Morning Must Reads: 2012 Checkup

http://uk.news.yahoo.com/22/20101122/twl-uk-korea-north-nuclear-bd5ae06.html
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China is the key in North Korea. DOH!!

Gloria Allred likes to be felt up ………at airport security checks.
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http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2010/11/19/gloria_allred_on_tsa_pat-down_i_liked_it.html
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Hide your children at airports. The naked nutballs are coming out of the woodwork.
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http://www.nbcsandiego.com/news/local-beat/Passenger-Chooses-Strip-Down-Over-Pat-Down-109872589.html?dr

Pessimistic Fed to slash growth forecasts
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http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/b92ecb0c-f596-11df-99d6-00144feab49a.html#axzz161OvEX2f
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“The revised forecasts will show how the Fed became much more pessimistic over the summer and also highlight fears among a few members of the FOMC that some of today’s 9.6 per cent unemployment rate is structural and will take years to cure.”

Global warming hoax continues.
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http://missoulian.com/news/state-and-regional/article_e2ec2758-f59d-11df-9314-001cc4c03286.html
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BILLINGS – The National Weather service says a record amount of snow fell on Billings on Saturday.
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Billings-based meteorologist Sean Campbell tells the Billings Gazette that a foot of snow fell on the city between midnight and 6 p.m., eclipsing the previous one-day record of 2.5 inches set in 2007.
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Campbell says the storm covered most of Montana except for the northwest corner.

A Thousand Cuts…….eventually you bleed to death.
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http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/al-qaeda-promises-us-death-thousand-cuts/story?id=12204726

‘SECURITY CAUSES HUGE INCONVENIENCE FOR ALL OF US’: OBAMA ADMITS HE HAS NO CLUE HOW INTRUSIVE TSA SEARCHES ARE

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http://www.theblaze.com/stories/security-causes-huge-inconvenience-for-all-of-us-obama-admits-he-has-no-clue-how-intrusive-tsa-searches-are/

GORE ADMITS HE WAS WRONG ABOUT ETHANOL SUBSIDIES: ‘NOT GOOD POLICY’

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http://www.theblaze.com/stories/gore-admits-he-was-wrong-about-ethanol-subsidies-not-good-policy/
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Fuel in your tank or food on your table?

Rusty:

Makes you wonder what was not good policy:

Using tax payer money to buy votes? (Let’s hear it from the we want money out of politics crowd).?
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Was bad policy to use ethanol as a energy substitute even though you use more energy in the production and transportation in the processing ethanol than you use in gasoline?
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Poses an interesting question. Since that was bad policy based on make belief science which saw Gore try to benefit for it, how is this any different from his global warming campaign which he profits from daily?

2nd week running Mark Shields gives us the liberals twisted version of reality.

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“MARK SHIELDS: I have never heard a Democratic leader, we have to define who Democratic leaders, I never heard a Democratic candidate for president say this, or anybody who was in question for that”
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Apparently he was in a liberal coma when John Kerry and Howard Dean were running for President.
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The funniest part is he managed to say this with a straight face while Evan Thomas and Nina Totenburg defended it. All of this in a segment about how the non-MSM media lies.

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You just can’t make this stuff up

Here we find another familiar refrain from the left- How they utterly despise the American public and just how stupid they are because they don’t agree with the bankrupt policies of the extreme left.
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But weren’t these the same voters who in 2008 voted in liberal Democrats in the the House, Senate and the WH?
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The logical conclusion that follows is: Voting Democratic makes you stupid!

Political reporters often rely on University of Wisconsin political scientist Charles Franklin for expertise. In just the past few months, his insights have appeared in articles in the New York Times, Washington Post, USA Today, Associated Press, Politico, Boston Globe, Christian Science Monitor, and many other publications. He’s also a co-founder of the influential website Pollster.com, as well as co-director of the Big Ten Battleground Poll.
So Franklin answered with considerable authority when he was asked, at a recent forum on the November 2 election results, why Republicans emerged victorious in so many races. “I’m not endorsing the American voter,” Franklin said. “They’re pretty damn stupid.”
Franklin was responding to a question from Bill Lueders, news editor of Isthmus, a weekly alternative newspaper in Madison, Wisconsin. In an account published Thursday (H/T Ann Althouse), Lueders says he asked Franklin why “the public seemed to vote against its own interests and stated desires, for instance by electing candidates who’ll drive up the deficit with fiscally reckless giveaways to the rich.”
“Franklin, perhaps a bit too candidly, conceded the point,” Lueders writes. “‘I’m not endorsing the American voter,’ he answered. ‘They’re pretty damn stupid.’”

Don’t you get it yet? Just because one area has snow doesn’t make the case for or against global warming. If that were the case, then record snowfalls would indicate we are entering an ice age. But, hey, my area hasn’t had any snow yet, the temperature is mild. And we often has snow for Halloween.

I think Franklin was talking about the Republicans. By and large, Dems failed to go to the polls on Nov. 2. The Dem. candidates failed to motivate the people (largely young voters) who were motivated to vote for Obama 2 years ago.
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It is a documented fact that of the last 5 presidents, Republican presidents have exploded the deficit and destroyed jobs a lot more than the Democratic presidents. Republicans are always the ones who want to end every kind of social safety net, as well. So, yes, it is the voter who votes Republican who votes against his own best interest. And that is very, very stupid.

What did I miss?

Poniewozik’s dead-tree-only column, “The End of Objectivity”.

Pending online release of that column…

At least one Republican Representative gets it. Of course, he’s retired.

“There is a natural aversion to more government regulation. But that should be included in the debate about how to respond to climate change, not as an excuse to deny the problem’s existence. The current practice of disparaging the science and the scientists only clouds our understanding and delays a solution. The record flooding, droughts and extreme weather in this country and others are consistent with patterns that scientists predicted for years. They are an ominous harbinger.[...]

What is happening to the party of Ronald Reagan? He embraced scientific understanding of the environment and pollution and was proud of his role in helping to phase out ozone-depleting chemicals. That was smart policy and smart politics. Most important, unlike many who profess to be his followers, Reagan didn’t deny the existence of global environmental problems but instead found ways to address them.

The National Academy reports concluded that ‘scientific evidence that the Earth is warming is now overwhelming.’ Party affiliation does not change that fact.”

(I read somewhere that the biggest distinction between winning and losing candidates this past election cycle was their stance on climate and energy issues)

So much for not ignoring the military leadership’s advice.

“It wasn’t too long ago that there were certain expectations about political and military policy. If, in the midst of two wars, the Pentagon asked Congress for some help, lawmakers were likely to oblige. This was especially true of Republicans, who took pride in characterizing themselves as the ‘pro-military’ party.[...]

…what’s especially noteworthy here is the consistency in which we’ve seen this pattern. On New START, obviously, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs and the Secretary of Defense are actively urging Senate ratification, but the GOP is convinced they’re mistaken. Mullen, Gates, and other military leaders also want to see Republicans end their filibuster of the National Defense Authorization Act, but the GOP is ignoring this request, too.

In fact, the U.S. military leadership and congressional Republicans are also on opposite sides of everything from civilian trials for terrorist suspects to closing the facility at Guantanamo Bay to Iran to torture to how the U.S. perceives the Middle East peace process in the context of our national security interests. GOP lawmakers haven’t even fared well on some veterans’ groups congressional scorecards.

The notion of Republicans siding with the military is supposed to be one of those assumed truths that we’re all supposed to just accept. But over the last two years, on most of the major policy disputes related to national security and defense, it’s been Democrats (on both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue), not Republicans, who’ve been siding with U.S. military leaders.”

Matt Taibbi: Courts Helping Banks Screw Over Homeowners:

Why don’t the banks want us to see the paperwork on all these mortgages? Because the documents represent a death sentence for them. According to the rules of the mortgage trusts, a lender like Bank of America, which controls all the Countrywide loans, is required by law to buy back from investors every faulty loan the crooks at Countrywide ever issued. Think about what that would do to Bank of America’s bottom line the next time you wonder why they’re trying so hard to rush these loans into someone else’s hands.

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/17390/232611

What could it be, it’s all a mirage | you’re scheming on a thing that’s sabotage

“Consider a thought experiment. Imagine you actively disliked the United States, and wanted to deliberately undermine its economy. What kind of positions would you take to do the most damage?

You might start with rejecting the advice of economists and oppose any kind of stimulus investments. You’d also want to cut spending and take money out of the economy, while blocking funds to states and municipalities, forcing them to lay off more workers. You’d no doubt want to cut off stimulative unemployment benefits, and identify the single most effective jobs program of the last two years (the TANF Emergency Fund) so you could kill it.

You might then take steps to stop the Federal Reserve from trying to lower the unemployment rate. You’d also no doubt want to create massive economic uncertainty by vowing to gut the national health care system, promising to re-write the rules overseeing the financial industry, vowing re-write business regulations in general, considering a government shutdown, and even weighing the possibly of sending the United States into default.

You might want to cover your tracks a bit, and say you have an economic plan that would help — a tax policy that’s already been tried — but you’d do so knowing that such a plan has already proven not to work.

Does any of this sound familiar?[...]

If a major, powerful political party is making a conscious decision about sabotage, the political world should probably take the time to consider whether this is acceptable, whether it meets the bare minimum standards for patriotism, and whether it’s a healthy development in our system of government.”

Not only does the legal system favor wealth, it’s our regulatory system as well.

“First off, he lamented the fact that we have been holding hearings like this since 2007. “Every year we have another set of hearings, and you can add 2 million foreclosures” to the bottom line. Nothing gets fixed, despite all kinds of documented evidence that the banks and servicers have committed fraud. Levitin’s position is that the servicers should be banned from the loan modification business entirely, because they don’t have any interest in it except as a profit-maximization scheme, and they have massive conflicts of interest that cut against doing right by the borrowers (and even the investors for whom they work).

But this was the key moment. Levitin said that we don’t have the full data sets from the servicers, or any comprehensive data to see whether there is a full-on crisis of unclear title and improper mortgage assignment. In other words, we don’t quite know the full extent of the problem. Levitin said, essentially, ‘The federal regulators don’t want to get info from servicers, because then they’d have to do something about it.’ They don’t want to recognize the scope of the problem because it would require them to act.

And Levitin in particular singled out the Treasury Department. “The prime directive coming out of Treasury is “protect the banks” and don’t force them to recognize their losses.’ That says it in a nutshell, and it was said in open testimony in Congress.”

They found the attacker of Antoine Dodson’d sister, he worked for the TSA.

hide your kids, hide your wife and hide your husband cuz the TSA iz rapin errbody out here

“There Will Be Blood”

“The fact is that one of our two great political parties has made it clear that it has no interest in making America governable, unless it’s doing the governing. And that party now controls one house of Congress, which means that the country will not, in fact, be governable without that party’s cooperation — cooperation that won’t be forthcoming.

Elite opinion has been slow to recognize this reality.[...]

How does this end? Mr. Obama is still talking about bipartisan outreach, and maybe if he caves in sufficiently he can avoid a federal shutdown this spring. But any respite would be only temporary; again, the G.O.P. is just not interested in helping a Democrat govern.

My sense is that most Americans still don’t understand this reality. They still imagine that when push comes to shove, our politicians will come together to do what’s necessary. But that was another country.

It’s hard to see how this situation is resolved without a major crisis of some kind. Mr. Simpson may or may not get the blood bath he craves this April, but there will be blood sooner or later. And we can only hope that the nation that emerges from that blood bath is still one we recognize.”

They’ve hit upon an ingenious method for extracting a country’s wealth.

“When a residential property bubble as big as Ireland’s bursts, there will be always enormous bank losses. But because those losses haven’t materialized yet, everybody in Ireland and the EU is sticking their heads in the sand, pretending that they’re never going to arrive at all.

The best-case scenario, then, is that the EU bailout will kick the Irish can three years down the road. But in implementing the plan, Ireland’s banks will effectively be nationalized and any future mortgage losses will have to come straight out of these bailout funds. Which aren’t remotely sufficient for such a task. If the spike on mortgage defaults comes sooner rather than later, this particular bailout package could prove to be very short-lived indeed.”

Huckabee is not wrong. The ouster of 3 supreme court judges is the most important election result for it destroys the sacrosanct impartiality of the 3rd branch, devoted not to the whims of the people but to the rule of law. Such an atrocity.

(hope you don’t mind me appending something to your post, square1)
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Also, too:
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["Countrywide Never Sent Mortgages to Trust, Now With Helpful Chart."]
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“These laws are based out of New York trust law, not congressional law. As Professor Adam Levitin noted in his testimony, between the New York trust law and the Pooling and Service Agreements there are very specific requirements to passing these notes down the chain. They are required to protect investors from both malfeasance, to avoid fraudulent transfer concerns, and to create ‘bankruptcy remoteness’ of that asset from the originator/sponsor.
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And it appears that during the worst excesses of the mortgage bubble the very basic rules of property transfer and record-keeping were ignored. The trust and its servicers have no standing to foreclose.
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Key point: Tim Geithner and Treasury did not announce this breakthrough in what we know. The Federal Reserve did not announce this breakthrough in what we know. Even at this late stage, the actions of the trust, servicers and depositors are opaque to regulators and investors.
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The only reason we know about this is from a New Jersey bankruptcy court. And it’s only because of the people in the field, deposing robosigners, piecing together the records and fighting to get information about what is actually broken in the biggest piece of our stalled economy, that we know any of this. Advances like this will disappear if Congress doesn’t allocate the $35 million dollars it is supposed to for legal aid groups, and you can now understand why lawmakers are hoping this request dies quietly.”

Generally it’s nice to have a link to whatever you’re quoting. That way, when your quote references “this” and “that” we will know what “this” and that” are. Otherwise it looks like you’re just making this stuff up.

Bad linky GC. Try this one:
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http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2010_11/026737.php

They’ve hit upon an ingenious method for extracting a country’s wealth, part 2.

(with charts and diagrams!)

“A brief budget history since the 80′s: We cut taxes, increased military spending and cut investment in our infrastructure, and the result was huge budget deficits and slower economic growth. Then in the 90′s we raised taxes on the rich and increased investment in the country and we had big budget surpluses and the economy was growing at a good clip. Then in the 00′s we again cut taxes on the rich and raised military spending and cut back on investing in the country, and went back to huge deficits (‘incredibly positive news’) and feeble economic growth culminating in the financial crash.

So now, to address the Reagan/Bush deficits the DC elites — the ‘serious people’ — are proposing … not raising taxes on the rich, not cutting military spending and not investing in the country. Instead they want to cut back more on the safety net and on services for the middle class. There really is a brain disease loose in DC.

The justification for DC’s refusal to fix a problem caused by tax cuts on the rich by restoring taxes on the rich is that you can’t raise taxes on the rich during a recession. The oft-repeated idea that taxes ‘take money out of the economy’ has become so ingrained that there is no discussion at all, it is just accepted as a given.[...]

Since the Reagan Revolution with its tax cuts for the rich, its anti-government policies, and its deregulation of the big corporations our democracy is increasingly defunded (and that was the plan), infrastructure is crumbling, our schools are falling behind, factories and supply chains are being dismantled, those still at work are working longer hours for fewer benefits and falling wages, our pensions are gone, wealth and income are increasing concentrating at the very top, our country is declining.”

Disclosure: I only read the first third of the Taibbi article, so he may have mentioned this.
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But to follow up on your post, now that the Fed has taken all these toxic residential and commercial MBS “assets” off of the books of the banks, the government has a massive conflict of interest in that they need foreclosures to go through in order to avoid massive losses.

yarg. thanks for the backup linky.

“On START, Obama wants to make it Jon Kyl vs. the world.”

Uh, the Times article you link to doesn’t even mention Jon Kyl. Au contraire, if you heard Obama’s presser, you would know that Obama inexplicably covered for Kyl, saying Kyl wasn’t opposed to New START, he just didn’t think there was time to vote on it. Uh-huh. Then, says Obama, right there in front of the world, “I take him at his word.” Obama should have made it Kyl, et al. v. the World. He didn’t.

The Constant Weader at http://www.RealityChex.com

Coal exports to China and import of global warming to US skyrockets.

“At ports in Canada, Australia, Indonesia, Colombia and South Africa, ships are lining up to load coal for furnaces in China, which has evolved virtually overnight from a coal exporter to one of the world’s leading purchasers.

The United States now ships coal to China via Canada, but coal companies are scouting for new loading ports in Washington State. New mines are being planned for the Rockies and the Pacific Northwest. Indeed, some of the world’s more environmentally progressive regions are nascent epicenters of the new coal export trade, creating political tensions between business and environmental goals.

Traditionally, coal is burned near where it is mined — particularly so-called thermal or steaming coal, used for heat and electricity. But in the last few years, long-distance international coal exports have been surging because of China’s galloping economy, which now burns half of the six billion tons of coal used globally each year.

As a result, not only are the pollutants that developed countries have tried to reduce finding their way into the atmosphere anyway, but ships chugging halfway around the globe are spewing still more.

And the rush to feed this new Asian market has helped double the price of coal over the past five years, leading to a renaissance of mining and exploration in many parts of the world. [...]

Last year, the United States exported only 2,714 tons of coal to China, according to the United States Energy Information Administration. Yet that figure soared to 2.9 million tons in the first six months of this year alone — huge growth, though still a minuscule fraction of China’s coal imports. “

If you think that the amount of precipitation is directly proportional to temperature, then you missed basic grade-school science. (You are aware that snow is a form of precipitation, I take it?)

“If a major, powerful political party is making a conscious decision about sabotage, the political world should probably take the time to consider whether this is acceptable, whether it meets the bare minimum standards for patriotism…”

Uh, Steve, the word you’re groping for avoiding is: T-R-A-I-T-O-R.

Rick Santorum??? You have got to be kidding. We voted out this liar in Pennsylvania. He is about as radical as they come. Right now, he lives in Virginia and if he decides to run, should do so from that state. The truth is virtually all the GOP candidates come with a lot of backage or lack of positive exposure. The ones that are exposed are also darn right scary. Palin should take Barbara Bush’s advice and move back to Alaska.

May your children and grandchildren live to reap the wages of your willful ignorance

“The rich are always going to say that, you know, ‘Just give us more money and we’ll go out and spend more and then it will all trickle down to the rest of you.’ But that has not worked the last 10 years, and I hope the American public is catching on.”

http://abcnews.go.com/ThisWeek/warren-buffett-read-lips-raise-taxes/story?id=12199889

via Washington Monthly

I am not the biggest Tom Friedman fan in the world, but it put it well week when he said “98 out of 100 scientists support the idea that carbon emssions are warming our planet. Repiblicans are asking us to bet on the chance that the other two are correct.”

The new right wing can, and surely will, deny the statistics that demonstrate the consequences of their other policies – the continuing high unemployment, the increasing concentration of wealth among the rich, the ever yawning deficit. But the increasing warmth of the planet overall is a trend that they will increasing difficulty to deny, alas. Look not at an oddball snowfall in Montana but the consistent, ever increasing drought in America’s southern tier to see the impacts of their intransigence.

I was about to ask whether you were in a coma during the summer, when there were record breaking heat waves in the U.S. and Europe. But then I realized that plays into the same asinine argument you were making about snowfall. A blizzard here and a heat wave there are not conclusive. The overall temperature trends are going in one direction.

You know, kind of like Glenn Beck saying he doesn’t believe in evolution because he’s never seen a half man half ape walking around.

(And yes, it took almost superhuman control not to make a mirror joke there.)

Another example of the failure of American education in that Rusty still doesn’t know the difference between weather (that is what is outside your cell right now) and climate (the long term trends of what is happening.

Tell the islanders it isn’t real as they move their villages and capitol. Tell the polar bears who are finding less and less polar ice. Tell the Alaskans who may find themselves over run by bears who are being restricted to a smaller and smaller area. Tell it to the south where the droughts are getting longer and water is getting to be critical in some areas.

But then I realized that plays into the same asinine argument
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That’s true — a single hot day is just as statistically irrelevant as a single cold day.
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But at least the aggregate of hot days is relevant. When GW skeptics talk about snow, the amount of precipitation is not even a metric of local coldness.
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If it were, then we would expect always to see a little bit of snow at around 0 C, and more snow at -10C, and even more snow at -20C. But obviously it doesn’t work that way.

And, of course, there is this:

October ranked the eighth warmest October on record. The first 10 months of 2010 tied with the same period in 1998 for the warmest combined land and ocean surface temperature on record. The global average land surface temperature for January–October was the second warmest on record behind 2007. The global ocean surface temperature for January–October tied with 2003 as the second warmest on record behind 1998.

http://www.noaanews.noaa.gov/stories2010/20101118_globalstats.html

No, bad policy was the subsidity to take a food crop and use it as a fuel source, creating food issues all around the world and raising chicken, pork, and beef prices here. It is bad to keep tankers of Brazilian ethanol at half of the US price off shore to protect the American industry.

Good old “free market” except when we are on the losing side. Still have a US protected industry in sugar to keep cheaper Central and South American sugar out. Another “free trade” victiory for US corporations.

Hopefully the next group of appointed judges will stand for right over popular and the vote would still be 7-0.

With Huckabuck’s feelings, we would still have separate but equal. There are some things you don’t ask for a majority decision. Slavery anyone?

Huckabuck likes the theory in The Pelican Brief. Fortunately, there is the Club for Growth who doesn’t like him and there is a judgment issue which we here have seen 3 times-2 murderes who killed again and his arrogance to have the hard drives on state computers destroyed when he left office against state law for retaining records.

Tax cuts for the rich may have created jobs in China or Brazil but if they had worked, why was Bush the first US president to actually lose jobs over his 8 years and was losing them at the rate of 700,000 a month in December 2008. Carville was right-”don’t piss in my shoe and tell me it is raining”.

Freeper and New Rusty:
Here is some news from Siberia. They still have cold winters but something interesting is happening as the permafrost thaws. You might to take an expedition there and find out for yourselves.
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http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20101122/ap_on_re_eu/eu_climate_siberian_meltdown

So true. I don’t know why Dems aren’t pointing out how unpatriotic the Reps are. And though I agree that the TSA rigors are offensive and unproductive, I know if this was a Rep administration, critics would be called traitors who wanted the terrorists to win.

Well they are using the aptly name Rapinscan machine promoted by ex-Homeland Security guy, Michael Chertoff.

“I don’t know why Dems aren’t pointing out how unpatriotic the Reps are.”
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The genius of the current Republican playbook, which seems quite mad and traitorous on its face, is that they know that the manifest, observable truth about Republicans is too shrill for The Village to talk about. They simply cannot acknowledge the reality of what “conservatives” have become – loyal only to the domestic enemies of the United States. Calling out the lies and treason of “conservatives” and the corporations who are actively subverting the national interest for political and financial gain, no matter how true and important a story, isn’t something the corporate press is interested in doing.

But Alex, the ever virginal Katherine Jean Lopez from the National Review has had such a crush on Santorum for so long.
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http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2010/11/barbara-bush-i-hope-sarah-palin-stays-in-alaska-video.php?ref=fpb
This is a link to Bar’s statement she hopes Palin stays in Alaska. This is the gentile lady who when asked about VP candidate Ferraro said she couldn’t say but it rhymed with “rich”. She was also so pleased when visiting the Katrina refugees at the dome in Texas, was pleased they had found shelter that was up to their normal standards. But the Bushes are just down home folks.
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Of course, I hope Sarah runs. She would be a disaster.

When the permafrost melts and releases all of the methane, it’s game over.

Fair and Balanced
FPN (Fox Propaganda Network)
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http://mediamatters.org/research/201011180031
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$40 million donated by FPN to potential GOP candidates.

Fox Propaganda Network (FPN) not racist, but number 1 with racists. So says a Fox employee:
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http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2010/11/quote-for-the-day-ctd.html

http://mediamatters.org/research/201011220028?newsref=www.eschatonblog.com
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From Beckstan:
On FPN (Fox Propaganda Network)
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Beck has found a town in Ohio that he is comparing to Bedford Falls, the fictional town in “A Wonderful Life”.
In his fevered brain the town is exceptional because it has not received any federal money. He is going there to help them out. In fact they received $6 million in stimulus money.
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I wonder if it has ever crossed Beck’s crazy thoughts that there would not have been a run on George’s old savings and loan, if federal insurance had been in place at that time. George could have saved his honeymoon money.