What's in your wallet?

The prospect of foreclosure is frightening enough to the many people who are having trouble making mortgage payments and who fear losing their homes. It's frightening enough without the prospect of strange men crashing through the back door in the middle of the night.

Even worse for some people here in The Sunshine State, folks who are simply a bit behind in payments but who are not in foreclosure have been treated to a surprise breaking and entering by representatives of one of those banks that love to advertise how they're on your side. Listen to the 911 call from one frightened woman and put yourself in her position and ask yourself what you would do if the man in black kicked in your door. I certainly know what I would do and what the law allows me to do to a possibly armed unannounced midnight caller. It would involve more than an angry letter to J.P. Morgan.

The hired thugs of our friendly banking industry have done worse than frightening people half to death in a way Pauly Walnuts could only envy. There are stories of home invasions at wrong addresses and one Jason Grodensky from nearby Ft. Lauderdale, Florida with the good fortune to have no mortgage at all had his house foreclosed on by Bank of America. What's in your wallet?

The publicity has been bad enough that major banks are curtailing foreclosure viking raids or freezing foreclosures entirely for the moment. Nancy Pelosi and some 30 Democrats in the house are calling for an investigation in their typically socialist way and Attorney General Eric Holder has announced he will be looking into it. Bloomberg News reports that some 7 states are investigating charges that false documents and signatures have been used to justify hundreds of thousands of possible fraudulent foreclosures and their attendant Viking raids against surprised and terrified homeowners.

So it's all going to be taken care of right? The Democrats are on the side of the people and against those huge, ugly hordes of corporate Visigoths and their paper battering rams, right? They control the Senate and the House and they'd never let the Republicans rubber stamp the right of Corporate Huns to lie, cheat and bypass every code of human decency since the Code of Hammurabi and the Proclamation of Telepinu -- right?

Don't be too sure, because a bill that may do just that now sits on President Obama's desk that somehow oozed through our lefty, anti-business, death-to-Capitalism Congress. Stalled in the Senate Judiciary Committee, Democratic Senator Robert Casey used some obscure procedure to take the bill away from the Senate Judiciary committee and the Senate then immediately passed it without debate and by unanimous consent. There was no one in the gallery to sing Whose side are you on.

Fox Nation - are you man enough?

Fox Nation -- do you have the stomach for it?

"It's Time to Say NO to Biased Media and Say YES to Fair Play and Free Speech."

is the curtain behind which they spew out biased interpretations as freely as Fox News ever did. Fox Nation is a month old "Conservative opinion" site that is by their own description " for those opposed to intolerance," and of course intolerance means that gagging sound one makes when trying to swallow the allegedly conservative outrages against the misrepresentations they perpetrate -- just like Fox News itself.

"Why aren't white males being considered for the Supreme Court?"

asks this fine publication today. Of course the court always has been and still remains mostly white male, but it's good for readership to get the skinheads and Aryan nation idiots in an uproar about their being persecuted. I really don't have the stomach for it, but I'm sure they're opposing intolerance here in some obscure fashion.

"attempts to monopolize opinion or suppress freedom of thought [and] expression,"

are what they oppose as long as those thoughts don't include any objection to pointing an M1 Garand military rifle at Barak Obama and Jesse Jackson.

Coincidence? Only their psychiatrist knows for sure. Of course I've been thoroughly excoriated on right wing sites for suggesting that "heads should roll" in the hate radio business and it was interpreted in fair and balanced fashion that I was calling for the murder and ritual decapitation of Rush Limbaugh, so I really don't feel any inhibition in asking whether this is a subliminal thing, meant to make the bigots giggle and their trigger fingers wiggle -- or pure accident. It could be that, certainly and I'm being fair and balanced about it.

Rights, religion and cockroaches

Even if you're not a criminal, you probably know that a good way to pull off a heist is to create a distraction. Plainly, when nature or circumstances provide one, the slight of hand artists, the flim-flammers and fast fingered scammers; the looters and pillagers come out of the woodwork like roaches -- and so do the Christianists.

No, it's not just the nutjobs with sandwich boards yelling about the end of the world, it's the politicians and preachers and the "crossover" models as they say in Detroit. Sure, the argument for the apocalypse seems better every day, but that's never enough satisfaction for God's own nihilists. They have to make sure we're all either under strict control, or lined up like ducks for the Jeezimator to come and blow us all away.

Take South Carolina State Senator Robert Ford. He is trying to get a bill banning profanity passed that would make it a felony to utter certain unspecified words and which would carry a five year maximum sentence. The push goes on and is probably advancing, to convince us all that the Constitution was really founded on the Bible so Christianity should be the State Religion and while we still haven't retrieved the civil rights the last Republican Administration took away, the State of North Dakota is trying to grant them to any fertilized human egg cell. That's right, "any organism with the genome of homo sapiens" according to the bill, is a person and a citizen. As far as I can tell, King Tut's mummy is an organism with a human genome, but he doesn't live in North Dakota where all that treasure would have to be given back to him.

"This is very simply defining when life begins, and giving that life some protections under our Constitution — the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness"

says the bill's sponsor, Rep. Dan Ruby. I wonder why swearing isn't my right, but I don't have to tell you he's a Republican and I shouldn't have to tell you he's a moron either, since the Constitution says no such thing, those words being the preamble to the Declaration of Independence.

I shouldn't have to tell you, unless you were educated in some remote jungle, that both the zygotes involved in fertilization were already alive and that in fact, human life exists in an unbroken line back to some microbe or proto-microbe that lived back before the Pre-Cambrian. I shouldn't have to tell you either, that the Bible; the same Bible these same folks tell you is the basis for our laws, contains no such prohibition but rather asserts that life begins with breath. Even the Biblical word n'shemah is deliberately mistranslated as "soul" by Christians which is really what the right-to-life scammers want to protect. It really means "breath."

It takes a certain kind of mind to look at this picture and see a "baby;" an organism capable of thought, action or even life outside of another human body that has more rights for instance than someone who is accused of being an "enemy combatant" by an unreliable source. It takes a certain kind of person to brag about our freedom while wanting to take it away for using the anglo-saxon word for feces. It takes a certain kind of person to read the angry denunciations of Christianity by James Madison and Tom Jefferson and call them devout fundamentalist Christians.

So when someone bumps you in a crowd, or there's a commotion in a busy street or when the economy is collapsing all around you, keep your eyes open, your hand on your wallet and maybe your finger on the trigger. Yes, they are out to get you.

It's not fraud when we do it

We've certainly seen and heard plenty of haughty harumphment aver the tax problems of Tim Geithner. We've had more of the "more of the same" from the same folks who gave us, or tried to give us Sarah Palin as a Joan of Arc reformer and an upholder of the kind of ethics Republicans like to talk about while trying to keep us from examining their own failings.

We're not seeing a hell of a lot about Sarah Palin's tax problems. It seems that it hadn't occurred to her that the additional "travel related" money she was being paid for staying at home in Wasilla ( since her home isn't in the capitol, Juneau) was taxable income. Of course we learned a long time ago that the State of Alaska has been paying for all kinds of family expenses like tickets to basketball games, and sled races, but these things are "private matters" according to her spokeswoman. That's because she's a Republican in a Red State. otherwise any personal detail would be a public matter and could and would be used against her by her party's scandal machine. I'm still waiting for the "Liberal Press" to make a fuss about it. I'm still waiting to hear why everything we do or say on the phone or in our mail: why everything we buy and everywhere we go is no longer a private matter as far as the Government is concerned.

Next time they tell me what a bad break Sarah got from the mean old media, I might just have to mention this, as well as to relate my litany of her other lies.

Of course Alaska is in for some hard times, since 90% of its revenue comes from soaking the oil companies, hard as that might be to explain to laissez faire lovers who supported her ant-Tax rhetoric. " living within our means and putting money aside for a rainier day" is something, like ethics, that Sarah likes to give lip service to while running up debt like a mainstream Republican.

But they're still talking about her as a Presidential Candidate, which is fine with me. Let her select Joe the Plumber as VP too and maybe the accountant she used to hide her expense account shenanigans for Secretary of the Treasury as well. The country's going to hell anyway and we might just as well get it over with. You betcha!

Morning quickie

So only days before the second Bush leaves town (not that he spends much of his time there) his father is already touting Jeb Bush as a presidential candidate.

Now let's see, we had Prescott Bush laundering money for Hitler and getting caught, We had Neil Bush involved in scandalous S&L shenanigans that cost us billions and getting off unscathed, we had George who made the dubious claim of being "out of the loop" during the Iran-Contra scandal, we had George the second who officially sealed the incriminating evidence and who is certainly a contestant for the worst American president (and I think we can include Central and South America in the contest) and perhaps we'll have another Bush, by and by.

Now how many gang members have to screw us before we can call it a gang bang?

Scott free

Anyone who has been hoping that the end of the Bush autocracy would entail the opening of Cheney's information crypt will probably be frustrated. It's possible that nothing prosecutable ever done by this administration will ever come to light. Although there is enough evidence of a vast smorgasbord of crimes, misdeeds and prosecutable acts above and beyond the deliberate instigation of a war by means of false information; although the unrestrained domestic spying continues, although the evidence is there that even foreign leaders like Tony Blair have had their bedrooms bugged, that domestic groups have been infiltrated, wiretapped and followed; even eye witness testimony may never be backed up by official records. Millions of White House e-mail records may disappear into the bit bucket forever.

One of the first actions of the Commander Guy was to dismantle the system for archiving electronic records and replace it with a system that never has worked. Apologists for Bush might argue otherwise, but this was just another act in the unprecedented assault on openness that has obsessively classified not only the records of executive misprision, but nearly every day to day thing that was previously held to be public record.

Some argue otherwise and cite the need to "move on" but just as the discrediting of Nixon was held up for decades by his pardon and the loss of crucial records, Bush may be able to stifle history and thwart accountability as thoroughly as the folks who recently tried to arrest Karl Rove were stifled. The resurrection of George W. Bush may take place long before his demise, his policies given a new coat of paint and unmerited dignity and launched against us again. The Party that once convinced us that criminals were regularly let go because of Liberal Judges will, in effect, get away with murder,will be set back on the street to loot and pillage -- and there's probably nothing we can do about it.

A criminal and the friend of criminals

While we're being entertained by the fabulous fictions of Sarah Palin, perhaps it's time to look at the lumps under the McCain carpet. They are big enough to trip over.

Sarah isn't old enough or aware enough to remember, ( or possibly not honest enough) but I am. It's time to bring up the Keating 5 scandal. It's time to see what part John S. McCain III took in screwing the American people out of 3.4 billion by covering up criminal activities and accepting money for his part in the fraud. It's time to recognize that he did it for money and power, that he has always played an important part in the look the other way deregulation that has resulted in the biggest financial debacle in my lifetime.

This is real, this is important, this is crucial. No he wasn't exonerated ane no he hasn't changed his politics. Instead he hires Bud "Swift Boat" Day as a slime source. He has his minions circulate e-mail hoaxes about al Qaeda paying for Obama's education, about his chief adviser being an Iranian, about his campaign being financed by the Chinese, the Pakistanis and other bogeymen dear to the imaginations of the bigots and idiots who support him. He persists in spreading through his proxies, the myth that Obama is a Muslim.

You can't argue an idiot into being smart, but we can and must make people remember the John McCain version 1.1 -- the version before the painted up cardboard McCain of today.

Watch this 13 minute mini-documentary: Keating Economics. Tell your friends not to vote for crooks and liars. Learn how John McCain is the problem, not the solution.

Going down slow

I have had my fun, if I never get well no more.
All my health is failin on me, oh yes, I'm goin down slow.

Please, write my mama, tell her the shape I'm in.
Please, write my old mother, tell her the shape I'm in.
Tell her to pray for me, forgive me for my sin.


-Howlin' Wolf-


Conservative financier though I may be, I'm always condemned as a Liberal by those whose ignorance, superstition and general malice has been packaged and sold as Conservatism. I'm also told that I'm cheering for America's defeat because I so often seem to be pointing to evidence that our current course will soon take us on the rocks. It wouldn't be at all surprising then if I were indeed gloating over the slow motion shipwreck that is sinking our financial institutions one by one, just as I've been predicting all these years, and for the very reasons I've given. I'm not, of course, gloating over all the suffering Republican preoccupations have been causing and will likely cause much more of. It would, I fear, take a disaster of gigantic proportions to wake them from their idiocies just enough to notice that we're not in prosperity any more. It's the rest of America that needs to know that we're taking on water faster than the pumps can handle and listing ever further to starboard. It's not Palin's daughter, it's not small town values, it's not Gay marriage, it's not selling oil leases off Florida - it's the economy, stupid. It's what the crooks and the gibbering Jeezmongers have done to the economy.

The credit crisis now has Lehman Brothers, AIG, and Merril Lynch following on the heels of Freddy Mac and Fanny Mae while the universe of public and private debt expands on a cosmic scale. It's the economy, stupid and if it can be fixed at all after 8 years of Bush's Animal House party weekends, it won't be fixed by people who brag that ""The issue of economics is something that I've really never understood as well as I should" and tell us he would rely on Greenspan while Greenspan is calling him a bungler. It won't be fixed by some corrupt small town mayor who doesn't actually know what Freddy Mac is or who owns it. and most of all it won't be fixed by candidates cramming freaky-fringe religious rubric down our throats and lying like unholy hell about what their positions were last week.

Flag pins won't save us, nor pledges nor patriotic songs, in fact the nitwit nationalism growing like a cancer in America is a part of the problem, but it's the economy and we are stupid, or preoccupied or afraid to admit just how deluded we have become since Reagan convinced all the idiots to vote Republican. They're still championing the same nonsense that blew the hole in our hull and they're still lying about what they said and did only months ago. The Republicans are still telling us it's all right, that the termite eaten structure of our economy is sound. To me it's a bit like telling the Titanic passengers that land is only three miles away -- straight down.

No, I'm not gloating, but if I'm dreaming that the earth will open up and swallow the people who perpetrated the sell-off of our birthright and our future, I think I can be forgiven.

What happened

What a revelation! Scott McClellan, the guy who used to stand in front of reporters and the minority of Americans not watching Britney and Anna Nicole and "da game" and spout lies, has now revealed that he told us a lie - unwittingly, of course. It wasn't his fault that he failed to check the facts. He wasn't paid to question; he was paid to sneer dismissively at reporters who did.

Scott has a book coming out in April, titled What Happened.

"So I stood at the White House briefing room podium in front of the glare of the klieg lights for the better part of two weeks and publicly exonerated two of the senior-most aides in the White House: Karl Rove and Scooter Libby. There was one problem. It was not true. "

And guess what Scott, you didn't win the Kyrgyzstan Lottery either and the guy trying to get his millions out of Nigeria isn't any more honest than your ex-boss - and of course there's been a lot of blood under the bridge because of the crime family you covered up for. I don't mean to be cruel, but it's your turn to be sneered at. I really hope you don't make any more money from it than OJ did from If I Did It and I hope you soon get to hear the current mouthpiece defame you with the same sneer and condescension as you used from the same podium you told your lies from.

Lost another one to Ditech!

"Neither a borrower, nor a lender be; For loan oft loses both itself and friend"

And sometimes your shirt. Remember weasel-faced founder and CEO of Ditech, J. Paul Reddam who back in the 90's urged us to borrow up to 125% of our home values to "jump on a hot stock?" That was of course, just before those hot internet stocks tanked. You'd think that would have been a lesson, but although Reddam bailed out of Ditech right before the illegal kickback indictments were handed down and any number of people began to question the wisdom of listening to him, borrowing seems to have become as fashionable as trucks and the folks who have been living by borrowing increasing amounts on their ever rising home values are beginning to feel a truck is parked on them. Foreclosures are booming in my area and retail sales are down.

Of course the credit crunch, the decline of earning power of the American worker and the other financial woes in the papers today are bringing back the crackpot attacks on capitalism itself. Barbara Ehrenreich at the Huffington Post has an amusing take on the current "revolution" by the working poor but she agrees that the credit crisis doesn't signal the end of capitalism any more than did the crash of 1929. What it does signal is the need for responsible regulation and the need to strangle people who insist that the market will take care of itself and everything else from hedge funds to the Mexican guy that rims your hedges. What it proves is that cheap credit is not a substitute for income - at least not in the long run and that we need to get rid of a government that favors corporate profits at the expense of wages, investment, safety, public health and national security.

Dead at last

I'm not always a fan of Christopher Hitchens although I'd never deny his intelligence, but he and I see eye to eye regarding the late Jerry Fallwell. Dead at last, good God almighty, dead at last.

I don't have the time and patience to expatiate on the offenses of the "reverend" Fallwell but it's something that needs to be done and done often, lest we forget that this Bible thumping bigot and hate monger thrived on our our reluctance to turn an honest and critical eye on anyone calling himself Reverend; our forbearance when it comes to perceiving and punishing the evil of religious leaders, annointed, ordained or self-appointed, be they Mullah or Pastor, Reverend or Rabbi, Priest or Pundit.

Hitchens' erudite excoriation of Fallwell and his profession on CNN's Anderson Cooper 360 expresses my sentiments admirably, if more politely than I would do. Perhaps you've seen it, but even so it's worth seeing again.

Cross posted at The Reaction

It's worse than that.

When I reported yesterday that Charges against Ann Coulter had been dropped despite the iron-clad case for voter fraud after a timely call from the FBI, I expected that the farce was at an end. Then came this report on Brad Blog exposing the nefarious activities of the Beast and her goon squad and the most infuriating revelation of all: that the FBI agent who bullied the Palm Beach County authorities into dropping the case was a former "boyfriend."

How long will it be before we realize that the Mafia is no more than a bunch of pickpockets when compared with the group that has taken over our country? This ultra-criminal group of families isn't just infiltrated into a few legitimate businesses, but is in fact the government. Coulter is a made woman in the supersyndicate and she will be protected until we have the courage to jail the lot of them.