Silver Falls Bank, Silverton, OR.
For those keeping score at home, that’s a total of three Pacific NW banks so far this year. The previous two were Pinnacle Bank of Beaverton, OR., and Bank of Clark County of Vancouver, WA.
Of course, the number of banks is not so important as the size. If you go back to last September, there was some big NW banky thing that had to be dealt with, even if they were technically listed as Nevada and Utah institutions.
I have to say, cat blogging is way cuter. I can haz natunilization pweeze? :-)
Check out the latest New York Review of Books review of Jeff Madrick’s, “The Case For Big Government”. The review is entitled “Government Beyond Obama?” written by Richard Parker.
Ya, baby! Big government is back! (maybe).
Eat Shit, Homophobes!!!
Ryan Allen, a gay senior at Mason University and part-time entertainer who performs in drag, has been elected the 30,000-student college’s Homecoming Queen, and was wildly cheered when he was crowned before a large crowd.
A spokesperson for the school’s College Republicans called Allen’s election victory “silly” and said her group is ignoring him. Your party loses again, sweetie!
Calling mr cynikal klown…Wells Fargo closed today at $10.80/share. You were touting your stock market acumen not long ago when it was at $25/share because it had a “safe” 5% dividend, and thus was a good ‘long term hold”. I called bullshit at the time.
Dividend plays are for widows, orphans, and suckers.
Nice call, fucking genius. Yea, yea….you will undoubtedly come back and crow about all your winners. BFD.
Speaking of College Republicans, aren’t they the group that MILKS VULNERABLE SENIOR CITIZENS? Yes, I believe so!! This is what the fishwrapper uncovered about their nefarious fundraising operations:
“Fund-raising group milks vulnerable senior citizens
“By David Postman and Jim Brunner
“Seattle Times staff reporters
“The College Republican National Committee has raised $6.3 million this year through an aggressive and misleading fund-raising campaign that collected money from senior citizens ….
“Many of the top donors were in their 80s and 90s. The donors wrote checks … to groups with official sounding-names such as ‘Republican Headquarters 2004,’ ‘Republican Elections Committee’ and the ‘National Republican Campaign Fund.’ But all of those groups … were simply projects of the College Republicans, who collected all of the checks.
“And little of the money went to election efforts … nearly 90 percent went to direct-mail vendors and postage expenses, according to records filed with the Internal Revenue Service.
“Some of the elderly donors, meanwhile, wound up bouncing checks and emptying their bank accounts. ‘I don’t have any more money,’ said Cecilia Barbier, a 90-year-old retired church council worker …. ‘That was all my savings that they got.’ … Barbier said she ‘wised up.’ But not before she made more than 300 donations totaling nearly $100,000 this year, the group’s fund-raising records show. Now, she said, ‘I’m really scrounging.’
“In Van Buren, Ark., Monda Jo Millsap, 68, said she emptied her savings account by writing checks to College Republicans, then got a bank loan of $5,000 and sent that, too, before totaling her donations at more than $59,000. …
“[S]ince at least 2001, some leaders of College Republicans have objected to the tone and targeting of the fund raising done by Response Dynamics, the Virginia company that handles the direct-mail campaign. ‘We felt their fund-raising practices were deceptive, to say the least,’ said George Gunning, former treasurer of the College Republicans. Gunning … and two other board members fought to cut ties with Response Dynamics but were blocked by … Scott Stewart, the chairman of the College Republicans ….
“The board debated the fund-raising practices after the family of an elderly Indiana woman with Alzheimer’s disease demanded that her donations be returned. The woman’s family said it had sent a registered letter asking that she be taken off the mailing list, but the solicitations continued. Only after a newspaper reported on the story did the College Republicans refund $40,000 to the family, according to Jackie Boyle, one of the woman’s nieces.
“‘I think this is a nationwide scam,’ Boyle said on hearing of recent complaints. ‘They’re covering the whole country … they need to be investigated.’ …
“The Washington State Attorney General’s Office received at least six complaints about the College Republicans fund-raising letters …. The complaints cited ‘fund raising representations’ and ‘senior exploitation.’ …
“This year, as millions of dollars flowed in, College Republicans falsely claimed in letters that checks were only trickling in and that the group was in a constant budget crisis. And the elderly continued to be a major source of donations. There are far more retired people giving to College Republicans than to any other IRS-regulated independent political committee, IRS records indicate.
“The Times was able to determine the ages of 49 of the top 50 individual donors to the College Republicans. The median age of the donors is 85, and 14 of them are 90 or older.
“Donors interviewed this week frequently expressed disbelief when they were told how much they gave to the College Republicans. ‘That can’t be true,’ said Francis Lehar, a 91-year-old retired music publisher, when he was told … he gave the College Republicans nearly $23,000. …
From January through September, the Massachusetts man wrote 90 checks to the group, records show.
“The letters are computer-generated, personalized form letters, but the recipients often view them as personal correspondence. … For … donors, the mail was part nuisance, part companion. Several spoke of sorting the mail and writing checks almost as their job this campaign year.
Where the money goes
“The College Republicans had another warning in September 2003, when the Center for Public Integrity, a Washington, D.C.-based watchdog group, issued a report on the explosive fund-raising growth by the College Republicans. The report noted that several elderly donors who were contacted did not appear to know to whom they had given money.
“Response Dynamics, its affiliates and other companies related to the fund raising get most of the money raised by the College Republicans. About $9 million of the College Republicans’ reported spending this year appeared to go into fund-raising expenses, according to a Times analysis of reports filed with the IRS. … The large amount of money devoted to fund raising … is unusual among the top ranks of the burgeoning field of so-called 527 independent political groups. …
“Officials of Response Dynamics have publicly described their strategy. ‘Direct mail fund raising means asking for money and asking for it often,’ company President Ron Kanfer wrote in a 1991 article on the art of the pitch. ‘You must literally force them to send money.’
“An August fund-raising letter showed that aggressive approach, telling donors there was a Democratic conspiracy to intercept the committee’s mail: ‘Given what I’ve learned, you and I must take every precaution necessary. Apparently the Democrats don’t have any concern about hurting you, your family or America. Their sole concern is revenge — vengeance — retribution.’
“With the approach of Tuesday’s election, the letters have become even more breathless. Last Saturday, a donor received what appears to be a photocopied handwritten note from the director of one committee: ‘Please understand I have no one else to turn to. This is serious: We will have to close our doors! I need your help now!’ …
“The letters imply close connections to Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Republican leaders and the party organization. The pitches sometimes promise that special messages will be hand-delivered to Bush or others if they are sent back with a donation.
“Most donors interviewed said they get up to 50 solicitations in the mail each day. That pile can include four or more from the College Republicans. ‘My house looks like a post office, and I’m not exaggerating,’ said Anne Kravic, a retired school-district employee in Parma, Ohio. … ‘I wouldn’t say that a single week passed I didn’t send something and sometimes twice a week, depending on how serious the situation was according to them,’ she said. Her small monthly pension cannot keep up with the life of a political financier. ‘I’m tired of it. I’m quitting. It is too much for me. My bank account has been overdrawn already,’ she said.
“Elliot Baines is an 84-year-old Florida retiree who says he has a hard time just carrying the mail he gets each day now. ‘It’s almost too much for me to handle,’ he said. Baines was surprised to hear he had given more than $63,000 and that it had all gone to College Republicans. He said he was swayed to give, sometimes against his better instincts, by the power of the letters. ‘I thought if I paid them off once it would send them away, but it just encourages them to send more,’ he said. ‘It is just a rat race in this house to pay off these people and hope that they quit. But they don’t. They keep sending.’
Quoted under fair use; for complete story and/or copyright info see http://seattletimes.nwsource.c.....bs28m.html
“They keep sending….” Have you noticed that those ubiquitous credit card offers in the mail have dropped dramatically?
Perhaps there are some good things coming out of the self-immolation of the financial system.
A drag queen getting elected as the homecoming queen? That is fairly ridiculous. I ran it past my gay brother, and he agreed with me.
They must have a lot of time on their hands at Mason U.
@6 From reading Sunday morning police blotters in college town newspapers, it has always seemed to me that rich frat boys (you know, kids from Republican families who grow up to become Republican businessmen and politicians) have too much time on their hands. They sure don’t spend it studying — that’s evident from the wreckage they leave in their wake later in their lives when they run businesses and governments. They spend way too much of their time drinking and doing drugs, getting in fights, overturning cars, raising hell, raping women, falling out of windows, and destroying things.
1. Proud To Be An Ass spews:
Is that really what you want??
You must be either a Government Employee or a real loser incapable of competing to cheer for this. Washington State is known for Big Government. $8.3 BILLION Budget shortfall and $25 BILLION or so Deficit in State Pension Fund. Works reaaaaaaaaaaaaal good Proud.
Be careful what you wish for.
3. Proud To Be An Ass spews:
I’ve been out of that WFC for months.
I’ve just started averaging in to a couple funds slooooooooowly. Less than 10% of 1/2 of my liquid assets that I intend to eventually have in equities. Just put a bit more in on Friday. If I lose, I can carry it back against my prior gains.
I am looking at Wells Fargo again.
We’ll see.
Market Pimp @8:
Why don’t you read the article, assemble a cogent counter-argument (you can get help if needed), and then get back to me.
Otherwise, go fuck yourself, charlatan.
@8: Your heroic big banks are on the hook for TRILLIONS. Now tell how good a job they do, eh? “Masters of the Universe”? Yea, fucking right.
You really are a putz.
re 8: Let me explain it to you in terms that even an idiot like yourself can understand: There is a lot of power out there in the world. Large corporations occupy that space and do what they please in order to make THIS QUARTERS profit. Beyond that, they rarely think.
The only power large enough to have some control is a government of the people, by the people, and for the people — which you and your duncible cohorts intend to drown in the bathtub.
Do you have the mistaken notion that if you could accomplish that drowning that YOU would have more freedom? Think about that next time your kid is playing with a toy Chinese fire engine covered in green leaded paint.
In fairness to the Chinese, they probably thought we said not to use red paint.
There’s been a “free market” in finance as long as I can remember with only an SEC to police inside trading and disclosure.
Gee what happened? I thought the free market was “self-regulating”. First the S&L’s died under a Republican’s watch and now the banks as a whole are practically in receivership as a result of the laisezz-faire attitude of the Bushies.
The trolls drunk on Limbaugh, Matt Sludge and in Cynical’s case, Reader’s Digest are at a loss. All they can babble is idiocies about CRA, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and Barney Frank.
John reminds me of a pre-WWII German citizen, applauding the government increasing power grab.
“If you want a point after which a Second Depression became inevitable, the guy holding the pen on that disastrous decision was who?
“The bill that ultimately repealed the Act was introduced in the Senate by Phil Gramm (Republican of Texas) and in the House of Representatives by Jim Leach (R-Iowa) in 1999. The bills were passed by Republican majorities on party lines by a 54-44 vote in the Senate[11] and by a 343-86 vote in the House of Representatives[12]. After passing both the Senate and House the bill was moved to a conference committee to work out the differences between the Senate and House versions. The final bipartisan bill resolving the differences was passed in the Senate 90-8 (1 not voting) and in the House: 362-57 (15 not voting). Having majorities large enough to override any possible Presidential veto, the legislation was signed into law by President Bill Clinton on November 12, 1999.”
Yeah, that’s right….the same Phil Gramm who’s wife had a hand in the Enron trading loophole that set up the rest of it. Oh, what a fine bubble it’s been, too.”*
Forget the right wing crap blaming Freddie, Fannie and Barney Frank.
*from George Ure- urbansurvival.com
11. Proud To Be An Ass spews:
Mine??
Clinton & Obama received WAAAAAAAAAY more support than McCain.
Keep dreamin’ though.
troll-
These KLOWNS may or may not see what ever-reaching government can do. Problem is they are a little shy on their history acumen.
Nazi’s, Japan, China, Soviets and on & on.
@17: The problem is the destruction of democracy…not “big government” per se. Big corporations, absent restraint by We the People are inherently anti-democratic.
But you only reveal the depth of your ignorance. Your “acumen” is a farce.
Puddy read the “25 People to Blame for the Financial Crisis” in Time.
Angelo Mozilo –
$49,895 Republican
$22,998 Democrat
$49,000 special interest
total: $121,893
Joe Cassano –
$501 Republican
$6,700 Democrats
total: $6,700
AIG $$$$
Cycle Total Democrats Republicans % to Dems % to Repubs
2008 $801,244 $559,226 $241,118 70% 30%
2006 $650,375 $361,081 $274,294 56% 42%
2004 $1,076,948 $593,612 $482,336 55% 45%
Franklin Raines – fired the whistleblower who fingered the illegal practice of handing out $245 million in bonuses over five years to the Fannie Mae Democratic supporters.
$2,000 Republican
$60,000 Democrat
$1,000 special interest
total: $63,000
Kathleen Corbett –
$1,250 Republican
$14,400 Democrat
$3,000 special interest
total: $17,550
Herb and Marion Sandler –
$0 Republican
$341,500 Democrat
$2,505,013 MoveOn.org – not a special interest
total: $2,846,513 to all to the Democratic
Herb and Marion were/are allies of left-wing billionaire George Soros who has all his money in Curacao not paying US Taxes and nary a peep from the Goldy’s NorthWest Division of Lunatic Moonbats
Richard Fuld –
$32,900 Republican
$127,650 Democrat
$43,400 special interest
total: $203,950
Stan O’Neal –
$5,000 Republican
$7,800 Democrat
$2,000 special interest
total: $14,800
David Lereah
$500 Democrats
National Ass Realtors
Cycle Total Democrats Republicans % to Dems % to Repubs
2008 $4,121,945 $2,339,495 $1,781,450 57% 43%
2006 $4,018,182 $1,971,582 $2,025,600 49% 50%
2004 $4,041,427 $1,924,583 $2,106,844 48% 52%
Someone else can continue… I’m Hungry.
Do you really want that? These goof balls may or may not see what ever-reaching government can do.