ROBO-SIGNED MORTGAGE DOCUMENTS go back to the 1990s.
Archive for 2011
September 2, 2011
QUESTION OF THE DAY: Why NOT Own a Fully-Automatic Rifle? I’m thinking, I’m thinking!
THE SOLYNDRA DEBACLE: Obama’s Enron? “President Bush was flayed for the Enron bankruptcy, based on his tenuous ties to the firm. If the same media rules applied, Solyndra would be Obama’s Enron, given his active promotion of the company and his lavish funding of it. A prodigious Obama-Biden fundraiser is a major backer of the failed concern.”
INTRODUCING the Viagra condom.
LAWYERS GUNS AND MONEY: Joe Pappalardo on how Warren Zevon explains the Libyan War. Were any headless Thompson gunners sighted?
AN UPDATED VERSION: Violence on Campus: Practical Recommendations for Legal Educators.
ATF GUN-SMUGGLING UPDATE: Gunwalker: Details of Coverup Revealed. “Emails reveal attempts to hide that Gunwalker guns were present at Brian Terry’s murder — within hours of Terry’s death.”
IN THE MAIL: From Dick Cheney, In My Time: A Personal and Political Memoir.
AS A SHARE OF GDP, Federal, State, and Local Expenditures Are At World War II Levels.
MARKET FAILURE VS. GOVERNMENT FAILURE: We’ve certainly seen a lot of the latter, lately. If “market failure” is an excuse for taking power away from markets, shouldn’t “government failure” be a reason to take power away from government?
LEARNING TO LOVE your “Federal Family.”
UPDATE: Reader John S. Ford writes:
Why not have the feds be more specific about who my “Federal Family” really is and just call them my “Big Brother”? I’m just saying…
More like your drunken profligate brother-in-law who’s always hitting you up for a loan. Meanwhile, reader Bill Hesson emails:
All this creepy “federal family” business reminds me of an important insight from Hayek. Is it too much to believe that the destruction of our macro-cosmos is this Administration’s intent?
“If we were to apply the unmodified, uncurbed, rules of the micro-cosmos (i.e., of the small band or troop, or of, say, our families) to the macro-cosmos (our wider civilization), as our instincts and sentimental yearnings often make us wish to do, we would destroy it. Yet if we were always to apply the rules of the extended order to our more intimate groupings, we would crush them. So we must learn to live in two sorts of worlds at once.”
The Fatal Conceit, F.A. Hayek
It’s funny how people who don’t like talk of “family values” as applied to actual families like the idea when it comes to describing the public sphere.
MORE ON THE ALUMNI DEFECTIONS FROM WIDENER LAW SCHOOL: “Coincidentally, the AALS 2012 Annual Meeting in January will focus extensively on threats to academic freedom.”
IT IS MORE IMPORTANT TO WIN THE WAR than to report on it.
INSTAVISION: Life After 9/11. I talk with Dean Reuter about his new book (co-edited with John Yoo), Confronting Terror: 9/11 and the Future of American National Security.
RECOVERY BUMMER (CONT’D): No Jobs Added In August. “The weakness in employment was underscored by revisions to the jobs data for June and July. Collectively, those figures were lowered to show 57,000 fewer jobs added.”
UPDATE: “It was the first time since World War II that the economy had a net zero jobs created for a month.” Hey, they don’t call him President Zero for nothing.
And note this: “Mr. Ryan chided the administration—which once predicted that the 2009 stimulus bill would hold unemployment under 8%—for now projecting that unemployment would remain higher than 8% for the remainder of Mr. Obama’s current term.” Yes, it’s good to keep pointing out that the stimulus bill didn’t deliver on Obama’s promises. Obama lied, the economy died!
And look at the horrific 16.7% number for black unemployment:
Reader Joel Mackey emails: “Looks like Paul Azinger is vindicated.”
JOHN PODHORETZ: The White House Mess:
We will little note nor long remember Wednesday’s breathless kerfuffle, with the White House deciding to schedule a speech in front of a joint session of Congress without actually asking Congress first — and planning for it during a long-planned Republican debate.
The White House spin doctors told some fibs, realized they looked petty and unseemly, then backed off and moved it a day. This won’t even rise to the level of a Jeopardy question in a year’s time.
But supporters of President Obama outside the White House have every reason to be terrified by what happened on Wednesday — and I choose the word “terrified” carefully. For the incident suggests that the White House’s sense of how things work has grown dangerously distorted. And if this White House is broken, it’s not good for anyone.
It’s broken, all right. And we’re broke. And there’s a connection. . . .
Related: Politico: White House Furious Over Speech Delay: “The White House was well aware the president’s speech would conflict with a planned Republican debate sponsored by POLITICO and NBC to be held at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, Calif. The debate would be broadcast live by MSNBC and live-streamed by POLITICO. CNBC and Telemundo will re-air the broadcast. Yet the White House did not see this as an obstacle.”
That’s because they’re inept. And what’s the consequence? “The White House did not want to give in and look weak, but what was the alternative?” Um, competence? Well, no. . . . Despite the Politico spin of this failure as something that the House Republicans did to Obama, this is a case of tactical overreach by the White House political shop. They thought Obama could upstage the Republican debate, and that the House Republicans would roll over for the awesome majesty of the Presidency. But the diminished Obama Presidency isn’t looking very majestic these days, and this peeved foot-stamping isn’t helping, and merely serves to underscore the White House political operation’s incompetence. (By complaining about Rush Limbaugh and the Tea Party, they just further the Obama-diminution process while building up his opponents.) They miscalculated, and it blew up in their face. Whining to the press that they were outmaneuvered won’t improve things, and no capable political operative would imagine that it could. But then, why should we expect more competence from the White House political shop than we’ve seen from the rest of their operation?
UPDATE: Reader Jim Somers writes: “Glenn, the Administration’s handling of the jobs speech scheduling is, I think, quite revealing of the degree to which they don’t get what’s going on. First, trying to pre-empt and one-up the GOP debate was sure to anger Republicans and make them even less willing to work with the president on jobs legislation. Is the President aware that the Democrats no longer control the House, and thus need GOP cooperation to pass a bill? Second, this was really kind of a sad, nostalgia-driven attempt to go back to something that Obamaniacs thought was just really awesome during the ’08 campaign – the ‘Barack Block’, where anytime Obama gave a speech, the networks would cut away from anything else they were covering – a McCain speech, a Hillary speech, whatever. In fact, Josh Marshall’s original TPM blog post, when it was first announced that the White House wanted the speech at the same time as the GOP debate, was simply titled ‘FWAAMP’, which I think was supposed to be sound of the President big-footing the GOP. No doubt Marshall thought it would be like, totally awesome to get back to the days of the Barack Block. Those days are gone forever – you should just let ’em go.”
As I said, he’s much diminished. Not least by this kind of behavior.
TRANSPARENCY: The Hill: GOP wants White House papers on loan to failed solar company.
House Republicans are demanding White House paperwork related to a $535 million loan guarantee to a solar company that filed for bankruptcy this week.
The Republicans are probing the White House role in the 2009 federal loan guarantee to Solyndra Inc., a California solar company that announced this week it is shutting down and filing for bankruptcy.
The shutdown is a bit of an embarrassment for the administration, as the company was the first selected to receive the loan guarantee under a new program. President Obama visited the company just more than a year ago to tout White House green energy efforts.
Ah, why get excited about a few hundred million when we’re busy squandering trillions?
A DAY IN THE LIFE of hurricane tracking.
BYRON YORK: Left Paints The Campaign As A Religious War. For them, it is.
ANOTHER EVERGREEN HEADLINE: McCain Full Of Crap.
ATF GUNRUNNING UPDATE: Issa, Grassley make good on promise to expand “Fast & Furious” investigation.
AT AMAZON, up to 40% off on exercise equipment.
DONALD BOUDREAUX ON free trade vs. protectionism.