Retreat: White House to offer ‘Accommodation’ to religious groups on contraception issue

That was quick….

The Video:

Video: New RNC Ad — Five Years Later

The real question is this; would America be any better under a big Government statist Republican like Mitt Romney or Newt Gingrich…. or a Christian Statist like Rick Santorum?

I tend to believe that not to be the case.

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

Coming to an airspace near you: 30,000 surveillance drones!

Remember what I wrote this?

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.

Well, here you go, this confirms what I said….:

Look! Up in the sky! Is it a bird? Is it a plane? It’s … a drone, and it’s watching you. That’s what privacy advocates fear from a bill Congress passed this week to make it easier for the government to fly unmanned spy planes in U.S. airspace.
The FAA Reauthorization Act, which President Obama is expected to sign, also orders the Federal Aviation Administration to develop regulations for the testing and licensing of commercial drones by 2015.
Privacy advocates say the measure will lead to widespread use of drones for electronic surveillance by police agencies across the country and eventually by private companies as well.
“There are serious policy questions on the horizon about privacy and surveillance, by both government agencies and commercial entities,” said Steven Aftergood, who heads the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation also is “concerned about the implications for surveillance by government agencies,” said attorney Jennifer Lynch.
via Drones over U.S. get OK by Congress – Washington Times.

The nanny staters and big Government socialists will carp — But-but-but-but it is for the greater good!:

“It’s not all about surveillance,” Mr. Aftergood said.
Homeland Security has deployed drones to support disaster relief operations. Unmanned aircraft also could be useful for fighting fires or finding missing climbers or hikers, he added.
The FAA has issued hundreds of certificates to police and other government agencies, and a handful to research institutions to allow them to fly drones of various kinds over the United States for particular missions.
The agency said it issued 313 certificates in 2011 and 295 of them were still active at the end of the year, but the FAA refuses to disclose which agencies have the certificates and what their purposes are.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation is suing the FAA to obtain records of the certifications.

Good luck with that lawsuit. The Government only reveals what they want you to know. You can go read the rest of that; but one thing that stands out:

Currently, the only barrier to the routine use of drones for persistent surveillance are the procedural requirements imposed by the FAA for the issuance of certificates,” said Amie Stepanovich, national security counsel for the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a research center in Washington.
The Department of Transportation, the parent agency of the FAA, has announced plans to streamline the certification process for government drone flights this year, she said.

I give it about a year or so; and they Governments — local, state and federal will be flying these drones, with equipment in them to see inside houses and know what you are doing. It is what the liberal Democrats and Statist Republicans in this Country have wanted to do for years. Now the technology is there and they can do it.

As Randy Weaver found out, the Government is not your friend; and if and when they want to come after you, they will. This right here will make that feat even more possible.

(H/T HotAir.com Headlines)

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.

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)

The obligatory Israel might attack Iran posting

I swear, if I had a nice, crisp, one hundred dollar bill for every time I saw this question or headline — I could retire early.

The story:

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta has a lot on his mind these days, from cutting the defense budget to managing the drawdown of U.S. forces in Afghanistan. But his biggest worry is the growing possibility that Israel will attack Iran over the next few months.
Panetta believes there is a strong likelihood that Israel will strike Iran in April, May or June — before Iran enters what Israelis described as a “zone of immunity” to commence building a nuclear bomb. Very soon, the Israelis fear, the Iranians will have stored enough enriched uranium in deep underground facilities to make a weapon — and only the United States could then stop them militarily.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu doesn’t want to leave the fate of Israel dependent on American action, which would be triggered by intelligence that Iran is building a bomb, which it hasn’t done yet.
via Is Israel preparing to attack Iran? – The Washington Post.

AllahPundit over at HotAir.com tosses cold water on this rather hyped headline or opinion piece.

Between you and me; I highly doubt Israel would do something like that. I could be wrong, but something tells me that Israel is just not going to risk “upsetting the apple cart,” as my grandmother used to call it. This is not to say that I do not think that Israel has the right to defend themselves, I do believe that fully. What I fear is, that Israel will pick a fight with Iran and get in over their heads; and want the United States to pull their butts out of fire. As much as I am sympathetic to the cause of Israel and how much I know the history of Israel and the Biblical connection to the land and the people — I just do not believe that the United States of America is obligated to come to rescue of a Nation, like Israel, that decides to pick a fight with another Nation. We would not do that for any other Nation, so why should we do it for Israel?

Realistically speaking, I believe this little conflict will be resolved via diplomacy, rather than war. Because again, I believe the United States and its allies learned their lessons from the last time that they tried a foolhardy mission of occupation of a Country. I believe that a fiasco of that magnitude will not be repeated anytime soon. Again, I could be wrong; but I really just do not see this happening again, at least not this soon.

Others: Guardian, Politico, CNN, Pat Dollard, Weasel Zippers, msnbc.com, Jerusalem Post, Associated Press, War in Context, Israel Matzav, The Enterprise Blog and Chicago Boyz