Video: Best dog-treat ever

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Fed study: US family wealth down nearly 40% since crash

Why is the financial pain limited to the 99%? Wall Street pay has declined, but it's fair to see that most Americans would gladly live on their income level, even in it's current state. Our failure to address this problem only reinforces the argument that neither party represents middle class America. Bloomberg:

The average American family lost 38.8 percent of its wealth from 2007 to 2010, with the biggest losses concentrated among households with the most assets tied to their homes, a Federal Reserve study shows.

Median net worth declined to $77,300 in 2010, an 18-year low, from $126,400 in 2007, the central bank said in its Survey of Consumer Finances. Mean net worth fell 14.7 percent to a nine-year low of $498,800 from $584,600, the central bank said today in Washington.

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Violent Neo-Nazi Greek spokesman sues victims for defamation

Milliseconds before clocking his female victim.

"Only in America" has come to Greece.

How is it that the man who hit a woman repeatedly in the face, and threw water on a second woman - all on national TV - can then sue his victims for defamation, after the police had to launch a nationwide man-hunt to find the guy?

Once again, why is he not in jail?

A Greek far-right politician who hit a left-wing politician in the face and threw water at another during a live television talk show sued his victims for defamation on Monday.

Ilias Kasidiaris, spokesman of the far-right Golden Dawn party, said he would also sue private TV station Antenna for wrongful detention after he was locked in a room in the studio following the attack until he broke down the door and escaped.

NOTE FROM JOHN: Wrongful detention? He's lucky someone didn't shoot him after he started beating up a woman on national TV.

It is funny how thin-skinned those neo-Nazis are. Read the rest of this post...

Sununu: Romney's attack on cops, firemen, teachers not a "gaffe"

Romney surrogate Jon Sununu on MSNBC defending Romney's plan to cut cops, fireman as government waste:

SUNUNU: Let me respond as a taxpayer, not as a representative of the Romney campaign. There are municipalities, there are states where there is flight of population. And as the population goes down, you need fewer teachers. As technology contributes to community security and dealing with issues that firefighters have to deal with, you would hope that you can, as a taxpayer, see the benefits of the efficiency and personnel that you get out of that.

JANSING: But even if there’s movement to the suburbs, teachers and policemen are needed somewhere.

SUNUNU: But I’m going to tell you there are places where just pumping money in to add to the public payroll is not what the taxpayers of this country want.

JANSING: Do you think that taxpayers of this country want to hear fewer firefighters, fewer teachers, fewer police officers, from a strategic standpoint?

SUNUNU: If there’s fewer kids in the classrooms, the taxpayers really do want to hear there will be fewer teachers. [...] You have a lot of places where that is happening. You have a very mobile country now where things are changing. You have cities in this country in which the school population peaked ten, 15 years ago. And, yet the number of teachers that may have maintained has not changed. I think this is a real issue. And people ought to stop jumping on it as a gaffe and understand there’s wisdom in the comment.

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Citibank won't take Minneapolis mom's mortgage payments; home to be auctioned Wednesday

UPDATE: Victory.
________

Some stories just write themselves, and this is one I wish hadn't made my job easier.

The headline tells the tale. The wrinkle is that the homeowner's son is an Occupy Homes Minnesota activist. From the press release:

Colleen McKee Espinosa, a single mother of three -- including Nick Espinosa, a volunteer organizer who has helped other homeowners fight foreclosure -- hoped that negotiations with officials at Citibank would allow her to catch up on her mortgage and keep her home. But Citibank still has the home scheduled to be auctioned off at a sheriff sale at 11am on Wednesday, June 13th.

McKee Espinosa, a registered nurse, has owned her home for 16 years. Last year, she attempted to pay her Citibank mortgage to catch up on two past-due payments on the indicated due date. The bank told her the home had already been sent into foreclosure.

“I’ve come up with the money I owe them but they refuse to take it,” McKee Espinosa said.

After the Minneapolis Star Tribune, the blog Crooks and Liars, and others covered the story, Citibank officials contacted the family, assured them they were doing everything they could to resolve the case, and assigned them a contact in the "executive response unit." Despite this, the bank is moving to auction the home at a sheriff's sale this Wednesday at the Hennepin County Government Center, after which time the bank would have no legal obligation to work with the family.

They're not going easily, though I don't know what their recourses are:

"My mother has struggled her whole life to keep our family afloat and give my siblings and I a better life than she had," said Nick Espinosa, "I've dedicated the last 8 months of my life to helping families fight against unjust foreclosures and the greedy banks that would rather leave homes vacant than work to keep families in their communities even after being bailed out with our tax dollars. CitiBank won't be stealing the home I grew up in from my mom--it stops here."

The family has seen a huge outpouring of support from the community since the campaign started. McKee Espinosa's union of 20,000 nurses statewide, The Minnesota Nurses Association, St. Anthony East Neighborhood Association, and hundreds of neighbors have called for Citibank to negotiate with the family and signed an online petition asking Citibank to work out an agreement with the family. Most neighbors on the block have sent letters to Citibank and display yard signs in support of the family.

"I have decided that I'm not leaving my home until we get a good faith negotiation. I'm fighting to send the message to other people not to give up, because if you're isolated you can't fight these people,” said McKee Espinosa. "I'd tell the banks they better watch out because people are catching on to their game and a lot of people are going to fight back now."

As near as I can gather, the foreclosures are happening because mortgage banks benefit more from foreclosures than from homeowner-friendly deals that keep the mortgage checks coming in. Bad news for the investors in the mortgage-backed securities, but good for the banks.

Rats on a sinking ship. The banks — who created these mortgages en masse in order to fill the feeding maw of the Giant Pool of Money looking to invest in the then-hot securities — are basically saying "Tough to be you" to the same investors they fed. The banks get some money, while the securities approach zero in value.

Money. Brings "eye of a needle" to mind.

GP

To follow or send links: @Gaius_Publius Read the rest of this post...

ABC's Carrie Gann sugarcoats anti-gay study paid for by anti-gay activists

This is the network that just put Ann Coulter on This Week, so perhaps I'm expecting too much actual journalism. Read the rest of this post...

Is the GOP incompetent or trying to sabotage the economy

I worked on the Hill for five years, and cognitive dissonance is a wonderful gift to politics.

While I'm sure the GOP leadership isn't thinking "let's tank the economy," I'm also sure that for the past four years they've been thinking: "If we pass x, y, and z it will help the economy which will help Obama's re-elect, so we have to block any legislation that helps his re-elect."

Of course, they're the same thing - destroying the economy and stopping Obama from being re-elected - but in politics, it's all too easy to make a disconnect between the two, and thus Republicans can hold themselves harmless for a very real, and effective, four-year strategy to harm the American economy.

From Michael Cohen in the Guardian:

Beyond McConnell's words, though, there is circumstantial evidence to make the case. Republicans have opposed a lion's share of stimulus measures that once they supported, such as a payroll tax break, which they grudgingly embraced earlier this year. Even unemployment insurance, a relatively uncontroversial tool for helping those in an economic downturn, has been consistently held up by Republicans or used as a bargaining chip for more tax cuts. Ten years ago, prominent conservatives were loudly making the case for fiscal stimulus to get the economy going; today, they treat such ideas like they're the plague.

Traditionally, during economic recessions, Republicans have been supportive of loose monetary policy. Not this time. Rather, Republicans have upbraided Ben Bernanke, head of the Federal Reserve, for even considering policies that focus on growing the economy and creating jobs.

And then, there is the fact that since the original stimulus bill passed in February of 2009, Republicans have made practically no effort to draft comprehensive job creation legislation. Instead, they continue to pursue austerity policies, which reams of historical data suggest harms economic recovery and does little to create jobs. In fact, since taking control of the House of Representatives in 2011, Republicans have proposed hardly a single major jobs bill that didn't revolve, in some way, around their one-stop solution for all the nation's economic problems: more tax cuts.

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NYT columnist suggests that Hitler was a "progressive"

Digby is right. This kind of garbage has no place in the NYT.

As for Hitler being a progressive, he didn't like Jews, people with disabilities, gays, transgender people, social democrats or socialists.  While there are large swaths of Americans who don't like those particular groups either, those Americans don't generally call the Democratic party their home.

Just sayin'. Read the rest of this post...

The gays versus the Latinos - why one group won while the other, not so much

The Washington Post looks at two competing movement - gay rights and immigration - and why one ended getting a good chunk of what it wanted from the Obama administration, while the other didn't get much at all.

On reading the piece, it sounds like the immigration movement tried to parallel many of the actions we did in the gay community - angry private meetings, embarrassing protests, ticking off the entire community against the administration in an attempt to scare the President into doing the right thing.

But for the gays it worked, for the Latinos, it didn't.

Why?

I'm not entirely sure.  I do know that, as a community, we're awfully good at getting in one's face.  I also think we did a fantastic job over the past few decades of personalizing our oppression.  In part, we had no choice - AIDS did a fine job of personalizing our suffering all on its own.  But so did Don't Ask, Don't Tell - you can't find a more sympathetic victim than a US servicemember, in dress uniform, who risked their life for their country.  (Having said that, here's a sympathetic personal look at immigration in today's Washington Post.)

I also think that immigration advocates need to do a better job of selling their cause to the American people.  We're a country of immigrants, so in some ways you'd think there'd be a natural empathy there.  And there is.  But.  A lot of those immigrants came here legally.  The ones affected by immigration reform did not.  And I think it's an issue that needs to be better addressed.

I remember being told fifteen years ago by a Latino advocacy group in Washington, DC that there were somewhere between 15 million and 60 million Latinos in the US - the uncertainty being the number of those here illegally.  I remember being shocked by the size of the numbers - both by the magnitude of the potential illegal immigration and the uncertainty of the number.  A second figure equally surprised me - that 3 million people try to cross the Mexican border illegally each year and 1 million succeed.

Those are awfully large figures.

And while too many folks on the right seem only motivated by rJacism, sometimes I get the feeling that immigration advocates on the left don't want to acknowledge that there's a legitimate concern, among people who aren't racists, about the fact that a million people flow across the border illegally each year.  That number bothers me in terms of national security, but it also bothers me in terms of friends of mine (including Latino friends) who tried to immigrate legally and were turned down.  The illegal immigration doesn't feel particularly fair to those who didn't make it.

In the end, I think that's the challenge that immigration - Latino immigration - advocates have before them.

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