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  1. 1

    I like Ike!

    http://www.utne.com/politics/W.....hower.aspx

    The 1950s might look like the golden years to some Tea Partiers. It was back before the Kennedys, the Clintons, and Obama ruined this great country, always looking to tax the rich, ignoring the guiding principles of capitalism. That view of the world ignores the actual history, argues author Toby Barlow in the Huffington Post.

    Dwight D. Eisenhower, president from 1953 until 1961, passed the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956, a massive public works project that today would be the equivalent of $197 billion, reports Barlow. Obama’s $50 billion infrastructure proposal clocks in at a fraction of the price. And the Federal Aid Highway Act wasn’t paid for by some grand Republican—or Tea Party—plan that all at once lowered taxes and the deficit; it was paid for by a lot of new taxes. The richest among the U.S. population during the tenure of that celebrated Army general were taxed a staggering 91 percent, compared to today’s 35 percent,

  2. 2

    Abe Lincoln and Dwight Eisenhower were two biggest tramplers of states rights this country has ever known!

  3. 3

    We should note that one of the ways Eisenhower got the interstate highway bill through the Republican Congress was argue it was necessary for national defense against communist invasions. At least part of the act designated the interstates as “National Defense Highways”, and mandated that in the event of a national emergency, they would be cleared of civilian traffic and confined entirely to military use.

    I guess the only way to get Republicans to vote for anything is to label it a defense bill.

  4. 4

    Hello!
    You all were nice enough to feature our video “Hockey Mama For Obama” back during the election, so we’d love to share our latest with you!
    Hockey Mama For Obama takes on Christine O’Donnell’s “I Am You” ad, short and sweet!

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WgE_VwaOdrE

    Thanks for your time!

  6. 6

    It’s a big, fifty-cent word, I know. But cognitive dissonance is the reason you find a sign calling Obama a “long-legged mack daddy” just fifteen feet in front of a woman telling a tea party crowd to keep their eye out for saboteurs pretending to be racist tea partiers.

    Discuss.

  7. 7

    @ 4 Now that is just damn funny. I don’t care who you are, you gotta laugh at that. I am now humming the refrain! . . . “I’m not you, I’m not you, you’re not me. . .”

  8. 8

    @5,

    So, if somebody can’t make the payments for the over-priced house they willing purchased, it’s hunky-dory for them to stop payment on the house and just live in it for free???

  9. 9

    Some people are making a big deal out of Christine O’Donnell and the witch-thing. Hell, Wicca is just as valid a religion as Christianity, Islam or Judaism. It’s an accepted religion by the Department of Defense and the Veterans’ Administration. How cares if O’Donnell is a witch or not?

  10. 10

    @9 Once again: it’s the hypocrisy. The kind of Christian extremism O’Donnell represents would prefer, often as not, to burn witches. (Or at minimum, deny them the status you mention.) Same reason nobody much cares if Anderson Cooper hires illegal aliens. Lou Dobbs, however…

  11. 11

    @10

    If Republicans can’t comprehend hypocrisy after the Rush Limbaugh pain killer revelation, they probably never will. However, I respect your effort at trying.

  12. 12

    @9
    She says she wasn’t a Wiccan. I believe her as the story was that she went with a date to a satanic alter and satan isn’t part of Wicca.

    She can’t even keep her religions straight.

    @10

    The kind of Christian extremism O’Donnell represents would prefer, often as not, to burn witches.

    Or maybe they’d try to drown them.

  14. 14

    Pretty funny….

    The Republicans are running an add in West Virginia accusing the Democratic candidate of supporting Obama. (Shrug).

    But what’s funny is how the ad was created. It was filmed in Philadelphia, not West Virginia. And the casting agency put out a call asking for actors who could create a “hick” appearance for the ads.

    “We are going for a ‘Hicky’ Blue Collar look,” it said. “These characters are from West Virginia so think coal miner/trucker looks.”

    http://seattletimes.nwsource.c.....enate.html

    Of course, now the Republican candidate and the Republican party are all tyring to distance themselves from the add, saying that they had nothing to do with it, it was all the fault of the casting agency.

    But they didn’t seem to have a problem while it was airing. Now that the story’s leaked, they’ve pulled it from YouTube and their websites, and are trying to pull it from ad rotation as well.

  16. 16

    @15 Isn’t that great? It should be a Dem campaign commercial in Delaware. Bury the bi…, er, witch with it.

  17. 17

    @8, No, now a bank or lender that attempts a repo will have to have actual lawful, contractually binding paperwork to foreclose on a property. It’ll be a bit harder to foreclose on a guy who paid cash for his home, and never had a mortgage.

    And regarding your flying monkey, O’Really, ‘Barney-Frank-caused-the-global-financial-meltdown’ philosophy, this is just another nail in the coffin of you sad clowns who believe it was the borrower’s fault; the banks didn’t even take the time to create legitimate paperwork because they thought they were just pushing the responsibility off to someone else (European banks, for example, who were sold a bill of goods blessed by American ratings agencies). If your brother-in-law approached you to borrow money, and you knew he couldn’t pay it back, you be a stupid fuck to lend it to him. The same goes for banks, who actually practiced these basic lending behaviors until the derivative market was spawned. Wake up and smell the coffee.

  18. 18

    Re 17

    Actually a true conservative believes that if a bank didn’t practice due diligence, they should suffer the consequences. Federal money bailing banks out for bad decisions was a shame bordering on criminal. If a bank makes bad loans that default, they should be allowed to fail.

    But I also believe, unlike you, that signing my name to a contract binds me to the terms of that contract. I read and re-read my mortgage contracts. I had them checked out by my attorney. Before I signed a note worth many years of my income I actually read and understood the document which effected this. And if I hadn’t, I would have accepted full responsibility for the stupidity of failing to do so.

    Most of thsese ‘fraudulent’ foreclosures were going to happen anyway. The notes were in default, the borrower wasn’t paying his or her mortgage. The banks skipped a step, and someone should be held responsible for it at the respective financial institutions. But the left pretending that innocent men and women are being pushed out of their homes by the evil banks is just ridiculous. These folks weren’t paying the mortgage for Gods sake.

  20. 20

    Proud,

    I made no moral comment. I made no judgements. I can feel badly for a family that bet that the balloon payment would be workable. Or that the variable rate interest loan would work for them. Or that buying a $400,000 house on $30,000 of annual income would work. I can feel badly that they bet and lost. This doesn’t translate to excusing them from their obligations.

    Honestly, I don’t feel badly for the banks, who business is assessing risks though. Nor do I believe that they should be freed from the consequences of those poor risk assesments.

    All I point out is that the vast majority of these ‘fraudulent’ foreclosures were going to happen. From what I can gather people at the banks signed affadavits for which they didn’t have authority. The actual facts of the foreclosures aren’t at issue. True, if this happened someone at the bank should lose their jobs, but it doesn’t change the fact that the notes weren’t being paid by the borrowers.

  21. 21

    Lost @ 20: “…From what I can gather people at the banks signed affadavits for which they didn’t have authority. The actual facts of the foreclosures aren’t at issue….”

    Well, that’s part of the question, isn’t it? In Florida, they’ve set up “foreclosure courts” staffed by retired part-time judges who go through a couple hundred of them in a morning. A journalist attending one such hearing said that at the beginning of the hearing, the judge pointed out that he was determined to finish by noon (just three hours later), and to speed the process along he wasn’t going to listen to any arguments from the homeowners that they didn’t really owe the money, or that the bank attempting to foreclose didn’t really own the mortgage or the note, or that the notice wasn’t served properly, etc. In other words, he was just going to rubber-stamp the bank’s paperwork. Homeowners who attempted to argue were told to shut up or be jailed for contempt of court. They were informed they could appeal his ruling, which of course wouldn’t be heard until long after their home was sold and they had been evicted.

    One fellow, a hispanic who argued that the bank had made a clerical error and not recorded his payment, and refused any future payments until he made a duplicate payment to replace the “lost” one (and had a file folder of correspondence and copies of cancelled checks to back up his assertions), was forcibly removed by the baliff. As he left, the judge muttered that he was tired of dealing with “deadbeats”. (Having had a similar dispute with Washington Mutual a few years back, I can sympathise with the guy).

    Others who tried to argue that they had a new payment arrangement approved under the federal government’s programs, but the bank’s computers weren’t accepting the new payment amounts, were similarly brushed aside. After the hearing, the judge asked the baliff – “what is this federal refinance program that these people keep talking about? I’ve never heard of such a thing!”

    And in the midst of this, comes word that the banks weren’t even checking their own paperwork – bank officers signing the affidavits admitted that they only checked the dates, and had no idea if the amounts were correct, whether the bank still owned the note and mortgage or had sold it to another bank, or whether the mortgage was actually in default at all.

    So the upshot is – we really don’t know who is behind in their payments at the time of the mortgage foreclosure, and who isn’t. Neither do the banks. And the court certainly can’t say, with any certainty.

  22. 22

    By NICHOLAS THOMPSON, NYT Book Review, 22 August 2010

    … Rhodes opens with a rather familiar account of the 1990-91 Persian Gulf war, but he then moves to the quiet, but more interesting, story of the weapons inspectors who patrolled the country between that war and the next one, in 2003.
    The book’s most dramatic passage covers the day in September 1991 when inspectors entered Baghdad’s Design Center compound. At first, their search seemed futile. Someone had removed the good stuff from the files. But after four hours, the inspectors stumbled into a basement room that had apparently been missed. And there, in one of the first boxes they opened, was a vivid, damning and thorough six-month interim report on Saddam Hussein’s nuclear weapons program. “The message came over the secure radio: ‘we found it.’ This was one of the best moments of my nonproliferation life,” one of the discoverers recalled. They smuggled the material out with the help of a medical team, perhaps violating the Geneva Conventions. The next day brought more drama: the inspectors were taken hostage, in a parking lot. They were held four days before being released.

    … Of course, neither of those two episodes has an entirely happy ending. In Iraq, the inspectors found lots of evidence showing that Hussein had a lively weapons program before 1991 (which he did) and then nothing showing that he continued it (because he hadn’t). But they couldn’t prove that the program had ended and, 12 years after the parking-lot confrontation, the United States invaded again.

    Something from the always-reliable New York Times for the Bush Lied idiots to choke on.

  23. 23

    Obama better than Reagan!
    —————————————-

    So CNN reports September “jobs took a hit”. Great, but in exactly the way Republicans want. Private sector jobs were up again (as they have been for many many months) and government jobs were down. Isn’t this EXACTLY what Republicans LIKE? The stock market has gone from 6,600 to 11,000 under this “socialist” (giggle). We haven’t entered a Reagan “double dip” recession and unemployment is still far lower than it hit under Saint Reagan (all bless his name). And just like Reagan who bailed out the Savings & Loans, Obama continued the bail outs of big industries this time. So again, following in his footsteps, the Republicans should be holding rallies for Obama…LOL.

    So this makes Obama a MEGA SAINT since he’s out performing Reagan in polling, unemployment, economic recovery and stock market growth. Hmmm.

  25. 25

    Large American companies are sitting on trillions of cash trying to figure out either

    1) enrich executives and board member even more than they have already through buying back stock and other manuveurs

    or

    2) figure out a way to cut out competitors by buying them. This by the way tends to shed jobs.

    But don’t tax those companies – that’s a job killer!

  26. 26

    And those companies aren’t about to hire any more people in large amount.

    Still too much unused capacity in their operations from sluggish demand. It’d be dumb.

  28. 28

    @12,

    Thanks for reminding us that Wiccans don’t have a “devil” or a hell. It’s an earth-based religion, mainly celebrating the seasons and cycles of the Moon and nature.

    I made the assumption that O’Donnell was being accused of being a Wiccan witch, largely because those are the only ones I know. Usually they’re of the Alexandrian or Gardnerian Traditions, but there a lot of eclectics out there, too.

    The best thing about Wicca is there’s no central authority – no hierarchy, no male-only priests, no bishops, no monsignors, no cardinals, no popes. There is no intermediary standing between a Wiccan and the God and Goddess. Good idea – cut out the middle man!!

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