Tweet
Happy Buy-Chocolate-and-Flowers-and-a-Card Day, supporting the chocolate, flowers and card industries.
• John Boehner is forced to split up the House surface transportation bill into three separate bills, to overcome far-right oppposition. What a clown show it is over there.
• The federal government recovered $4.1 billion in health care fraud last year. On the flip side, the high-risk pools expected to cover tens of thousands as a bridge to the implementation of the exchanges have significantly underperformed.
• RJ Eskow goes after Ed DeMarco.
• The Federal Reserve’s enforcement orders on servicer violations are truly a joke, and they once again include this boilerplate:
“NOW, THEREFORE, before the filing of any notices, or taking of any testimony or adjudication of or finding on any issues of fact or law herein, and without this Consent Assessment Order constituting an admission by (bank) of any allegation made or implied by the Board of Governors in connection with this matter, and solely for the purpose of settling this matter without a formal proceeding being filed and without the necessity for protracted or extended hearings or testimony, it is hereby ORDERED by the Board of Governors…”
In layman’s terms, no admission of wrongdoing. Again.
• Progressive groups want hearings on a Constitutional amendment to reverse the Citizens United ruling.
• Meanwhile, the Association of Mortgage Investors continues the trend of securities holders blasting the settlement deal.
• Politicians have not expanded the safety net. The nation got older and health care got more expensive, is all.
• Jeffrey Sachs looks at the hard numbers of the FY2013 budget, finds that the rich get off relatively easy, contrary to popular opinion. And the discretionary budget just gets battered in the budget, mostly by design, because of the debt limit deal.
• Could the opposition party in South Korea block the free trade agreement with the US?
• It’s nice that a former Republican Congressman has joined the call for an up or down vote on all Presidential nominees within 90 days, but this will only start gaining momentum when current Republicans have something to say about it.
• Phil Angelides, the chair of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, had the good sense to quit a firm that was about to invest in distressed mortgages, but how did he join up in the first place?
• Nancy Brinker of the Susan G. Komen Foundation also happens to be a penny ante grifter.
• Mike Elk on some labor victories and the importance of local, shop-to-shop organizing.
• Definitely with Josh Marshall on this: who cares if US voter registration rolls aren’t perfectly accurate as far as dead voters? That information isn’t transmitted directly from morgues to the registrar of voters. It takes time to clean up the rolls, not to mention money, which states don’t have.
• Yves pointed out the disclaimer the DoJ slapped on the National Mortgage Settlement website, saying they disavow its content. Hilarious.
• Elizabeth Warren takes the lead in another poll in the Massachusetts Senate race.
• Crazy Pete Hoekstra, on the other hand, saw his “yellowgirl” ad send him into a nosedive in Michigan.
• Have I mentioned lately how much I love the Occupy Our Homes movement?
• The Maine caucuses were an absolute mess, and could really blow up in Mitt Romney’s face.
• Speaking of that Romney professionalism, they put surrogate Jim Talent on a conference call to criticize Rick Santorum for voting for Medicare Part D, when Talent voted for it too.
• I heard US retail sales spun as a positive, but it should be noted that they were below forecast.
• The Club for Growth endorsed Dick Lugar’s opponent. Lugar is the most threatened Senator to a Tea Party primary challenge.
• Israel keeps accusing Iran of being behind the attacks on Embassy workers in India and Georgia, but Indian investigators don’t suspect the Iranians at all.
• Loving the idea of “cash mobs”.
• Holy crap, Stephen Breyer. Robbed at machete-point?
• Sadly, we won’t have Herman Cain on Dancing with the Stars this year.
• The ACLU takes a shot at Obama’s “evolution” on marriage equality in a Valentine’s Day message.
• TBogg’s comments aside, I thought Ian Milhiser’s assessment of the Bartlet Presidency was just kind of funny.
25 Comments
Support this site!
Subscribe to the newsletter
Advertise on Firedoglake
Send
us your tips
Make us your homepage
About FDL News Desk
We’re all Greeks now. Austerity come to the Windy City.
CTA survey seeks public input about “hypothetical fare scenarios”
That and $38,496.50 will get you into an Obama fundraiser.
Private prison company offers to buy 48 states’ prisons [--in exchange for a 90% occupancy rate]
LINK.
Rare visit to remote Chinese region shows depth of Tibetan despair
“Beijing has long blamed unrest in ethnic Tibetan areas on conspiracies hatched by the Dalai Lama, the Tibetan spiritual leader who fled to India after a failed uprising against Chinese rule in 1959.
“But conversations with ethnic Tibetans here and elsewhere in Sichuan province, where almost all of the self-immolations have occurred, suggest that China’s authoritarian policies designed to tamp down disorder are fueling the troubles.”
LINK.
I think Israelis might be doing the attacks themselves. No one has been killed as far as I’ve heard. I think surely the Iranians could manage to kill a few people if they went to the trouble to start planting bombs all over the place. The Isrealis are by many accounts are not above posing as CIA agents to arrange a murder or five, so who says they can’t pose as Iranians to justify an invasion? I think they know they’ve been caught killing Iranian scientists and they want to change the focus and stir up outrage against someone else. I also think they are perfectly happy to sacrifice a few civilians to promote the right wing agenda.
Be afraid. Be very afraid. By way of Brad Delong:
FINANCIAL BLACK SWANS DRIVEN BY ULTRAFAST MACHINE ECOLOGY
A La fatster:
Shortest & sweetest put-down of Ed DeMarco I have seen. DeMarco is acting head of FHFA which controls Fannie and Freddie. DeMarco refuses to allow principal write-downs for underwater borrowers whose mortgages are owned by Fannie or Freddie.
LINK.
The money grafs, so to speak:
Parents ‘struggling to feed children as prices rise’
“A year of record food prices has forced millions of parents in the developing world to cut back on food for their children, says aid agency Save the Children.”
LINK.
Eeeeeek!
Well, that certainly got all jumbled up (a la fatster, indeed). It was intended for Fractal @ 6.
And this was intended for allan @ 5: Eeeeeeeek!
Time to go to bed.
I would be shocked, I tell you shocked, to find that the Israeli ever did false flag attacks. /s
Nobody ever does false flag attacks. Everybody is completely honest about all things at all times. That is why everything is working out so well.
It’s a twofer for Israel. They get to play their victim card (again) and claims Iranian incompetence at the same time.
Yep, so true
I’ve also always been of the opinion that Israel did the Harire assassination.
I heard on radio this am that the Is-Ir dust up is a “slow moving” Cuban miss’l crisis….doesn’t sound good with US at the ready, it seems. With a big potential for things going wrong…felt scary to me.
Not very comforting when only solace is to hope (TM) that no accidents push into full scale war, to be sure.
Of course we should take these things with a grain of salt-
but
the EU attacks were shown to be by Iran via Hez
The EU attacks in general harmed far fewer than could have been expected.
Iranian incompetence may be real.
Who the hell really knows what is going on – Indian police say they do not see and are not chasing an Iranian connection, and in Columbia we find the police closing the case of 2 killed Priests by 2 thugs as a suicide where one of the Priests had AIDS and wanted to die. You chose your degree of belief and more on.
I have only one rule, which is to believe nothing purveyed by any PTB, regardless of where located geographically.
I have a hypothesis generating mechanism, which is to caste suspicion on party that would benefit most. Not at all reluctant to have actual evidence, not mfgd by and govt, refute my hypothesis.
The US folks don’t believe Iran re the announcement of “4th” generation enrichment going on.
They do believe that the known actions point to a bomb but only a crude U238 version in a year, 3 years to small missile bomb. Iran passed medical isotope needs a year ago so the “20%” level for a research reactor, where one gets those isotopes, is not needed except for a bomb.
I doubt any action by the US for the next 18 months – but Israel reads the tea leaves and takes the Iranians at their word, and concludes they are close to real terrorist atomic actions via Iran controlled Hez into population centers in Israel, and may react much sooner.
“caste suspicion on party that would benefit most” has been a proven winner since the Greeks noted the correlation and the Romans made it an article of faith.
Port Authority of Allegheny County (Pittsburgh), PA fares. The ‘T’ is the train/subway system.
Full Fare T Surcharge*
1 Zone $2.25 + $0.75
2 Zones $3.25 + $0.75
And they are planning to cut more services and raise fares again.
To be sure. I didn’t invent the idea. Surprising, though, how many people believe what they’re told instead of starting with general principles.
That’s what got me onto Israel instead of Syria wrt to Harire. Syria was the obvious suspect and that alone, hypothetically, would make it reluctant to do the deed, bc of world wide condemnation that would, and did ensue, including forcing Syria out of Lebanon. Nations often act stupidly, so maybe Syria didn’t figure that out in advance, but it’s also been my experience, as Scott Horton (the other one who does radio interviews on antiwar.com) sez: empire makes you stupid. Small countries, with more to lose, might (I said ‘might’ not ‘would’) think a little bit harder about the consequences of their actions.
But who the hell knows.
Gotta support the HC ind at all costs by getting rid of public transportation. And loot the poor & middle class in the process. Another twofer.
The real truth is that everyone in that part of the world revels in aggression and deception, and they are all so practiced at it that we Americans should just accept that we are completely out of our league whenever we try to figure it all out.
http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-pn-newt-gingrich-san-diego-zoo-20120214,0,5904067.story?track=rss&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+latimes%2Fnews%2Fpolitics+%28L.A.+Times+-+Politics%29
Newt Gingrich spent Valentine’s Day at the zoo with the elephants. Somebody call Rick Santorum.