Bachmann and Perry seriously squirming over gay marriage

And perhaps the most interesting part of the story: They're squirming because the Teabaggers like to leave things to the states, which means a federal ban on same-sex marriage might be seen as over-reaching, as would an attempt to overturn state-based decisions on those same marriages. Read the rest of this post...

Robert Naiman: Why I am protesting the Toxic Tar Sands Pipeline—It’s all up to Obama

Both Joe and I have covered the toxic, sludge-carrying Tar Sands Pipeline protest for a while, and it's gotten a little press ... but only a little.

For some reason, Obama & Co. really want to keep a lid in this, and the access-addicted media seems to be going along. (Have you seen much mainstream coverage? Neither have I. Yet arrests at the White House continue daily.)

Here I wrote about the reasons this is bad from an ecological point of view. This statement by Robert Naiman, an environment professor and holder of the UNESCO Chair in Sustainable Rivers at U. of Washington, explains the political problem:

The key political fact about the proposed Keystone XL tar sands oil pipeline from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico is this: at the end of the day, the decision of whether to approve the permit for the pipeline or not will be a political decision wholly owned by President Obama.

The final determination on the permit will be based whether approval would be in the "national interest" of the United States. This is an inherently political determination. By denying the permit for the pipeline, President Obama can take a concrete action against climate chaos without securing one Republican vote, without spending one tax dollar, without getting approval from the Tea Party.

If, on the other hand, President Obama were to approve the permit for the pipeline, then he would be acting to promote climate chaos, and this decision could not be blamed on the dispute over the nation's projected debt in 2021, Republicans or the Tea Party. It would be President Obama, standing alone, breaking a campaign promise to act to protect the climate from chaos induced by human action.

"Obama will be acting to promote climate chaos" — acting alone and unbidden. In a very real sense, the planet is in his hands.

The protesters are attempting to up the ante for Obama. They want to make this Obama's key green issue prior to his 2012 ad campaign cum pitch for re-election. It appears that Obama really wants this pipeline, and wants the protests to go away, both from the White House and from the news. Who will succeed?

In the meantime, it looks like green voters may be abandoning Obama. Will he step up? It's game on, folks.

If you care (I hope you do), the Tar Sands Protest website is at tarsandsaction.org. You can follow their tweets at @TarSandsAction. More as it develops.

GP Read the rest of this post...

Reminder: In 2010 Iowa AG Miller was major recipient of new out-of-state bank & finance money

There's been a lot of sniping about New York AG Eric Schneiderman's refusal to go along with Iowa AG Tom Miller in his attempt to construct a "deal" with Bank of America in the robosigning–mortgage fraud scandal. (I put "deal" in quotes because some have called it a "whitewash" instead — more here.)

For example, just this morning, Miller and others got a nice opportunity from the Washington Post to whine their hearts out (Matt's good coverage of that is here).

And the Obama administration has sided squarely with Miller & the banks against Schneiderman, perhaps because banks are where the money is, and Obama's got a brand new $1 billion ad campaign to finance.

So it's useful to be reminded of this, Matt Taibbi at his prognosticative best, writing way back in April (is it really September?) about Tom Miller and his "special relationship" with those banks he's brokering a deal with (sorry, "investigating"). Taibbi's italics, my bolding and re-paragraphing below.

Best Way to Raise Campaign Money? Investigate Banks

A hilarious report has come out courtesy of the National Institute of Money in State Politics, showing that Iowa Attorney General Tom Miller – who is coordinating the investigation into the banks’ improper mortgage dealings – increased his campaign contributions from the finance sector this year by a factor of 88!

He has raised $261,445 from finance, insurance and real estate contributors since he announced that he was going to be coordinating the investigation into improper foreclosure practices. That is 88 times as much as they gave him not over last year, but over the previous decade.

This is about as perfect an example of how American politics works as you’ll ever see. This foreclosure issue is a monstrous story that is somehow escaping national headlines [that was April; no longer]; essentially, all of the largest banks in the country have been engaged in an ongoing fraud and tax evasion scheme that among other things has resulted in many hundreds of billions in investor losses, and hundreds of thousands of improper foreclosures. ...

Put it this way. If the banks had to pay what they actually owed – from the registration taxes/fees they avoided by using the electronic registry system MERS to the money taken from investors in toxic mortgage-backed securities to the fees and payments stolen from homeowners via predatory loan practices and illegal foreclosures – they would probably all go out of business. That’s how much money is at stake here: the very future of financial giants like Bank of America and Citi and JP Morgan Chase is hanging to a very significant degree on the decisions of politicians like Miller.

Hence the sudden avalanche of money sent Miller’s way. The numbers are laughable. In 2006, out-of-state donors gave Miller’s campaign $10,508. For the 2010 cycle, that number was $497,357. Three lawyers by themselves – Al Gore’s attorney David Boies, plus Donald Flexner and Robert Silver, all partners in the firm Boies, Schiller and Flexner – gave Miller a total of $60,000.

Guess who Boies’ firm defended last year, in a suit brought by an Australian hedge fund that claims it was ripped off in a deal involving toxic mortgage-backed CDOs? That’s right: Goldman, Sachs.

And that's how it works. Tom Miller's a made man. Taibbi in April. (If you want to drill down, the underlying numbers are here.)

Schneiderman and others are working to kill that deal. And for their efforts, Obama surrogates take him on, and the Washington Post helpfully muddies the waters.

Re-read Matt's piece, then ask yourself: Isn't justice usually the goal of an Attorney General. It is on my TV.

UPDATE: And now MoveOn has taken Schneiderman's side. So much for under the radar.

GP


Read the rest of this post...

Wikileaks leaks unredacted cables

Well I guess it had to happen, the full text of the Wikileaks cables has leaked.

Wikileaks and the Guardian are trading claims as to who is at fault. The fact is that the situation does neither of them much credit for their security. The gist is that Wikileaks sent the Guardian a password to decrypt a file that was loaded onto a server for a short length of time and then removed.

The Guardian believed the password to be a temporary password unique to them and published it in their Wikileaks book. The same file with the same password had been shared over BitTorrent.

In a somewhat surreal twist, Wikileaks announced that it has "commenced pre-litigation action".

Strong cryptography does not mean strong security. The human element is almost always the weakest link. Read the rest of this post...

Banks still fabricating documents in foreclosure fraud

For those not paying close attention to this issue already, it may be news to you that despite being outed a year ago for using the practice of robosigning to fabricate thousands of documents used to foreclose on homeowners, banks are still using this practice today. American Banker:

Some of the largest mortgage servicers are still fabricating documents that should have been signed years ago and submitting them as evidence to foreclose on homeowners.

The practice continues nearly a year after the companies were caught cutting corners in the robo-signing scandal and about six months after the industry began negotiating a settlement with state attorneys general investigating loan-servicing abuses.

Several dozen documents reviewed by American Banker show that as recently as August some of the largest U.S. banks, including Bank of America Corp., Wells Fargo & Co., Ally Financial Inc., and OneWest Financial Inc., were essentially backdating paperwork necessary to support their right to foreclose.

Some of documents reviewed by American Banker included signatures by current bank employees claiming to represent lenders that no longer exist.

David Dayen explains what this means:

And you see, the banks HAVE to fabricate documents. Because they destroyed the private property system through improper and sloppy securitizations and lost or missing mortgage assignments during the bubble years, and as such they cannot prove standing to foreclose without lying. Robo-signing is a crime, but it’s also a cover-up for a much bigger crime, which involves MERS and improper mortgage transfer and securities fraud. The robo-signed, forged, fabricated documents are the smokescreen being used to foreclose and get the real problem off the books. Banks are trying to wriggle off the hook by saying they are merely “memorializing” past actions with the fake documents. Some courts aren’t buying it; the pooling and servicing agreements stipulate that all assignments showing transfers must take place within 60 days, not years later through “memorialized” actions.

What this really comes down to is that making a settlement with banks around robosigning now, while there has been no real investigation by the state law enforcement officials who are negotiating a settlement and while the practice is continuing as the negotiations go on, is dangerous and premature. The banks can't possibly be negotiating in good faith with Tom Miller and the other state AGs because they're still committing the crimes they want to be released from prosecution for!

There's a massive criminal scheme being revealed by the press and a handful of diligent public officials like Attorneys General Eric Schneiderman, Catherine Cortez Masto and Beau Biden, as well as county Registers of Deeds like Jeff Thigpen in North Carolina and John O'Brien in Massachusetts. These officials seem committed to pursuing investigation and accountability. It's time their peers get on board. Read the rest of this post...

Stiglitz on Dodd-Frank: "We are once again at risk of a freezing of the credit system"

Another segment of Chris' and my interview with Nobel economist Joe Stiglitz. In this segment, Stiglitz talks about the mortgage crisis in America, and about the Dodd-Frank banking bill (he's not a fan).

Stiglitz on the mortgage crisis:

"We could have avoided this, but the bankers didn't want it, and unfortunately the Obama administration gave in to the bankers.  They kept listening to the bankers in the design of the programs that would help owners, and they kept putting forth programs that many economists that looked at them said they're not going to work. They didn't listen, they didn't work, and here we are years after the bubble broke still trying to deal with this problem."

He goes on to to say that Dodd-Frank bill didn't go far enough.

"The market has no confidence in the banking sector.  There's a lot of non-transparency.  And that means when rumors go around about what is going on, everybody knows they don't know.  The consequence is that we are once again at a risk of a freezing of the credit system."

Previous interview snipets:

* Stiglitz: Probabilities of a double dip recession "certainly have increased significantly" (3:17 long)

* Stiglitz: Obama administration and the Fed have demonstrated an "inability to make economic judgements." (1:09 long)

* Stiglitz: "The Fed is very good at creating problems, not so good at resolving them.... QE3 won’t help" (6:46 long)

* Stiglitz: "The only thing that can be done (to help the economy in the near term) is fiscal stimulus, spending more money." (1:01 long)

* Stiglitz: We are bearing the consequences of Obama/Congress not pushing state/local aid in 1st stimulus. (2:05)

Read the rest of this post...

What Speechgate says about Boehner

Josh Marshall's people over at TPM have been making hay over the latest Hill flap over Obama's request for a joint session of Congress to talk about jobs and Boehner's alleged snub. I think they have buried the lede.

For folks on the Hill and in the establishment media the flap over the speech is far more important than the programs Obama proposes to create jobs. That's just boring policy stuff to them.

It is a tempest in a teapot, but one of the principles I have learned in working on computer security is that the way a system breaks can tell you a lot about its inner workings. Sometime we deliberately break stuff to try and find out how it works.

According to all the parties concerned Boehner's office received a request from the White House for the joint session and made no reply. That is a staggering admission for any Speaker's office to make. A direct request from the President and they didn't clear the decks to deal with it?

When a journalist calls me for comment on some Internet security flap the first question I ask them is 'what is your deadline'. Every staffer on the Hill knows that protocol, they didn't think to ask the President's staff.

If the Speaker's story is taken at face value he has a serious problem with the competence of his staff and that in turn raises questions of his own competence. It is clear that the staff had more than 15 minutes notice that the request was going to be made.

As far as the Hill gamesmanship goes, Obama's message is that the most important issue facing the country right now is jobs and Boehner's message is that the most important thing is an internal GOP function. Presidential primary debates are a dime a dozen. A joint session of Congress would not be diminished in any way be the absence of two of the nuttiest House members. A presidential primary debate would not be diminished by being moved forward or back by an hour or so.

What this event tells me about Boehner is that he is not very competent and that what he thinks important is himself and his party functions. Read the rest of this post...

Rick Perry tells evangelicals, in code, that he’s not gay

Straight guys usually don't say it in code.



Maybe Rick Perry just has a wide stance. Read the rest of this post...

Cheney’s lies of omission on Plamegate

David Corn has been reading Cheney's memoir. Would it surprise anyone here to know that Cheney lies?

It's not shocking that in Cheney's telling, Libby, his loyal lieutenant, was no more than an innocent bystander sideswiped by a runaway investigation caused by a cowardly Powell and a guilty Armitage. To protect Cheney (and presumably distance the vice president from the White House's get-Wilson crusade), Libby had lied to FBI agents about how he had come to learn of Valerie Wilson and her CIA position, and a jury found the evidence against him convincing. Yet Cheney claims that nothing untoward transpired and that Libby had merely experienced "a faulty memory." Cheney suggests that Bush, who commuted Libby's prison term, failed the guts test by declining to pardon Libby at the end of his presidency.

In his memoir, Cheney is not experiencing faulty memory; he is photoshopping history in the most heavy-handed manner. But that's appropriate. The Wilson scandal was a microcosm of the larger tale of the administration's use of false information and misrepresentations to guide the nation to war in Iraq. Cheney, Libby, Rove, and their allies always knew this. And with this new book, Cheney is again trying to beat back the judgment that he and Bush dishonestly pitched the case for the Iraq war. Yet his retelling of the smaller story of the CIA leak affair is proof he remains an unreliable source.

Read the rest of this post...

S&P; giving AAA rating to subprime loans

The ratings agencies rarely make any sense and this time it's no exception. How much is S&P earning to provide such ratings? Bloomberg:

Standard & Poor’s is giving a higher rating to securities backed by subprime home loans, the same type of investments that led to the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, than it assigns the U.S. government.

S&P is poised to provide AAA grades to 59 percent of Springleaf Mortgage Loan Trust 2011-1, a set of bonds tied to $497 million lent to homeowners with below-average credit scores and almost no equity in their properties. New York-based S&P stripped the U.S. of its top rank on Aug. 5, saying Washington politics were making the country less creditworthy.

Treasuries gained about 1.95 percent and U.S. borrowing costs have fallen to record lows as investors repudiated the downgrade, according to Bank of America Merrill Lynch indexes. S&P has awarded AAAs to more than $36 billion of securities in the U.S. this year that were created by bankers who continue to gather thousands of loans, bundle them into bonds of varying risk and pay ratings firms a fee to assign credit rankings.

Read the rest of this post...

First Grader handcuffed for misbehaving in class

[Via Huffington Post] The parents are suing, the board of education won't respond. Chicago Tribune reports:

The mother of a Chicago Public Schools elementary school student is accusing an on-campus security guard of handcuffing her son and detaining him for more than an hour while he was a first-grader last year at Carver Primary School on the city’s far South Side.

In a lawsuit filed Monday in Cook County Circuit Court, LaShanda Smith alleges that security guard David Allen “acted in conscious disregard” of her son’s safety when he handcuffed him in March 2010 following an unexplained incident on campus. She is seeking more than $100,000 in damages.

It gets worse [Fox]

Attorney Michael Carin said the students were taken to an office where they were handcuffed and told they were going to prison and would never see their parents again.

What is wrong with these people? What next, tasers, waterboarding? Read the rest of this post...

Stiglitz: We are bearing the consequences of Obama/Congress not pushing state/local aid in 1st stimulus

During Chris' and my interview with Nobel economist Joe Stigltz this past Sunday in Paris, Joe mentioned that one of the big mistakes of the stimulus package was the lack of funding for states and localities. The transcript is below the video - the video is 2 minutes long.

STIGLITZ: More of the money could have gone to help the states and localities.  It was predictable that they would be facing financial problems.  They would be cutting back, firing teachers.  Can you imagine, in a period where the United States needs to strengthen our education system we are firing teachers?  The government is supposed to stimulate the economy, and yet employees in the public sector are actually lower than they were before the crisis, so our government is contributing to the downturn in that sense.

So first, we could have avoided these cutbacks by an appropriately designed stimulus package for state and local.  That's what I said they ought to be doing.  For some reason the Obama administration did not push this, Congress did not pass this, and we are now bearing the consequences.

The second thing that we should have done is to recognize this was going to be a long and deep economic downturn, and knowing that it's a long deep economic downturn, in the first year of the economic downturn you make plans for the second and third year of the economic downturn.

In the first year, you hire a lot of engineers and people that can help design good projects, high return projects, and that would have been a high return investment.

Previous interview snipets:

* Stiglitz: Probabilities of a double dip recession "certainly have increased significantly" (3:17 long)
* Stiglitz: Obama administration and the Fed have demonstrated an "inability to make economic judgements." (1:09 long)
* Stiglitz: "The Fed is very good at creating problems, not so good at resolving them.... QE3 won’t help" (6:46 long)
* Stiglitz: "The only thing that can be done (to help the economy in the near term) is fiscal stimulus, spending more money." (1:01 long)

Read the rest of this post...

Vermont national guard unable to help in Vermont due to Iraq

This is downright nuts. Why do we leave our own people with massive bills for wars and then not even enough equipment to get through events like Irene clean-up? These costly wars have to end.

Eight helicopters on loan from the Illinois National Guard were expected to arrive Tuesday night in Vermont to help the Vermont National Guard deliver food, medicine, water and other supplies to 13 Vermont towns cut off from the rest of the state in the aftermath of Tropical Storm Irene.

The outside helicopter support is needed because all six of the Vermont Guard’s Black Hawk helicopters are still in Iraq, where they and 55 Vermont soldiers are wrapping up a yearlong hospital transport mission, said Lt. Lloyd Goodrow, spokesman for the Vermont Guard.

The eight helicopters being sent in include six massive, double-bladed Chinook choppers and two smaller Black Hawk helicopters, said Vermont Guard Capt. Doran Metzger.

Read the rest of this post...

Al Jazeera: Gaddafi had extensive links to US officials

It's definitely worth watching the video attached to the Al Jazeera article. According to the Libyan Intelligence Agency files, Gaddafi had been in regular communication with former Bush official David Welch. More troubling is that the files detail a meeting less than one month ago where Welch proposes solutions for riding out the storm, running counter to NATO and White House policy.

What would be of great interest in the files would be more details surrounding the release of al-Megrahi and any deals offered. Al Jazeera:

Welch now works for Bechtel, a multinational American company with billion-dollar construction deals across the Middle East. The documents record that, on August 2, 2011, David Welch met with Gaddafi's officials at the Four Seasons Hotel in Cairo, just a few blocks from the US embassy.

During that meeting Welch advised Gaddafi's team on how to win the propaganda war, suggesting several "confidence-building measures", according to the documents. The documents appear to indicate that an influential US political personality was advising Gaddafi on how to beat the US and NATO.

Minutes of this meeting record his advice on how to undermine Libya's rebel movement, with the potential assistance of foreign intelligence agencies, including Israel.

The documents read: "Any information related to al-Qaeda or other terrorist extremist organisations should be found and given to the American administration but only via the intelligence agencies of either Israel, Egypt, Morroco, or Jordan… America will listen to them… It's better to receive this information as if it originated from those countries...".

Read the rest of this post...