagnosed with a brain tumor.