Send that junk mail back to the banks for OWS

This guy has a great idea for what you can do with all those credit card solicitations the big banks keep sending in the mail. (I must get two a week from Chase, and have been forever, it's driving me insane - they're the Annoying Orange of junk mail.)  Well this guy has a solution.  Send the postage paid envelope back with a message.  Great idea.  I'm doing it with the next Chase letter I get, which should be in my mailbox right now. Read the rest of this post...

Cain accuser wants to come forward, got one year’s salary in settlement

Toast's ready. NYT:

The lawyer for one of the two women who accused Herman Cain of sexual harassment said Tuesday that she wanted to come forward but was bound by a confidentiality agreement with the National Restaurant Association.

The lawyer, Joel P. Bennett of Washington, said in an interview that his client was calling upon the association to release her from the confidentiality agreement so that she could speak publicly about what happened with Mr. Cain.

“He’s no longer an employee of the National Restaurant Association, so the National Restaurant Association could argue that well, he’s no longer an employee so it doesn’t bind” the women, Mr. Bennett said.

More from a second NYT story:

The National Restaurant Association gave $35,000 — a year’s salary — in severance pay to a female staff member in the late 1990s after an encounter with Herman Cain, its chief executive at the time, made her uncomfortable working there, three people with direct knowledge of the payment said on Tuesday.

Read the rest of this post...

Video: Two dogs skateboard across Paris (most amazing thing I’ve seen in a while)

I read the title of this video and figured it was going to be somehow less than interesting than it sounded. Nope. Actually even more interesting. The dogs skateboard. They don't just stand on a skateboard while their master pushes them. The dogs flip the skateboard into the upright position, jump on, then kick start it. Then after moving ten feet and the skateboard slows down, the dog lowers one leg and gives a few kicks to get it moving faster. Absolutely amazing. I'd love to know how the owner trained them to do this. Read the rest of this post...

Must watch video: Rachel Maddow devastates Rick Perry’s queer behavior this weekend

Am I wrong, or is this a major league outing? Watch and decide. Whatever it is, it's devastating (click image to launch video in another tab):


In her on-site blurb, she calls these "inexplicable speech patterns and mannerisms." Yeah, I'd say.

This sure looks like a different guy than the man affectionately called "Crotch" — but what do I know?

She's right, though. If this goes viral, it's the end of his run.

GP

NOTE FROM JOHN: Rachel is right here.  Perry acts rather non-heterosexual in this speech, and I also found myself asking whether he was under the influence of something. Read the rest of this post...

Barefoot and pregnant, and hurry up with my martini

Far right family values (and divorced) radio host Dennis Prager is down on what he calls "feminism."  To the rest of us it's called "not discriminating against, or looking down on, women." I really don't need to quote more than this second paragraph of his essay.

Yes, women have more opportunities to achieve career success; they are now members of most Jewish and Christian clergy; women’s college sports teams are given huge amounts of money; and there are far more women in political positions of power. But the prices paid for these changes — four in particular — have been great, and outweigh the gains for women, let alone for men and for society.

Yes, sure we discriminate less against women in employment and at the university level, and sure, more women (still far too few) are elected politicians who bring a much needed feminine perspective to, oh, I don't know, issues affecting 50% of the population who are women.  But.... But?  There's a "but" to not discriminating against women? That's like saying there's a "but" to letting blacks marry whites.  There really is not "but."  Non-discrimination is an inherent good.  Period.  You simply do not get to talk about the relative merits of discriminating against women (or anyone else for that matter).

But just for the fun of it, let's visit Prager's list of grievances of how discriminating less against women has brought upon us the end of all times.

1. Women are having more sex out of marriage, just like men have always done, and that's making women depressed.  Yeah right.  Check out this quote and see if you can find the 3rd grade logical fallacy in it.

New York Times columnist Ross Douthat recently summarized an academic study on the subject: “A young woman’s likelihood of depression rose steadily as her number of partners climbed and the present stability of her sex life diminished.”

Yes it's none other than my favorite, post hoc ergo proper hoc - aka after it, therefore because of it. Women have sex, women are depressed, so sex is causing depression. Maybe. Or maybe women who are more depressed go out and have more sex to try to feel better. Kind of an obvious point lost on Prager. And certainly not a good reason to start discriminating against women again.

2."The second awful legacy of feminism has been the belief among women that they could and should postpone marriage until they developed their careers. Only then should they seriously consider looking for a husband. Thus, the decade or more during which women have the best chance to attract men is spent being preoccupied with developing a career. Again, I cite woman callers to my radio show over the past 20 years who have sadly looked back at what they now, at age 40, regard as 20 wasted years. "

Uh, it's called mid-life crisis, and pretty much all of us going through it if were in any way self-aware. Honestly, other than Steve Jobs, who goes to their death bed thinking their job changed the world? I think some political activists can, but really, what percentage of people overall? Thus, I'm sure anyone working for a living has ennui around age 45. I do. And I didn't "chose" to forgo marriage. And with marriages breaking up at a rate of around 50% in this country, are we really to believe that single women would be happier with a divorce or to, and joint custody, under their belts? Really?

3. Nannies. Prager is upset that women are working outside the home. I'm only partially sympathetic with him on this one. Yes, I think it might be better for children to grow up with at least one part at home all the time. But welcome to America - very few of us have the money to quit our jobs and take care of the kids full time. Even if Prager were right, this isn't the fault of feminism, it's the fault of the current structure of the American economy that makes it impossible for the majority of people to afford raise kids on income.

4. The emasculation of men. Seriously.

If you wonder why so many men choose not to get married, the answer lies in large part in the contemporary devaluation of the husband and of the father — of men as men, in other words. Most men want to be honored in some way — as a husband, a father, a provider, as an accomplished something; they don’t want merely to be “equal partners” with a wife.

And you can't be honored without demeaning someone else's existence? I realize that for the religious right, and far too many republicans, the very definition of their faith and their politics is based on who they hate and wish to oppress. But suggesting that men can't accomplish anything noteworthy as father, provider or anything else in life simply because women get a chance to do it too, is ludicrous. Again, I feel like we're talking to 3rd graders here, but your value and worth as a human being is not measured by comparing yourself to others. It's by comparing yourself to yourself. By looking at the talents, and crosses, you've been given, and seeing what you make of them. Read the rest of this post...

Krugman: "Things are falling apart in Europe" over debt and the euro

The NYT's Paul Krugman titles his latest post on the subject "Eurodämmerung" and it fits. We're finally watching the last of this years-in-the-making opera. It's ending like a tawdry family blame-game ... with deaths in the final act.

Things are falling apart in Europe; the center is not holding. Papandreou is going to hold a referendum; the vote will be no. Italian 10-years at 6.29 at pixel time; that’s a level at which the cost of rolling over the existing debt will force a default, even though Italy has a primary surplus. And with everyone simultaneously pushing for fiscal austerity, a recession seems almost certain, aggravating all of the continent’s problems.

After discussion of how they got there — we know the answer to that, don't we — he closes thus (my emphasis):

The question I’m trying to answer right now is how the final act will be played. At this point I’d guess soaring rates on Italian debt leading to a gigantic bank run, both because of solvency fears about Italian banks given a default and because of fear that Italy will end up leaving the euro. This then leads to emergency bank closing, and once that happens, a decision to drop the euro and install the new lira.

And ...

Next stop, France.

Look out below. My suggestion, watch the euro charts.

GP Read the rest of this post...

The Predators of the 1%

How does someone make it to the 1%?

There are only three ways: You can start in the 1%, you can engage in activities that create and build wealth and you can take the money from other people.

Over the past few weeks quite a few members of the 1% have been coming out in support of Occupy Wall Street. What do they all have in common? Almost all of them made it to the 1% by creating and building wealth.

Ayn Rand was right, society is plagued by the 'looters and the moochers'. All she got wrong was pointing her finger at the wrong people. The dead weight in US society are the members of the 1% who never contributed anything to society: The inheritors and the predators.

The GOP does not even stand for all of the 1% and certainly not for the 'job creators' who they invoke at every opportunity. The people the GOP really supports are the predators who got rich by taking from other people. Folk like the Walton family that made their pile through union busting. Folk like Don Blankenship who caused the deaths of 29 miners at his Upper Big Branch mine by appealing health and safety violation notices and telling his supervisors that their only priority was to "run coal". And yes folk like Bernie Madoff who became a billionaire by stealing the savings of millionaires. Read the rest of this post...

BofA drops $5 debit credit fee

UPDATE from Matt Browner Hamlin:

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Bank of America has dropped its plan to charge debit-card users a $5 per month fee. This is a huge victory for consumer groups and this was an issue which added a lot of fuel to the early days of the Occupy Wall Street movement. It goes to show that just because a bank has found a new way to extract wealth from the lower 99%, it doesn't have to do it. Public pressure on banks works.
_________________
Bank of America announced the $5 fee hike in response to a cut in the interchange fee for use of debit cards.

It never made the slightest sense from a business perspective as the cut in rates was phased so that it applied to 'banks too big to fail' before the rest. Encouraging customers to move away from banks that are too big is an administration policy goal.

Had BofA been serious about the fee they would have implemented it immediately. The pre-announcement was a rather obvious attempt to pressure the administration through their customer's complaints. What the bank did not expect was that their customers might take the side of the administration rather than theirs. Occupy Wall Street certainly helped move the needle on this debate.

When I worked for a major public corporation I used lobbyists. One of the rarely mentioned risks of employing 'corporate' lobbyists is that they are all aligned with one party or the other and the influence flows both ways.

Sometimes this is what the customer is actually looking for. In many industries government regulation is an inescapable fact of business life and knowing what the regulations will be as early as possible is far more important than what regulations are actually passed. Republicans expecting the health care industry to cheer at their attempts to derail or repeal parts of the ACA are likely to be in for a rude surprise.

But rather often the lobbyist is simply trying to use the client to advance their own career inside their party. Read the rest of this post...

Remember when Romney said he wouldn’t put a Muslim in the cabinet? He made his Mormonism relevant.

Mitt Romney can't have it both ways. Either a person's religion is relevant or it's not. But Romney can't say, as he did during the 2008 elections, that he wouldn't choose a Muslim as a cabinet secretary, and then turn around and say please don't discuss whether we should chose a Mormon as president. Either a person's religion is relevant or its not. And Romney clearly thinks it is relevant when the religion is Islam. So why isn't it relevant when it's Mormonism?

From the Christian Science Monitor:

I asked Mr. Romney whether he would consider including qualified Americans of the Islamic faith in his cabinet as advisers on national security matters, given his position that "jihadism" is the principal foreign policy threat facing America today. He answered, "…based on the numbers of American Muslims [as a percentage] in our population, I cannot see that a cabinet position would be justified. But of course, I would imagine that Muslims could serve at lower levels of my administration."

Romney, whose Mormon faith has become the subject of heated debate in Republican caucuses, wants America to be blind to his religious beliefs and judge him on merit instead. Yet he seems to accept excluding Muslims because of their religion, claiming they're too much of a minority for a post in high-level policymaking. More ironic, that Islamic heritage is what qualifies them to best engage America's Arab and Muslim communities and to help deter Islamist threats.

I'm surprised this didn't come up much during the recent brouhaha about one of Rick Perry's top religious supporters calling Mormonism a cult. Romney's attitude towards Islam is pretty much the same as this pastor's attitude towards Mormonism. Both are judging a potential politician's appointment to a senior government job based on their faith.

This seems to be a central tenet of Mormonism: Please leave me alone while I attack you.  Whether it's the innocent settlers the Mormons massacred back in 1857, after the Mormons had fled being massacred themselves in the midwest, or the Mormons' treatment of gays today (the Mormons have invested millions of dollars over the past two decades in passing legislation taking away the civil rights of gay Americans while at the same time public bemoaning America's ambivalence towards Mormons, and publicly criticizing gays for having a problem with the Mormons' multi-million dollar anti-gay activism).  Look at the way Mormons treated blacks.  Look at the way Mormons continue to treat Jews.  It's a fascinating history of religious and political aggression from a people who constantly demand the right to be left alone.

Perhaps Americans would leave the Mormons alone if the Mormons would start leaving us alone.  Mitt Romney is a hypocrite for saying religion matters for a cabinet secretary but not for the presidency.  If Romney says we should have a religious test for a lesser job, then he certainly must agree to having one for the highest job in the land.  (Has anyone asked if Romney would be okay with a Muslim as President?)

Romney opened up this can of worms all by himself.  He can't have it both ways. Read the rest of this post...

Hillary’s 92 year old mom passes away

Sad. Read the rest of this post...

Herman Cain accused of "possibly illegal" campaign transactions, violations of tax code

Blockbuster piece from Daniel Bice at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.  The article is long and detailed - check out for the specifics as to what money changed hands where.  But the conclusions, from multiple lawyers, is that what Cain did is possibly illegal, and not in a feeble "the FEC doesn't like it" kind of way, but rather, in a big scary "the IRS is gonna come get you" kind of way:

Herman Cain's two top campaign aides ran a private Wisconsin-based corporation that helped the GOP presidential candidate get his fledgling campaign off the ground by originally footing the bill for tens of thousands of dollars in expenses for such items as iPads, chartered flights and travel to Iowa and Las Vegas - something that might breach federal tax and campaign law, according to sources and documents.

Election law experts say the transactions raise a host of questions for the private organization, which billed itself as a tax-exempt nonprofit, and the Cain team.

"If the records accurately reflect what occurred, this is way out of bounds," said a Washington, D.C.-based election lawyer who advises many Republican candidates and conservative groups on campaign issues. The lawyer asked not to be identified because of those affiliations.

Michael Maistelman, a Wisconsin campaign attorney, agreed.

"The number of questionable and possibly illegal transactions conducted on behalf of Herman Cain is staggering," said Maistelman, a Democrat who has represented politicians from both parties on campaign issues.

The national election expert who works with GOP candidates said it would be a violation of the tax code for Prosperity USA to advance money to the Cain campaign for these items. She said there also are strict federal election regulations on reporting debts and incurring travel obligations.

"I just don't see how they can justify this," she said. "It's a total mess."

(H/t to Melissa Ryan over at AMERICAblog Elections.) Read the rest of this post...

GAO report rips NY Fed bailout of AIG counterparties

When AIG failed, the New York Federal Reserve stepped in to manage the wind down of the counterparties to the insurance company's massive credit default swaps (CDS) business. In short, the failure of AIG meant that they company couldn't pay off all of the bets they lost in CDSs in the residential housing market. Faced with an AIG bankruptcy, the counterparties - all big Wall Street banks - were in a position where they might get none of the money they were owed. Since the government was stepping in to save AIG, it was an open question as to how much money would be needed to pay AIG's counterparties. It was assumed that no one would be getting 100% of what they were owed, as AIG's failure meant they would probably have received nothing. Basically anything that came from AIG after it's failure was unexpected and largely undeserved money. The banks making swaps with AIG took risk when they made the bets and in the real world, but perhaps not the world of Wall Street, it's actually possible to lose money when gambling. As Dean Baker notes, "the government bailout of A.I.G. ensured that [financial institutions] suffered no consequences from their mistake."

The New York Times reports on a GAO study into the New York Fed's behavior around the 2008 AIG bailout. The GAO found that the NY Fed, under Tim Geithner, basically refused to drive a hard bargain with the AIG counterparties and have lied about their actions.

The report, by the Government Accountability Office, says that New York Fed officials have offered inconsistent explanations for their decision to pay other financial companies the full amounts they were owed by A.I.G., and that some of the explanations were contradicted by other evidence.

The report also asserts that the decision to pay the full amounts, rather than seeking concessions as the government later did in other cases, disregarded the expectations of senior Fed officials in Washington and the expressed willingness of some of the companies to accept smaller payments.

Did you get that last bit? Geithner's New York Fed even went so far as to turn down offers by banks to take less money than they were owed.

The AIG bailout was over $180 billion and, according to the Times, a quarter of that went to 16 Wall Street firms. To put it differently, money going to "save" AIG was being funneled straight to the people AIG owed money to...Wall Street banks like Goldman Sachs. The AIG bailout was a back-door bailout for the Wall Street banks which crashed our economy.

The GAO report suggests that this was done at the behest of Geithner's New York Fed, somewhat autonomously from the national Federal Reserve. The New York Fed has not been honest with the government about what they did and the conditions they were taking action in. Whether that's because Geithner's NY Fed was genuinely ignorant of the market they were entering into or they just wanted to give as much money to their friends at big banks and are lying to cover it up, it's not really clear.

But what is clear is that this is what a Tim Geithner orchestrated deal looks like: bailing out banks by preventing them from suffering losses that the market has suggested they should suffer. This is important for the current national mortgage/robosigning settlement talks with the nation's largest banks, which are being lead at the federal level by Geithner and Geithner's proxies and also include about 45 state attorneys general. By all accounts, the deal Geithner and the Obama administration are pushing looks awfully similar to the deal Geithner's NY Fed orchestrated for AIG's counterparties. That is, a sweetheart bailout for banks at the public's expense. While this shouldn't have been surprising prior to the GAO report on the NY Fed's work around AIG, the desire to bail out banks for their liability connected to foreclosure fraud, securitization fraud, and origination fraud is exactly what we now know we will get when Tim Geithner is involved. It goes without saying that President Obama should fire Geithner. Read the rest of this post...

VA Republican party sent around a picture of Obama with a bullet through his head

It was just a joke, they're now claiming.  From a state that used to lynch black people.  From a state that only four decades ago fought in the Supreme Court to stop blacks from marrying whites.  From a state that brought us "macaca."  And from a state that still oppresses its gay minority.

Maybe it was a joke (a joke that's a felony).  Or maybe it was another sad look into the soul of yet another southern state that just can't get beyond its seriously entrenched bigotry. Read the rest of this post...

Boy Scouts refused to call cops on serial child molester, so he kept on molesting for another decade; BSA still refusing to come clean

Oh my God.  The Boy Scouts of America, one of the most holier-than-thou homophobic bigoted organizations in America hid a pedophile from the cops, who then went and kept molesting more and more children over a decade.  Yes, these are the people who kick out gay scouts and gay scoutmasters because they call us immoral.  People who helped a pedophile escape and rape more children.  These are the people Americans have been entrusting their children to for over half a century.

Boy Scouts of America officials didn't call police in 1979 after Turley acknowledged molesting three Orange County boys, records show.

"You do not want to broadcast to the entire population that these things happen," A. Buford Hill Jr., a former Orange County Scouting executive, said of officials' decision not to contact authorities. "You take care of it quietly and make sure it never happens again."

Yeah, who would want to call the cops after some man admits to raping and/or molesting three kids? And it did happen again, and again, and again over a ten year period.  And the kids the guy tried to molest afterwards, two of them were pre-teen, suggesting that others might have been the same 12-and-under age. Nice. The guy was having sex with 12 year olds and under and the Boy Scouts didn't think that was a cop-calling offense.

It's time for a lot of American parents to have a chat with their children about just what did or didn't happen during their time with the Boy Scouts.

Oh, but it gets worse. More from AP:

Turley is one of more than 5,000 suspected child molesters named in confidential documents kept by the Boy Scouts of America. The records – called the "perversion files" by the Scouts – include admissions of guilt as well as unproven allegations.

How many of those 5,000 suspected molesters did the Boy Scouts turn in to the police?  Any?

What a bunch of pigs. The Boy Scouts have been running around for years with their high and mighty "we're better than the immoral gays" attitude, and all the while they're protecting admitted child molesters, who then go on to molest even more children.  I'm speechless.  I know I shouldn't be surprised, but I still am.  I can't believe anyone would let a guy get away with molesting a child, knowing damn well that he's likely to do it again.  How could the Boy Scouts do this? It sounds like their top priority was, like the Catholic church, protecting themselves, not the children in their care.

And now, according to the article, the Boy Scouts are still refusing to come clean on what they know.  Why do people have to sue the Boy Scouts in order to find out what the Boy Scouts know about potential pedophiles in their midst?  Would you send your child to be taken care of by someone who is fighting in court to protect the names of potential pedophiles?

Shouldn't the Boy Scouts be fighting in court to protect their own boys?

If I had a kid in the Scouts, I'd get them out right now.  Then have a long uncomfortable talk with your child about whether anyone touched them inappropriately.

Absolutely disgusting. Read the rest of this post...

Halloween leftovers

I spent Halloween at my friends Paul and Donald's place (I have no idea what to do with that punctuation), and every year they go all out with the creep decorations to scare the local trick and treaters. This year, one friend was hanging out in an animal hat he lent me for a while, while the boys blared scary music (usually Thriller) out the front window, and their front yard was tombstones and fog (I love the one tombstone, "I told you I was sick.")  Oh and that's their dog, Deputy, dressed as a hot dog.

The guy across the street was hiding on the stairs to his English basement, and when kids would knock on his door, he wouldn't answer, they'd think no one was home, so they'd start down the steps and he'd jump at them from below.  Too much fun.  But clearly one of the funniest Halloween stories I've ever read is Dan Savage's from two years ago.  It can't even summarize it.  Just go and read it, and laugh.

Read the rest of this post...

Christmas stocking stuffers for the top 1%

No one really has a clue how these people live — how their feet never touch the ground, how their wives and daughters never face a Chertoff 9000 at the airport.

Remember — these are baubles; stocking stuffers for the we-own-everything crowd. Real gifts include another house in France (h/t Digby and the devout & Christmas-y folks at Neiman Marcus):



Your tax dollars (and lost pensions) at work. Our Betters; here till we take away their power.

GP Read the rest of this post...