These people want a reality TV show, give them one. It’s called ‘Dealing With the Federal Prosecution System of the District of Columbia."Now that sounds like compelling television," chimes CJR's Alexandra Fenwick.
It’s asymmetrical, it’s unfair, and it’s about time that homeowners started being informed that a ding to their credit score is not the end of the world; that no one would expect a capitalist company to behave in the way that individuals are being told to behave; and that their options are in fact broader than they might believe.
H.M. EMBASSY
MOSCOW
Lord Pembroke
The Foreign Office
London
6th April 1943
My Dear Reggie,
In these dark days man tends to look for little shafts of light that spill from Heaven. My days are probably darker than yours, and I need, my God I do, all the light I can get. But I am a decent fellow, and I do not want to be mean and selfish about what little brightness is shed upon me from time to time. So I propose to share with a tiny flash that has illuminated my sombre life and tell you that God has given me a new Turkish colleague whose card tells me that he is called Mustapha Kunt.
We all feel like that, Reggie, now and then, especially when Spring is upon us, but few of us would care to put it on our cards. It takes a Turk to do that.
(Signed)
Sir Archibald Clerk Kerr,
H.M. Ambassador.
I've been a prisoner of war since December 19th, 1944, when our division was cut to ribbons by Hitler's last desperate thrust through Luxemburg and Belgium. Seven Fanatical Panzer Divisions hit us and cut us off from the rest of Hodges' First Army. The other American Divisions on our flanks managed to pull out: We were obliged to stay and fight. Bayonets aren't much good against tanks: Our ammunition, food and medical supplies gave out and our casualties out-numbered those who could still fight - so we gave up. The 106th got a Presidential Citation and some British Decoration from Montgomery for it, I'm told, but I'll be damned if it was worth it. I was one of the few who weren't wounded. For that much thank God.
Regrettably, the Court has been unable to find even so much as a scintilla of good faith on the part of Plaintiff. Plaintiff comes before this Court with unclean hands yet has the insufferable temerity to demand equitable relief against DefendantAhhh... poetry.
...if you want to be a strict constructionist, fine, but be one even when it’s inconvenient. Imagine if the Second Amendment read as follows: “A woman’s ability to survive childbearing being necessary to a free state, the right to abort a fetus shall not be infringed.” Now, do you think the anti-choice movement would simply ignore the leading clause and resign themselves to the idea that a woman has an unconditional right to abortion? Not a chance, and they'd be right to fight because the language clearly implies a conditional right.
And yet we almost never hear gun rights advocates mention the actual Second Amendment’s leading clause, “A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state….,” which at least suggests a collective right—indeed, obligation—to an armed defense of the state, rather than an individual’s right to use arms to protect himself and his property. For the record, I support gun rights with some restrictions, but that’s besides my point, which is that you can’t be so selective in citing the language in the Constitution that you chop off inconveniently ambiguous parts of the same sentence upon which you base a categorical claim.
A Swiss court has accepted film-maker Roman Polanski's plea to be freed on $4.5m bail from a Swiss jail where he is being held for a US child sex case.
The court said Polanski could stay at his chalet in the Swiss Alps. He would be monitored by an electronic tag.
It is highly unusual for extradition subjects to be granted bail in Switzerland, says the BBC's Imogen Foulkes, adding that Polanski's first application was refused.
It is thought Polanski will remain in jail until the Swiss Justice Ministry decides whether to appeal against the ruling.
...the compromise that ended up in the House bill is to have a mere public option, open only to the 6 million Americans not otherwise covered. The Congressional Budget Office warns this shrunken public option will have no real bargaining leverage and would attract mainly people who need lots of medical care to begin with. So it will actually cost more than it saves.Yet this is the provision that will be filibustered by the right wing. Because it will destroy private health insurance and turn us into a socialist state.
But even the House's shrunken and costly little public option is too much for private insurers, Big Pharma, Republicans, and "centrists" in the Senate. So Harry Reid has proposed an even tinier public option, which states can decide not to offer their citizens. According to the CBO, it would attract no more than 4 million Americans.
...the Reid bill's fiscal strategy, and its vision of how to "bend the curve," almost completely follows Baucus' path from September. Baucus' bill was the first to establish the principle that Congress could expand coverage while reducing the federal deficit; now that's the standard not only for the Senate but also the House reform legislation. And, perhaps even more importantly, the Reid bill maintains virtually all of Baucus ideas' for shifting the medical payment system away from today's fee-for-service model toward an approach that more closely links compensation for providers to results for patients. In the Reid bill, there is some backtracking from Baucus' most aggressive reform proposals, but not much.That post heaps praise onto Sen. Reid's bill for a host of measures that are not part of the current media scream fest.
Almost everything Baucus proposed to control long-term costs have survived into the final bill. And, with only a few exceptions, that's just about all the systemic reforms analysts from the center to the left have identified as the most promising strategies for changing the economic incentives in the medical system. (The public competitor to private insurance companies championed by the Left would affect who writes the checks in the medical system, but not what the checks are written to pay for.)
[it's] one of those pesky details embedded in both the House and Senate bills—a clause that lets insurance companies cross state lines to sell their wares. Way before last year’s election, Ronald Williams, the CEO of Aetna, told the Senate Finance Committee that allowing cross-state purchasing of health insurance was a necessary ingredient for reform. The Senate Finance Committee, along with the House, heard his plea.This is the same crap McCain tried to sell in the election. The same notion that candidate Obama dismissed as something that would lead insurance to follow the pattern of credit cards: a race to the bottom of customer service and value.
The provision, euphemistically named the Health Care Choice Compact, would work like this: Two or more states could join together and allow insurers selling health coverage to be governed by the laws and regulations of the state where the policy was issued, not the rules of the state where they’re sold. So a company wanting to sell in, say, Wyoming or South Carolina—which may have weak regulations—could choose to issue its policies in those states but actually sell them in New York or California—where the rules are tougher. If policyholders have problems with their coverage, too bad: the rules of the weaker state would apply, and they could be out of luck.
Insurers, looking toward lucrative new markets, want to fashion their new policies without having to deal with the restrictions and consumer protections required by some states. In other words, the current definition of market reform will mean they have to insure sick folks; in return, they will offer policies with less coverage and fewer protections. Think of it as back-door underwriting—a process that limits these companies’ liability for high-cost claims.
This is the core of the insurers’ business strategy, wrapped in the guise of consumer choice. Remember, this is the Health Care Choice Compact we’re talking about. If consumers want a policy with few benefits or no protections, that’s their choice. It’s kind of like letting a U.S. toy manufacturer sell yo-yos that conform to Chinese—not American—regulations. Take your choice: a yo-yo with lead, or one without?
Officials of The Philadelphia Inquirer National Sudoku Championship have disqualified the third-place winner of the Oct. 24 tourney after an investigation, which included a retesting at The Inquirer last week.
Eugene Varshavsky of Lawrenceville, N.J., was stripped of his $3,000 prize after doing poorly in the retest.
...first AIG contributed $5 billion to Maiden Lane III and the New York Fed gave it a $24.3 billion loan. Then Maiden Lane III gave all $26.8 billion to the banks in exchange for the CDOs. (The banks accepted $26.8 billion because they already held $35.0 billion in collateral; together that makes $61.8 billion — as I said, I can’t get $300 million to reconcile.) Then Maiden Lane III gave $2.5 billion right back to AIG (this is the amount by which AIG had overcollateralized). As part of the deal, the banks agreed to tear up the original CDS on the CDOs, so AIG couldn’t lose any more on the CDS (which, remember, are separate from the CDOs).
The controversy is not over paying $29.3 (or $29.6) billion for the CDOs, since that was the market price. The controversy is over whether AIG should have agreed to settle the CDS at 100 cents on the dollar (meaning that the banks get the difference between the face value of the CDOs and their current market value). Bloomberg reported a while back that prior to the government bailout, AIG had been trying to negotiate a settlement at 60-70 cents on the dollar, but that that portion of the term sheet was crossed out in the final agreement. The implication is that paying the swaps off in full was a back-door, off-the-books way of funneling cash to banks that we didn’t want to fail.
"I will not answer that question."Now, that's according to an interview with Rep. Peter DeFazio - and the NY fed is disputing this - but don't you think we should have a firm answer on this question?
About 200 European football games are under investigation in a match-fixing inquiry, German prosecutors have said.
...
On Thursday police carried out about 50 raids in Germany, the UK, Switzerland and Austria, making 17 arrests and seizing cash and property.
[Following a German scandal in 2005] Uefa has since introduced an early warning system which flags up unusual betting patterns.
The betting fraud detection system monitors real-time betting, giving investigators an immediate idea of whether there are irregular patterns.
The recent arrests would seem to indicate the detection process is working, but the scale of the manipulation must be a concern...
[The witness] said he was walking in a roadway between the main building, known as the Sportsdome, and five smaller buildings. Major Hasan was headed toward the main building, the witness said, when Sergeant Munley came around the corner of a smaller building. Major Hasan wheeled on her and shot her several times, the witness said. It was unclear whether she squeezed off a shot or not, but she fell over backward, with wounds in her legs and her wrist, the witness said.
Major Hasan then turned his back and began to shove another magazine into his pistol. He did not appear wounded, the witness said. A few seconds later, Sergeant Todd came around another corner of the same building, raised his weapon and fired several times at Major Hasan, who pitched over backward and stopped moving.
“He shot her, turned away from her and was reloading when he was shot,” said the witness, who was nearby.
“The time for pitchforks and torches is over.”All due respect, Mr. Talbott - but you're totally full of sh!t.
Scott Talbott, chief lobbyist for the Financial Services Roundtable, discussing the current appetite for financial regulation.
The House of Representatives will vote in December on [Prof. Warren's] idea. She suggested a Financial Product Safety Commission in a 2007 article in the magazine Democracy. President Barack Obama proposed it to Congress in June as the Consumer Financial Protection Agency.Now, I can appreciate that there are many hurdles before you have Prof. Warren heading a consumer protection agency with regulatory powers - but this sort of thing was only voiced by crazies only a few months ago. Now you have Bloomberg covering it as a tangible "what-if."
Warren won’t discuss whether she may be a candidate to lead the authority, which would have the power to regulate $13.7 trillion of debt products. A Warren nomination would tell banks that Obama is determined to force reduced checking-account fees and limit lender claims in mortgage advertising, among other measures the industry opposes, said Thomas Cooley, dean of New York University’s Stern School of Business.
The goal was clearly offside, yet was allowed to count. That's soccer.Or:
We were denied a clear penalty, but that's soccer.I suspect the line is an easy refuge for those who are prevented from expressing their true opinion. It lets them assume the mantle of sportsmanship - of stepping back to see the bigger picture. And in some cases, this can be more than just posturing - it can be an asset to the game.
"It is the court's opinion that the negligence of the Corps, in this instance by failing to maintain the MRGO properly, was not policy, but insouciance, myopia and short-sightedness," U.S. District Court Judge Stanwood Duval Jr. wrote in his lengthy ruling, referring to the Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet canal.Oh, and they ordered a payout of just over $700,000.
Somehow, having planets means a star loses its lithium. How the heck does that happen?
A brief digression. Lithium is a weird element. It’s the third lightest after hydrogen and helium, and unlike every other element after it on the periodic table, we don’t think it’s made inside stars. It’s too fragile; the nuclei get smashed up easily, and so it doesn’t last long in the cores of stars. That means that as far as we can tell, all the lithium in the Universe was created in the Big Bang.
Just because it gets wrecked in the cores of stars does not mean they have no lithium at all. Lithium created in the Big Bang would have been in clouds where stars formed, and if a lithium nucleus can avoid the core of the star by staying nearer the surface, it can survive. The Sun has lithium in it, for example, but at far less abundance (<1%) than what you see out in gas clouds. That means the Sun has destroyed a lot - but not all - of its lithium supply.
When astronomers look at other stars like the Sun, the amount of lithium they possess varies wildly. But now it appears that the amount of lithium in a Sun-like star depends on whether it has planets or not. Stars without planets have, on average, 10 times the lithium as stars with planets in the sample.
Weird.
For reporters trying to make sense of the phenomenon of [Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome], Stolen Valor offers particular cause for concern. Since the war's end, veterans' activists have claimed that anywhere from 200,000 to 2 million of the 3.3 million men who served in the Vietnam theater suffer from PTSD - never mind that fewer than 15 percent of those who set foot in the country were in front-line combat units, Stolen Valor notes. A four-year, $9 million study commissioned by Congress and undertaken by North Carolina researchers concluded that 830,000 Vietnam veterans were suffering from full or partial PTSD.Which is not to suggest that there's no such thing as a PTSD afflicted Vietnam veteran. But the idea that large percentages of them are drug users, psyche cases and criminals deserves a brutal dose of skepticism.
Impressive numbers indeed. Yet the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that only 2.2 percent of Vietnam veterans had the disorder. And the North Carolina study clearly had some methodological flaws. For example, it cited six women who claimed their disorder had been caused by being prisoners of war. "Apparently," write [authors] Burkett and Whitley, "no one involved in analyzing the survey realized that not a single American military woman was ever a prisoner in this war."
This is not only a matter of principle, but of public finance. The VA offers life-long disability payments to those suffering from PTSD, we read, yet is willing to accept documentation from veterans without checking military records to see if the form has been altered. The result, according to Stolen Valor, is an inflated roster of PTSD victims earning $32,076 per year tax-free for 100 percent disability at taxpayer expense - and more, if there are dependents.
“If Hasan was showing signs, saying to people that he had become an Islamist extremist, the U.S. Army has to have zero tolerance,” [Senator] Lieberman said. “He should have been gone.”
While enjoying a morning cup of coffee and checking email up on the Baba Deck with a group of friends who are in from the States we saw what was clearly the signature of a tanker attack just up the road. That has never happened this close to Jalalabad before so we conducted a brief staff meeting which consisted of saying “let’s go” and headed up the road to see what was what.
Mr. WELLSTONE. Mr. President I want to voice my strong objection to the process by which this legislation is being passed by the Senate. The Omnibus Appropriations conference report--containing numerous other pieces of unrelated legislation--is being passed by the Senate tonight under a consent agreement that was entered suddenly by the Majority Leader without the normal notification process. We should have had a recorded vote. Since I first came to the Senate 9 years ago I have felt that it does the Senate no credit to pass such significant budgetary legislation--literally hundreds of billions of dollars--without a recorded vote. We cannot be held accountable as Senators to our constituents when such bills are passed in this manner. I want to make it clear; I oppose this legislation and I would like the Record to show that I would have voted no had there been a recorded vote.
Goldman Sachs Mortgage, however, published guidelines in early 2007 indicating that it would accept a "stated income, stated asset" loan for a person with a subpar credit score of 600 who was borrowing 90 percent of his or her home's value. The designation meant that although the borrower had poor credit, his or her claimed income and financial background would go unchecked.
The health-care reform debate has done a good job avoiding the subject of prices. The argument over the Medicare-attached public plan was, in a way that most people didn't understand, an argument about prices, but it quickly became an argument about a public option without a pricing dimension, and never really looked back. The administration has been very interested in the finding that some states are better at providing cost-effective care than other states, but not in the finding that some countries are better at purchasing care than other countries. "A health-care debate in this country that isn't aware of the price differential is not an informed debate," says Halvorson. By that measure, we have not had a very informed debate.It is interesting that those who denounce the cost of health care reform, spend precious little time discussing controlling the costs of procedures.
...the first year the legislation takes effect (2013, as of now), people getting subsidized coverage would have to pay between 2 and 12 percent of their incomes for the insurance, depending on how much they earn. The government, of course, would pay the rest of the cost—that’s the carrot to entice people to buy in the first place. Those with lower incomes would pay less; those with higher incomes more. Okay—seems reasonable.
But in the second year and afterward, Appleby reports that the subsidies will be “based on a percentage of the premium that was paid the first year, no matter how far premiums rise.” Because wages don’t go up as fast as premiums, families, particularly those at the lower end of the income ladder, could easily find themselves paying far more for coverage as a percentage of their income than they were led to believe they would pay. And with premiums going up and up, which is the likely scenario, they will struggle and perhaps forgo insurance altogether.
The so-called “walkaways” can occur along several different paths, but the effect is the same — after threatening or getting foreclosure, the lender attempts to abandon the usually vacant property, leaving the original owner, the neighbors and the city to live with the damage.If you're like me - that second sentence got your attention.
Owners often accumulate taxes and zoning enforcement fines on property they believe they no longer own.
Neighbors watch their property values decline as the vacant property deteriorates and is often broken into and stripped.
Cities then have to bear the cost of boarding up a structure, maintaining the lawn and, eventually, demolishing it.
The house at 24 Glencoe Ave. looks bad on the outside.
[it] was purchased in January 2003 by the current owner, Donald Hennessey of McMurray, Pa. By October 2004, a foreclosure case had been opened, and Homecomings Financial Network, Inc. — which is owned by GMAC — was granted a foreclosure in March 2005. The property was ordered for sale at sheriff’s auction the following month.
Everything appeared to be on track until the appraisal required for a sheriff’s auction came in at $30,000 — well under the $71,792 that was owed on the mortgage. The sheriff’s sale was canceled in May and a few days later the lender dismissed the foreclosure.
So even though Hennessey thought the house had gone back to the bank, he still owned the vacant and abandoned property — and was on the hook for the growing property taxes and zoning fines from the city.
...
“I said I was sorry to inform them that the bank stopped the foreclosure, discharged the loan and never took title to the property, so it’s still theirs,” [Dayton Housing Inspector John] Carter said.
That’s exactly what happened at 24 Glencoe. Homecomings dismissed the foreclosure “without prejudice,” meaning it still holds a lien on the property and can come back to foreclose later.So these people are allowed to own the accrued fines and taxes until such time as the bank chooses to step in and take the place.
Today’s McLatchy story—“Goldman takes on new role: taking away people’s homes,”—beautifully illustrates the intimate intertwining of Wall Street and the subprime business. Here, Goldman is shown coping with the consequences of having bought mortgages from Argent Mortgage Co., a unit of Ameriquest Morgage Co. Now, Goldman may feel it is being unfairly tarred for just doing what it is supposed to do—make money—but, sorry, this is a clear case of lying down with dogs and being surprised to wake up with fleas.
Our Secretary of State says that means nothing. I agree but for different reasons; in the end it does not matter who is leading the country – the Afghan government will not be a proper [counterinsurgency] partner and will continue to be part of the problem regardless of how these elections turn out. Conducting a runoff will only give the bad guys more opportunity for mischief while accomplishing nothing.
If we want to rapidly build the Afghan Security Forces the only way to do it is to live and work with them 24/7. We need to adopt them, feed them, pay them, and watch after them. What can a US officer really do when the Colonel he is mentoring cannot feed his own troops because the money to buy that chow is siphoned off by officers above him? If they make a stink about it the Afghan Colonel is sure to be relieved and thrown out on the streets. The current mentors have guys fighting daily while dealing with problems they would never encounter in the American system. They do the best they can to support the unit they are assigned to mentor, but they are not really embedded. They live of separate compounds inside the Afghan compounds completely separate from their charges. Mentoring means leading by example while living and fighting with your host country troops. It does not mean setting up a parallel [Tactical Operations Center], camp, cook house, offices, and coffee shop where the Afghans are not welcomed or allowed.
