Ed Husain: US must stay out of Syria

A very reasonable argument:

In reality, this would mean the United States would once again carry the heavy burden of war. In NATO’s recent operation in Libya, the United States provided 75% of the reconnaissance data, surveillance, intelligence and refueling planes. Syria is not Libya, and NATO without the United States is not up to the job.
The Arab League is no match for a brutal Syrian regime backed by Russia, China and Iran.
In essence, therefore, we must stop pretending about NATO or the Arab League intervening and accept that it is not “international intervention,” but U.S. military intervention that is being sought in yet another Muslim-majority country. The Muslim dimension is important because the lessons of Lebanon, Iraq, Palestine and Afghanistan are that, invariably, intervention leads to occupation, which leads to varying degrees of Islamist radicalization
via West must not intervene militarily in Syria – CNN.com.

I would suggest you go read the rest of that, as it is a very well-reasoned argument against the United States getting involved in the Syria conflict. Now watch the Trotskyite Wilsonian Conservative war hawks tear this man to shreds for daring to say that we should not get involved.

The truth is folks; we are broke as a Nation. We just checked out of one Country and we are trying like heck to get out of another one. Going into this conflict would be, quite bluntly, crazy. Here is hoping that Obama listens to this reason and does not get involved. Syria is not Libya; and it damned sure is not Iraq. Different Nations, Different battles and a bunch of different issues here. Because of this, it would be in our best interest to stay out of it.

My thoughts on the mortgage settlement

You can read about this here, here, here and here.

First of all, let me say this; this issue here, above all of the others, is why I packed it in with the Democratic Party. On top of all of the class warfare, class resentment, racial resentment and everything else; was the realization that I made, that the Democratic Party, starting in 1973 and again in 1993 literally rigged the system to fail. This was by loosing credit restrictions to allow people, who had no business even getting loans, to get credit so easily.

Then once the system failed, the Government, started by George W. Bush in 2008 with tarp loans and the bailing out banks that were “Too big to fail.” Not to mention the fact that the Republicans ripped out regulations that made the whole thing like one million percent worse and when the Republican Congress received a warning that the whole thing was going to collapse, what did they do? They held a hearing and the CEO of Freddy and Fannie played the RACE CARD, they retreated! 😡 I won’t even get into the stupidity of the Federal Reserve, which really made some seriously idiotic mistakes.

Then instead of Obama being smart and saying, “We’re not picking favorites, we are going to allow the market to correct itself.” Instead, he continued the bailouts and even spent more on top of that. Not the mention his attempt to destroy our private healthcare system.

Anyhow, this settlement is not perfect; in fact, it stinks and someone has given a bullet-point list as to why.

This is via Naked Capitalism:

Here are the top twelve reasons why this deal stinks:
1. We’ve now set a price for forgeries and fabricating documents. It’s $2000 per loan. This is a rounding error compared to the chain of title problem these systematic practices were designed to circumvent. The cost is also trivial in comparison to the average loan, which is roughly $180k, so the settlement represents about 1% of loan balances. It is less than the price of the title insurance that banks failed to get when they transferred the loans to the trust. It is a fraction of the cost of the legal expenses when foreclosures are challenged. It’s a great deal for the banks because no one is at any of the servicers going to jail for forgery and the banks have set the upper bound of the cost of riding roughshod over 300 years of real estate law.
2. That $26 billion is actually $5 billion of bank money and the rest is your money. The mortgage principal writedowns are guaranteed to come almost entirely from securitized loans, which means from investors, which in turn means taxpayers via Fannie and Freddie, pension funds, insurers, and 401 (k)s. Refis of performing loans also reduce income to those very same investors.
3. That $5 billion divided among the big banks wouldn’t even represent a significant quarterly hit. Freddie and Fannie putbacks to the major banks have been running at that level each quarter.
4. That $20 billion actually makes bank second liens sounder, so this deal is a stealth bailout that strengthens bank balance sheets at the expense of the broader public.
5. The enforcement is a joke. The first layer of supervision is the banks reporting on themselves. The framework is similar to that of the OCC consent decrees implemented last year, which Adam Levitin and yours truly, among others, decried as regulatory theater.
6. The past history of servicer consent decrees shows the servicers all fail to comply. Why? Servicer records and systems are terrible in the best of times, and their systems and fee structures aren’t set up to handle much in the way of delinquencies. As Tom Adams has pointed out in earlier posts, servicer behavior is predictable when their portfolios are hit with a high level of delinquencies and defaults: they cheat in all sorts of ways to reduce their losses.
7. The cave-in Nevada and Arizona on the Countrywide settlement suit is a special gift for Bank of America, who is by far the worst offender in the chain of title disaster (since, according to sworn testimony of its own employee in Kemp v. Countrywide, Countrywide failed to comply with trust delivery requirements). This move proves that failing to comply with a consent degree has no consequences but will merely be rolled into a new consent degree which will also fail to be enforced. These cases also alleged HAMP violations as consumer fraud violations and could have gotten costly and emboldened other states to file similar suits not just against Countrywide but other servicers, so it was useful to the other banks as well.
8. If the new Federal task force were intended to be serious, this deal would have not have been settled. You never settle before investigating. It’s a bad idea to settle obvious, widespread wrongdoing on the cheap. You use the stuff that is easy to prove to gather information and secure cooperation on the stuff that is harder to prove. In Missouri and Nevada, the robosigning investigation led to criminal charges against agents of the servicers. But even though these companies were acting at the express direction and approval of the services, no individuals or entities higher up the food chain will face any sort of meaningful charges.
9. There is plenty of evidence of widespread abuses that appear not to be on the attorney generals’ or media’s radar, such as servicer driven foreclosures and looting of investors’ funds via impermissible and inflated charges. While no serious probe was undertaken, even the limited or peripheral investigations show massive failures (60% of documents had errors in AGs/Fed’s pathetically small sample). Similarly, the US Trustee’s office found widespread evidence of significant servicer errors in bankruptcy-related filings, such as inflated and bogus fees, and even substantial, completely made up charges. Yet the services and banks will suffer no real consequences for these abuses.
10. A deal on robosiginging serves to cover up the much deeper chain of title problem. And don’t get too excited about the New York, Massachusetts, and Delaware MERS suits. They put pressure on banks to clean up this monstrous mess only if the AGs go through to trial and get tough penalties. The banks will want to settle their way out of that too. And even if these cases do go to trial and produce significant victories for the AGs, they still do not address the problem of failures to transfer notes correctly.
11. Don’t bet on a deus ex machina in terms of the new Federal foreclosure task force to improve this picture much. If you think Schneiderman, as a co-chairman who already has a full time day job in New York, is going to outfox a bunch of DC insiders who are part of the problem, I have a bridge I’d like to sell to you.
12. We’ll now have to listen to banks and their sycophant defenders declaring victory despite being wrong on the law and the facts. They will proceed to marginalize and write off criticisms of the servicing practices that hurt homeowners and investors and are devastating communities. But the problems will fester and the housing market will continue to suffer. Investors in mortgage-backed securities, who know that services have been screwing them for years, will be hung out to dry and will likely never return to a private MBS market, since the problems won’t ever be fixed. This settlement has not only revealed the residential mortgage market to be too big to fail, but puts it on long term, perhaps permanent, government life support.
As we’ve said before, this settlement is yet another raw demonstration of who wields power in America, and it isn’t you and me. It’s bad enough to see these negotiations come to their predictable, sorry outcome. It adds insult to injury to see some try to depict it as a win for long suffering, still abused homeowners.

I have zero to add to this. The only thing I will ask is, who’s paying for all of this? Answer: You and Me — in Taxes. 😡

This is why we need a new political Party to get in there and fix this asinine morass.

Others: (All Liberals BTW…) American Prospect, Washington Post, US Politics, FT Alphaville, ourfuture.org/blogs_chrono/*, Wall Street Journal, Time, The Huffington Post, Swampland, ThinkProgress, Prairie Weather, Firedoglake, Business Insider, Financial Times and Discourse.net, ThinkProgress, The Huffington Post, Washington Monthly, Washington Post, Firedoglake, Rolling Stone, The Big Picture, Business Insider, Hit & Run, The Democratic Daily, Zandar Versus The Stupid, Feministing, ourfuture.org/blogs_chrono/*, No More Mister Nice Blog, Blog of New Orleans, Gambit, emptywheel, The Political Carnival, DealBook, The Page, Booman Tribune and Wall Street Journal, ProPublica, FORECLOSURE FRAUD, Business Insider and Calculated Risk, Washington Post, Daily Kos and Firedoglake, The Atlantic Online

Why do Republicans do stupid stuff like this?

…and to think, I supported this guy’s election:

Video:

Ohio Gov. John Kasich (R) does not generally script his speeches, preferring to form his remarks off-the-cuff based on notes. In the case of his State of the State address on Tuesday, that approach appears to have come back to bite the first-term chief executive, as he issued a rambling 100-minute speech that featured a series of bizarre — and potentially offensive — statements and actions.
During the address, Kasich imitated a Parkinson’s patient, cried, insulted the people of California, praised his “hot wife,” gave 14 shout-outs to the same person and played an awards show host while tearfully channeling a famously emotional fellow Ohio Republican, House Speaker John Boehner.
Roughly 70 minutes into the speech, Kasich discussed medical research and its impact on the Buckeye State’s economy. He was highlighting a deep brain massage program at Ohio State University to cure Parkinson’s when he started simulating the shaking actions that mark the disease as a means of highlighting what he and his cabinet saw when they visited the facility.
via John Kasich Parkinson’s Imitation Marks Ad Hoc Speech That Veered Off The Rails.

I know he was explaining what he saw, but still; did he have to do it like that?!

Oh, he wasn’t done there:

Kasich framed the speech as a pep talk for Ohioans, but in order to promote his record on job creation, he took swipes at residents of other states.
“A year ago, Ohio ranked 48th in job creation,” he said. “We trailed only Michigan and California in lost jobs — Michigan, the home of the auto industry that was devastated and California, of course, filled by a bunch of wackadoodles.”
In a break from tradition, the governor moved the speech’s location from the Capitol in Columbus to a school auditorium in the rural town of Steubenville, near the Pennsylvania border. He used the rural location to highlight new investment in hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, in the state, which will occur primarily in the areas closer to Pennsylvania and West Virginia. Frank Semple of MarkWest will be investing $500 million in starting new fracking businesses in the state, he announced.
The governor also championed the state’s coal industry.
“We’re the Saudi Arabia of coal. Clean it and burn it,” he said. “Clean it, Gordon, and burn it. Clean it, Battelle, and burn it. Use it.”
At one point, Kasich saluted his wife, Karen, describing her as his “hot wife.”
“And I also want to give a nice comment about my wife, Karen Kasich,” he said. “Sweetie, stand, take a little wave, would you, okay? I remember that cartoon that said, ‘Kasich will still not reveal how he snagged that hot wife.'”

Good luck in the reelection Governor. I mean, I hate to sound like I am whining; but this is the reason that the majority of Americans, who watch the liberal media, think that Republicans are just plain crazy. The sad part, the Republican party really does stand for some great things. Meaning those who actually stand by those things — unlike these two idiots; but yet, the Republican Party has idiots acting like this. It is truly a shame.

I guess what I trying to say here is this; I stopped voting for the Democratic Party back in 2008, because that party was on the crazy bus — headed for the cliff at one hundred miles an hour. (Figuratively, of course.) Now, it seems to me, that the Republican Party is loading up the same kind of a bus and is about to do the same thing. Which is why I am voting libertarian in 2012, because if the crazy, big government conservative wing of the Republican Party takes power again, which it will, if Mitt Romney gets the nomination; I really do not want to be responsible for it.

FBI says that “sovereign citizens” are a threat.

Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm….:

(Reuters) – Anti-government extremists opposed to taxes and regulations pose a growing threat to local law enforcement officers in the United States, the FBI warned on Monday.
These extremists, sometimes known as “sovereign citizens,” believe they can live outside any type of government authority, FBI agents said at a news conference.
The extremists may refuse to pay taxes, defy government environmental regulations and believe the United States went bankrupt by going off the gold standard.
Routine encounters with police can turn violent “at the drop of a hat,” said Stuart McArthur, deputy assistant director in the FBI’s counterterrorism division.
“We thought it was important to increase the visibility of the threat with state and local law enforcement,” he said.
via FBI warns of threat from anti-government extremists | Reuters.

I said this over at another blog’s comment section and I will say it here; A Government that watches it’s citizens and considers them a threat; fears those people and that is because they are doing wrong. This is nothing more than a police state action; and the American people should vote accordingly in 2012.

Further more, I find it most insulting that the United States Government would rather hunt down its own citizens, rather than hunt down and capture the real terrorists, who truly hate this Country and want to see it destroyed. That would be the radical Islamic Jihad Terrorists; you know like the ones that slammed those planes into the Trade Center, the Pentegon, and the field near Shanksville, Pa? — or people like these here? But no, our Government, see people like me; citizens who disagree with the policies of the socialist President to be a threat.

Having said that, I have an open message to the United States Government, Federal Bureau of Investigation, President Barack Hussein Obama, The United Nations and the rest of the Big Government morass:

Go Fuck Yourselves Sirs!

Which is all the more reason to go here and get armed with one of these:

That is all….

Others: Blogcritics, Hot Air, Weasel Zippers, Scared Monkeys, Atlas Shrugs, The PJ Tatler

Update: Like this posting? Please vote it up over at Reddit, please.

Why are Conservatives having dinner with Bill Ayers?

This bothers me and I will explain under the video: (H/T BreitBart via HotAir.com’s Headlines)

As I mentioned in my previous posting and in the related video; that the only difference between an internationalist Democrat and a Neoconservative is, quite frankly, the R and the D. Not to mention the fact that both take funding from special interest groups. Well, the more I want to believe that these current crop of Conservatives are truly Conservatives, the more that these current crop of Conservatives want to prove my suspicions, that they are nothing more than Trotskyite Conservatives who have much more in common with the far leftists than they would want us to really believe.

Video: Open Message to Michelle Malkin and Karl Rove

First of all, before you watch my video; Go read this article here, it will open in a new window — then come back here.

After reading that article, I went to twitter and really spoke my mind:

I am the type of person, if I make a mistake; I will admit it. I am also the type of person, that when I feel that I am right, I will back it up. So, I made this video:

I will simply end this blog posting with this; as I said in the video. To Michelle Malkin and Karl Rove; clean up the crap in your own party, before you unleash on my home town. The Republican Party is just as evil, just as screwed up and just hypocritical about many things, including foreign policy. I agree on Terrorism, it is a problem. But the Republican Party’s nominee for 2000 and 2004, who won those elections handled 9/11 in a wrong-headed way. Because of this, we are now having the problems in the middle east that we are having now. Maybe you should work to fix the problems with your party’s foreign policy and let Detroit sort out its own problems.

Thank You.

-Patrick

…and of course, Michelle Malkin’s resident useful idiot agrees with her.

Update: ….and if this isn’t bad enough, we have Andrew Breitbart meeting with Bill Ayers. You see now why I don’t want anything to do with the Republican Party and the majority of the Conservatives; or those who call themselves Conservative? 🙄

Update #2: In my video, I made a reference to Michelle Malkin using Frankfort School tactics, this is what I was referring to here:

Others: Alan Colmes’ Liberaland, The Atlantic Wire, New York Magazine, The Nation, Wonkette, Hollywood Reporter, nation.foxnews.com, The Hill, The Moderate Voice, Christian Science Monitor, Los Angeles Times, National Review, PopWatch, emptywheel, Poynter, ABCNEWS, Taylor Marsh, Outside the Beltway, The Raw Story, The Daily Caller, Hullabaloo and Daily Kos (via Memeornadum)

Religion of Peace?: Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, “Kill all Jews, annihilate Israel”

Hmmmmm:

The Iranian government, through a website proxy, has laid out the legal and religious justification for the destruction of Israel and the slaughter of its people.
The doctrine includes wiping out Israeli assets and Jewish people worldwide.
Calling Israel a danger to Islam, the conservative website Alef, with ties to Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said the opportunity must not be lost to remove “this corrupting material. It is a “‘jurisprudential justification” to kill all the Jews and annihilate Israel, and in that, the Islamic government of Iran must take the helm.”
The article, written by Alireza Forghani, an analyst and a strategy specialist in Khamenei’s camp, now is being run on most state-owned conservative sites, including the Revolutionary Guards’ Fars News Agency, showing that the regime endorses this doctrine.
via Ayatollah: Kill all Jews, annihilate Israel – WND .

But…..but…..but…. they’re peaceful Muslims!!!!!! 🙄

Why are they saying this?:

Because Israel is going to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities, Iran is justified in launching a pre-emptive, cataclysmic attack against the Jewish state, the doctrine argues.
On Friday, in a major speech at prayers, Khamenei announced that Iran will support any nation or group that attacks the “cancerous tumor” of Israel. Though his statement was seen by some in the West as fluff, there is substance behind it.
Iran’s Defense Ministry announced this weekend that it test-fired an advanced two-stage, solid-fuel ballistic missile and boasted about successfully putting a new satellite into orbit, reminding the West that its engineers have mastered the technology for intercontinental ballistic missiles even as the Islamic state pushes its nuclear weapons program.
The commander of the Revolutionary Guards, Brig. Gen. Seyyed Mehdi Farahi, stated in August that the Safir missile, which is capable of transporting a satellite into space, can easily be launched parallel to the earth’s orbit, which will transform it into an intercontinental ballistic missile. Western analysts didn’t believe this would happen until 2015. Historically, orbiting a satellite is the criterion for crediting a nation with ICBM capability.
Forghani details the Islamic duty of jihad as laid out in the Quran for the sake of Allah and states that “primary jihad,” according to some Shiite jurists, can only occur when the Hidden Imam, the Shiites’ 12th Imam Mahdi, returns. Shiites believe Mahdi’’s return will usher in Armageddon.
In the absence of the hidden Imam, Forghani says, “defensive jihad” could certainly take place when Islam is threatened, and Muslims must defend Islam and kill their enemies. To justify such action, Alef quotes the Shiites’ first imam, Ali, who stated “Waging war against the enemies with whom war is inevitable and there is a strong possibility that in near future they will attack Muslims is a must and the duty of Muslims.” In this regard, Ayatollah Khamenei has issued a fatwa in which he has even authorized carrying out primary jihad in the age of the absence of the Hidden imam under the authorization of Vali Faghih.

So, because Israel wants to protect itself from a insane regime, that is dedicated to the destruction of Israel and the Jews; that justifies their desire to destroy Israel and America? Then, to justify this; they use a false, throwback religion to justify it? Oh brother… 🙄 I believe that Israel and United States of America ought to give these turban wearing pieces of human excrement what they really desire to have. Which is all out war and the destruction of their Nation. I mean the international community has bent over backwards for these people and yet they still will not work with the U.N. So, I say, give them what they want — and crush the Islamic Republic of Iran to powder and be done with them.

Also, before anyone comes to my comment section and accuses me of not being a libertarian or a Constitutionalist; allow me to say this — on this issue of Jihad, radical Islam and American defense. I do not agree with Ron Paul’s idiotic assumptions that these are peaceful people. I am afraid that this is a misconception. These leaders and most of the people in the Nation of Iran; are NOT peaceful people. They have the same mentality that the hijackers that flew those planes into a World Trade Center Buildings in Manhattan, The Pentagon and into the field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania. The mentality is that the United States of America is the great Satan of the World and that they are the supporter of Israel and of the Jew. This is the very same mentality of the Nazi Party of Germany and it is one that the United States of America crushed during World War II, along with the imperialistic empire of Japan. We did it once and we can do it again. We just have to elect a President who sees this threat for what it really is and decides to act accordingly.

That is what this Nation needs in 2012.

Others: Jihad Watch, Weasel Zippers and THE ASTUTE BLOGGERS

Video: Happy Birthday President Reagan

(Via Americans for Prosperity – H/T Ed Morrissey)

Debate This: Is this Pete Hoekstra ad racist?

(H/T HotAir headlines)

I honestly do not know if it is or not. If anything, one could say that it is pandering to paranoia or populist sentiment in the conservative movement?

But, does it rise to the level of racism?

Comments welcomed here.

Charlie Rangel continues his role as a race-baiting twit

What a buffoon… 🙄

Video:

The story:

On of the main tenets of Eric Bolling‘s show Follow the Money is that a free market economy is fairer and more successful than one administered by the goverment. Tonight, Rep. Charlie Rangel ventured onto the program to make the opposite case: that government jobs were in some ways more attractive, because minorities and women experienced less discrimination.
Bolling opened the floor by asking why the president promotes government jobs. The distrust of the government didn’t surprise the longtime Congressman, but he noted that “a lot of women are involved in these lower income jobs, a lot of minorities,” and later explained, “the government doesn’t have the racism and discrimination that the private sector enjoys.” This, to Rangel, means that “a lot of people could to better with the government job,” both minorities, women, and the elderly, working in places such as the post office. Bolling asked again to confirm whether he really meant the private sector had discrimination.
via Rangel Says Private Sector is Racist – Charlie Rangel – Fox Nation.

Let’s see here; where’s that graphic at?

Whoop, there it is! 😆