Incoming GOP congressional oversight chair says Obama admin 'one of most corrupt'

He probably thinks the President was born in Kenya too. Good thing we let Bush administration off the hook when the Obama administration moved in. It clearly is going to pay off. Read the rest of this post...

Matt Taibbi explains MERS, the virtual mortgage registry that every banker loves

Sometimes the obvious isn't clear. We've covered the theft of homes via "hanging judges" in mortgage courts before. At the heart of this confusion (or scam, depending on whether you're a victim or a beneficiary), lies MERS, the virtual mortgage registry that's replaced the handling of mortgage ownership in this brave new slice-and-dice derivative world.

Matt Taibbi, who will have a new big piece about this in a coming issue of Rolling Stone, provides this handy metaphor for understanding what MERS actually is. Here's one slice:

Imagine, say, a family of twelve, two elderly parents in Iowa and ten adult children scattered in different states all over the country. Mom and Dad on the farm own one Ford F-150 that they owe $300 a month on. Every month, the truck gets passed to a different family member, who in turn becomes responsible for the monthly payment. But no matter who has the car and whose turn it is to come up with the $300, the truck stays in Dad's name and the money, in the end, comes to Ford Finance via Dad's checking account.

Looking at this as an individual and unique case, you wouldn't think there was much that was inherently wrong with this setup. Obviously the family arrangement violates the spirit of many laws and procedures [interesting list of spiritual violations here]. But again, looking at this as an individual case, not many people would say any of these "violations" were major moral transgressions, if they were really moral transgressions at all. After all, this is family!

But once you take this setup and institutionalize it, and employ it everywhere on a vast scale, it becomes seriously problematic. This is particularly true if, say, Pop begins allowing his kids to "rent" the car out to non-family members, so long as they kick a small fee upstairs. Say it's March and Pop gives the truck to son Jimmy in Toledo; in April Jimmy gives the truck to his buddy Rick in Akron, charging the $300 payment plus a $20 convenience fee. May: Jimmy gives the car to his girlfriend Trudy in Phoenix, telling her to wire $300 plus another $20 back to Pops in Iowa; she in turn lends the car to her occasional lesbian love interest Madison, who begins renting the car on a day-to-day basis in Tuba City as part of her family's Painted Desert Resort and Tourism business, etc. etc. And she's now kicking the fees back to Iowa.

Within a year Pop is buying fifty vehicles an hour and shuttling cars to new customers all over the country, collecting millions in fees every day; he becomes a billion-dollar corporate fixture, hiring the entire local Elks club to come with him to work as support staff.

So now, to take this already absurdly overwrought metaphor one final painful step further ...

I knew the Elks were involved. Tempted to click through? I am, and I've already read it.

And for fans of straight talk, he provides this handy summary in easy-to-memorize form. The problem in a nutshell:

In short, the mortgage industry considers MERS owner enough to foreclose on you, but not owner enough to be sued, or reasoned with, or even to provide basic customer service.

That's MERS. Thanks, Matt, for making the painfully obvious painfully clear.

Bankers.

GP Read the rest of this post...

WikiLeaks, Greenwald & Wired (oh my)

This is for fans of weedy issues, and contains mainly background and links. As we say in the Biz, this is a developing story. Stay tuned.

The background. You know that Bradley Manning is being held in a military brig within the U.S., in conditions that would be called "torture" if applied by al-Qaeda to our own people. He hasn't been charged with a crime, except in the court of public opinion (the one with the hanging tabloid judge).

His offense? Allegedly leaking hundreds of thousands of diplomatic cables (and maybe the Baghdad assault helicopter tape) to WikiLeaks.

And that's as far as most people go. At this point, Mr. and Ms. Busy America switch to a football game, of which we have many. Thank you, friendly media, for doing our thinking for us.

But a key question remains — how do we know that Bradley Manning is the leaker? Answer — by the word of one man, an ex-hacker and known government informant named Adrian Lamo. And that's all. Lamo somehow got into an IM-type chat with Manning (he's changed his story about that), and Manning somehow confessed. Somehow.

So where are the chat logs in which Manning confessed? Wired.com has them, and you can't read those parts.

And here's where the weeds start, and the links. If you're a fan of mystery stories, potential government sting ops, embedded informers within hacker–darling publication Wired, secret chat logs and "public enemies", this is for you. It's a puzzle waiting to be solved, and new pieces appear every week.

There are far too many open questions. For example, when did Lamo start working with the Feds, before his forced hospitalization or after? (Intrigued? I sure am.)

For an analysis of the Manning–Lamo–Wired timeline, click here.

For Greenwald's response to Wired's ad hominem counterattack, click here. (Greenwald's "crime" — asking for the part of the logs that verifies any of Lamo's stories.)

For Greenwald's most recent analysis of the events so far, click here.

For Greg Mitchell's ongoing daily blog of all things WikiLeaky, click here.

Or you could google "lamo wired assange".

To keep the complexity at bay, just keep the government goal in mind. If I'm the Feds, my perfect world includes a confession from Manning that he personally handed the leaks to Julian Assange, preferably over mocha cappuccino.

Why? Because that's a conspiracy, they can indict and extradite him, and then they can spend the next twenty years wiping that smile off his face; or not.

Enjoy.

GP Read the rest of this post...

Gov. Christie uses local workers to clear state roads, then blames mayors for not clearing local roads themselves

The shape of things to come. Here's New Jersey's tough-guy governor Christie responding to the response to his response to the recent storm (h/t lots o' folks; my emphasis):

At his first public event since a blizzard slammed the state, Gov. Chris Christie praised state workers and his administration for their response to the storm .... Christie signed a letter in Freehold officially requesting aid from the federal government and then took questions, blaming mayors for people being trapped in their homes and Democrats and the media for the attention being given to his decisions to remain in Disney World on a family vacation while the state was inundated with snow.

The soul of concern:

When asked about the hundreds of people trapped in their homes for days, Christie said unless they lived on state roads, it's not something his administration would have been able to change.

"If someone is snowed into their house, that's not our responsibility," Christie said.

When asked about mayors who said they were forced to divert their resources to unplowed state roads instead of clearing local roads Christie said, "I know who these mayors are and they should buck up and take responsibility for the fact that they didn't do their job."

That's self-reliance for thee, but Disney for me and the fam:

Christie made international news when the storm dumped nearly three feet of snow in some places and he remained in Florida. He said he had promised his children that he would take them to the resort the week between Christmas and New Years and didn't want to go back on that promise.

A real promise-keeper; moral to a fault.

Did I read that right? He takes Fed money to clean state roads, takes local "resources" to clean state roads, then blames local workers for not taking responsibility and doing their job — cleaning local roads.

This actually makes sense to his fans. Welcome to the future.

Morally yours,

GP Read the rest of this post...

Teabaggers ticked at GOP leaders

Look at why, and tell me these people are anything more than conservative Republicans.

In their final days controlling the House, Democrats succeeded in passing legislation that Tea Party leaders opposed, including a bill to cover the cost of medical care for rescue workers at the site of the World Trade Center attacks, an arms-control treaty with Russia, a food safety bill and a repeal of the ban on gay men and lesbians serving openly in the military.

They also want to drastically cut federal spending, eliminate the Department of Education, oppose the DREAM act, want the estate tax eliminated, want more oil drilling and more nuclear plants.

Again, this isn't a new political party. They're simply conservative Republicans. Read the rest of this post...

Sunday morning open thread

Well, my TV stand is finally put together, with the help of my neighbor, and now to the task of hooking up my stereo and everything else to it. Ugh. It's funny - finally getting the TV stand (my TV has been on the floor the past two years) feels a lot like when I went out to buy my first shower curtain. A weird grown-up-ness about it, mixed with an odd sense of accomplishment. Kind of like Steve Martin finding himself in the phone book (but without the sniper).

Read the rest of this post...

Is Krugman anticipating a Sarah Palin presidency?

I'm not sure how to read this Paul Krugman post. The last line seems flippant, but go through the whole thing carefully. The numbers don't lie, and I think he means what he implies.

Two things are clear. First, the economy has to grow around 2 1/2 percent per year just to keep unemployment from rising. Second, growth above that level leads to a less than one-for-one fall in unemployment (because hours per worker rise, more people enter the work force, etc.). Roughly, it takes two point-years of extra growth to reduce the unemployment rate by one point.

So, suppose that US growth is accelerating. Even so, it will take years of high growth to get us back to anything resembling full employment. Put it this way: suppose that from here on out we average 4.5 percent growth, which is way above any forecast I’ve seen. Even at that rate, unemployment would be close to 8 percent at the end of 2012, and wouldn’t get below 6 percent until midway through Sarah Palin’s first term.

So here's what I do if I'm Sarah Palin. First, I convince Big Money that I can actually win. (See above.) Then I tell them (it) that if I do, they can have any damn thing they want.

There are folks in this world to whom that would be mighty tempting. I think the Professor knows that.

GP Read the rest of this post...