Month: July 2010

Blamo!

by digby

Here’s something you don’t see every day: a news anchor actually challenging a lying winger on the air and then going back the next day with a thorough fact check:

See, it’s really not that hard.

h/t to bb

What Happens When It’s One Of Your Own?

by digby

Via Raw Story, here’s another sad example of something that happens every day in America:

Derek Thomas was admitted to West Jefferson Hospital in Jefferson Parish, Louisiana, Thursday, after a possible suicide attempt, reports ABC affiliate WGNO. When [the patient] refused to put on a hospital gown and said he wanted to leave the hospital, doctors ordered security to restrain him. Security guards “punched him in his lip, pulled out more than a fistful of his dreadlocks and tasered him to restrain him,” a statement from Thomas’ family said. Shortly afterwards, family members say, Thomas suffered a “massive epileptic seizure.”

This particular case of malicious torture of a mental patient is a little bit different, however. Derek Thomas is Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’s nephew. And Thomas and his family are reported to be outraged and heading down to Louisiana to personally intervene.

One of the hallmarks of the right is that they have no empathy (indeed, they scoff at the very notion) so they can’t understand something like injustice until they personally experience it. But maybe this will raise Clarence Thomas’s conscience a little bit and draw attention to this scourge among his elite peer group. Perhaps Thomas will even share some of his outrage with his ideological soulmates on the Supreme Court when one of these cases finally make their way to them.

By the way, there are other cases of these torture devices being used against epileptics. This one is the most horrific.

Update: No, I am not holding out a lot of hope for Clarence Thomas who has shown a remarkable ability to avoid feeling empathy, even for people in his own family. But hope lives eternal.

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h/t to JRC

Your Daily Grayson

by digby

Following up on my post from this morning, here’s a Youtube of the man from Orlando asking the head of HUD why it is that people shouldn’t default on their mortgages:

Update: Howie has a good post up on this subject focusing on the right wing meme that Barney Frank caused the housing crisis. (Not kidding.)

Laughably, Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Darrell Issa, Sean Hannity and other Republican clowns have tried to lay the blame for the housing problem on both working families and on progressives and no one more than on Barney Frank. It’s become as much a truism among right-wing dim bulbs that Barney caused the housing bubble as it is that Obama is a fascist socialist Muslim born in Kenya or Indonesia. We caught up with Barney a few minutes ago at an airport on the way back to Boston. He had read the Times piece. “We’ve had,” he began, “the worst economic situation since the Great Depression and it was caused by the right wing’s commitment to deregulation non-regulation. And as to their blaming us, the Republicans controlled both Houses of Congress from 1995 ’til 2006. I deny responsibility personally for the decisions of Newt Gingrich, Tom DeLay and Dick Armey. And I can prove that Tom DeLay does not take advise from me… because if he did, I would have told him not to go on that dance show.”

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Fiscal Vogueing

by digby

If you didn’t get a chance to see Maddow last night you missed this interesting segment on the fate of the current energy bill with Chris Hayes and David Roberts from Grist.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

The whole segment’s worth watching, but I thought this was particularly interesting and it seems like something the Democrats could be making more of:

HAYES: This is—this is infuriating for a million reasons but let‘s just—to increase the frustration, the CBO has now released its report on the Kerry/Lieberman bill, right, which shows it reduces the deficit by $19 billion, which seems to me like the kind of thing that maybe amidst this deficit hysteria we could get some, you know, conservative Democrats and Republicans behind.
ROBERTS: You might think. This is one of the great untold stories of the whole—of the whole climate fight, is that the bill—you can think of the bill as having two parts, there‘s all the energy stuff, which is bipartisan. Everybody loves it. It gives incentives to nuclear, to wind and solar, to electric cars. All that stuff spending. That‘s the spending side, which, of course, everyone in Washington loves to do.And then the other half is the price on carbon, which raises the revenue to pay for all that spending.

HAYES: Right.

ROBERTS: And so, what you‘re seeing in D.C. is, everybody loves the spending half and everybody‘s scared to death of the other half, where you raise revenue.
So, you know, I—Chris, I don‘t want to be cynical about the sincerity of the deficit hawks in the Senate but—

HAYES: Oh, never, never.

ROBERTS: — but it‘s peculiar that the ones that are the loudest about their deficit concern are the very ones lining up behind the most expensive, unpaid-for energy bill that you can imagine.

These deficit posers can get away with anything. This is happening on issue after issue but the Democrats can’t make anything of it because cynical Americans no longer care about hypocrisy. The assault on reason has left the body politic reeling.

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The Village In Full Effect

by digby

Tweety’s latest promo:

I think if you watch our show, you’re hearing the American family arguments. It’s as if you’re sitting at a dinner table with your conservative uncle and your liberal relatives and they’re arguing with each other and you’re hearing both sides. You’re hearing the interesting American attitude about things. You’re hearing the flavor of our country. You catch it. I don’t think it’s a calm event. I think it’s a noisy event. And I think at the end of the argument you’ll know where the American people are.

Really? Are you related to wealthy TV celebrities, political operatives armed with talking points and professional politicians all of whom live in the same place, went to the same ivy league schools and whose professional and social advancement depend upon each other? Does listening to their canned repartee really give us insight into “where the American people are?”

Le hameau de la Potomac in all its glory.

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Strategic Default For Me But Not For Thee

by digby

There’s a been a rumbling from above for some time now that people who walk away from their homes when the economics no longer makes sense are behaving very badly. This is known as “strategic default” which simply says that homeowner looks at the numbers and determines that she is economically better off if she gives the house back to the bank .

Apparently this is immoral. Why this should be I don’t know. The contract is clear. You pay or the bank gets to keep your equity and takes back the house. It’s a collateralized loan, after all. That’s the whole point. The person who does it suffers from the loss of all the money she has paid into the house and also gets a black mark on her credit record. The bank gets all the money and the property, which it can resell. Why this homeowner is considered to have made a moral transgression is beyond me. It’s just a contract and the bank loses nothing in the the transaction.

However, our betters are getting very exercised over the little people deigning to make rational economic decisions on their own behalf. Indeed, just last month they decided to take action:

Taxpayer-owned mortgage giant Fannie Mae is targeting families by going after struggling homeowners who strategically default on their mortgage, the firm announced Wednesday. A default is considered strategic when homeowners have the capacity to pay, yet choose to walk away from their mortgage. The trigger, researchers say, is negative equity: When the value of a home is less than what the lender is owed on it, borrowers are more likely to strategically default.[…]
And Fannie Mae, an arm of the federal government and a big part of the Obama administration’s housing policy, wants to make sure that if struggling families walk away, they suffer for it. Homeowners who strategically default or did not work “in good faith” to avert foreclosure through other means will be ineligible for new Fannie Mae-backed mortgages for seven years. The firm said it will also pursue homeowners in court, seeking so-called “deficiency judgments” to recoup outstanding debt by seizing borrowers’ other assets. Thirty-nine states do not limit the ability of lenders to recover what they’re owed.

If this catches on, the whole field of contract law is likely to get very interesting. Collateral isn’t good enough. Bad credit isn’t enough either. Americans are apparently now pretty much signing themselves into indentured servitude for the term of a homeowners loan based on “good faith.”

Well, probably not all Americans. This is the policy of Fannie Mae, working under the auspices of the Obama administration, which means they will only be going after lower and middle income people. And this is very good news because otherwise things could start to get a bit uncomfortable:

Whether it is their residence, a second home or a house bought as an investment, the rich have stopped paying the mortgage at a rate that greatly exceeds the rest of the population. More than one in seven homeowners with loans in excess of a million dollars are seriously delinquent, according to data compiled for The New York Times by the real estate analytics firm CoreLogic. By contrast, homeowners with less lavish housing are much more likely to keep writing checks to their lender. About one in 12 mortgages below the million-dollar mark is delinquent. Though it is hard to prove, the CoreLogic data suggest that many of the well-to-do are purposely dumping their financially draining properties, just as they would any sour investment.

When did housing become some kind of religious commitment? It is just another sour investment about which both contracting parties, the banks and the buyer, understood going in to be collateralized by the damned property. The difference is that middle class people who do this are called deadbeats and have their ability to function in our credit society severely limited, while the rich do not.

“I just decided to let it go, give it back to the bank,” he told the celebrity gossip TV show “TMZ.” “I just didn’t feel like it was a good investment.” The rich and successful often come naturally to this sort of attitude, said Brent T. White, a law professor at the University of Arizona who has studied strategic defaults. “They may be less susceptible to the shame and fear-mongering used by the government and the mortgage banking industry to keep underwater homeowners from acting in their financial best interest,” Mr. White said.

The rich and successful come naturally to this attitude because they understand how contracts work and don’t get hung up on the Calvinistic notion that they should destroy themselves rather than return a piece of property to a bank.

Banks don’t “feel” and they have no morals. They hold all the power to foreclose on you when you can’t pay and exercise it without emotion. If it is in their interest to renegotiate they will try to do it. If it isn’t, they won’t. Corporations are required by law to act this way on behalf of their shareholders. As long as that is true, then the all the parties to these contracts have no choice but to do the same thing. It’s just a financial transaction not a religious rite. This is a rigged game for average Americans and they should wise up.

Update: Pastordan writes in to explain that the Pharaohs had this all under control many moons ago:

From Exodus 5:

But the king of Egypt said to them, ‘Moses and Aaron, why are you taking the people away from their work? Get to your labours!’ Pharaoh continued, ‘Now they are more numerous than the people of the land and yet you want them to stop working!’ That same day Pharaoh commanded the taskmasters of the people, as well as their supervisors, ‘You shall no longer give the people straw to make bricks, as before; let them go and gather straw for themselves. But you shall require of them the same quantity of bricks as they have made previously; do not diminish it, for they are lazy; that is why they cry, “Let us go and offer sacrifice to our God.” Let heavier work be laid on them; then they will labour at it and pay no attention to deceptive words.’

Pharaoh gives the benefits, Pharaoh expects results, not slaves getting rational economic ideas in their heads.

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“Involuntary”

by digby

He thought he was only tasering a man on the ground with his hands behind his back but he grabbed his gun and shot him dead instead. So, it was an “involuntary” manslaughter:

After a tense wait in the trial of Johannes Mehserle, a Los Angeles jury has found the former BART police officer guilty of involuntary manslaughter in the January, 2009, death of Oscar Grant. Mehserle was accused of having shot the 22-year-old Grant in the back as he lay face-down on the platform of Oakland’s Fruitvale BART station after an altercation broke out on a train. Mehserle pleaded not guilty, claiming that he mistook his gun for his Taser stun gun. According to reports from the courthouse in Los Angeles, the involuntary manslaughter verdict, along with Meshlere’s additional conviction for the use of a gun in Grant’s death, could carry a sentence of 5 to 14 years. The other options before the jury included acquittal, voluntary manslaughter, which would have carried a penalty of 3 to 11 years,and second-degree murder, which would have carried a penalty of 40 years to life. Last week, Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Robert Perry ruled that Mehserle could not be convicted of first-degree murder, saying that evidence in the trial proved that Mehserle did not plan to kill Grant by shooting him once in the back.

He was just trying to teach the little bastard a lesson by swearing at him and then shooting him full of electricity while he was already on the ground. People have to learn to obey transit police officers unquestioningly and when they curse you out and threaten you out of the blue you have an obligation as a citizen to take whatever they mete out — including death if they accidentally pick up their torture device instead of their killing device. Shit happens.

Apparently, San Francisco and Oakland are anticipating that there might be some kind of Rodney King verdict reaction. Waiting to see if it materializes. Let’s hope not.

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Kabuki Democracy

by digby

Must Read Eric Alterman article about our kabuki democracy — and what to do about it.

(Blue America is already on the case …)

Update: BTW, I’m not fully endorsing the piece, just recommending it. More tomorrow.

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Nobles Disappointed

by digby

Mort Zuckerman was on MSNBC just now talking about the Aspen Aristocracy Festival. He’s very upset with the president and says just everyone he runs into (at the Russian Tea Room) is too. He rightly pointed out the stimulus program was inadequate and then went on to explain that 85% of the country wanted a health care plan that would deal with costs and the administration foolishly decided to focus on covering more people (presumably rather than fewer.) He says it will add a trillion dollars to the deficit and it is cratering in the polls with only 34% of people supporting it.

I don’t think I need to point out that all these points about the health care plan are wrong — the CBO says the plan will cut the deficit, you had to find a mechanism to get most people into the system in order to cut costs (or allow people to just die in the streets when they get sick) and the health care plan is actually gaining in popularity. (I’m not defending it, I’m just pointing out that every single point Zuckerman makes against it are factually incorrect.)

Then he explains that all the right people were very receptive to his message:

Zuckerman: Niall Ferguson and I were the two speakers talking about this [at the Aspen Elite Circle Jerk Society Confab] and I would just say that a year ago 90% of them would have thrown tomatoes at us!

Hostess: Are you even surprised by some of the people who are in that group with you as critics of the president?

Zuckerman: I don’t know if I’m surprised because I don’t think of specific people, but you know everywhere I go there is a level of dismay at the failure of this president to address the problems that we’re facing.

In fairness, Zuckerman’s critique of the stimulus is actually fairly right on. He was writing over a year ago that it was too small and not properly targeted, although I’m not sure that we would agree on the targets. His health care critique is just misinformed. There are lots of good reasons to be disappointed, but his points aren’t among them. What curious is that his speech at the Aspen Socialite Kaffe Klatch proclaimed that because of all this we now need to concentrate on austerity and cutting spending dramatically because people have lost faith in government to do anything right. Looks like old Mort is now an open confidence fairy.

Meanwhile, his tag team partner, invisible bond vigilante channeler Niall Ferguson, is flogging Paul Ryan’s nihilistic Randian dystopia (which even the Republican party has abandoned like a rotting corpse) and telling all these rich dilettantes that the only thing that can cure this problem is destroying the safety net, cutting the taxes of the wealthy and “incentivizing” the unemployed to take jobs that don’t exist (presumably by homelessness and starvation.)

And all of this to wild applause from the wealthy Obama supporters in the audience. I assume they all went out afterward and ate gobs and gobs of cake.

Update: Howie has more on Ryan
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We Shall Overcome

by digby

Fox news is very upset about racism:

Except when it isn’t:

Neiwert has the whole story, which explains that the New Black Panther party has been designated a hate group for some time by the SPLC, but points out that contrary to Beck’s comparison to the KKK, it has had zero success at recruiting or voter intimidation, while the KKK, well, we know that history. (If not, click the link.)

These guys are obviously racist asses. But as Neiwert observes there were a whole slew of racist vote intimidation cases that were dropped by the Bush administration. Of course those were of the more common “traditional” kind, which the Ashcroft and Gonzales DOJ civil rights division didn’t think were worth pursuing. The only racism the right recognizes is that which is perpetrated by the minority toward the majority. Whites, after all, have been historically sorely victimized in this country so special attention must be paid, even on a symbolic level.

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