Sunday Morning...

Away we go!

Comments

[jimmyk]

Dateline Bermuda
Should Snowden's pole-dancing girlfriend make the US squad, she would get the chance to re-up with her honey over in Moscow

Daddy, is pole-dancing a winter or summer sport? Inquiring minds want to know.

To busy on vacation to wade into the West-Radosh kerfuffle. I'm with (A)B that I find the whole thing a bit discouraging.

Now back to the beach...

[jimmyk]

oops. Didn't mean to hit 'post'.

[GMax]

Now back to the beach...

Showoff

[Ignatz]

Another day, another Eric Holder lie.
His list must be as long as Hillary's.

[James D.]

pagar @ 9:54

I wish we could blame just Zero for the trend of giving military vehicles and weaponry to local (often small town) police departments, but the practice predates him.

It's still madness, though. Why in God's name does the town of Elgin, Illinois need armored personnel carriers?

Don't we have ANY national political figures who see how insane and damaging this is...as well as being an issue that they could campaign successfully on?

I guess not - they're perfectly happy to have all this military gear in the hands of local, poorly (or not at all) trained officers. They're thrilled with the tens of thousands of unnecessary (unconstitutional, if we had a government or a judiciary that gave a damn about that anymore, and certainly unamerican, or at least it was, once upon a time) SWAT raids every year.

All that spiffy military hardware, and increased police use of it for any reason (or no good reason at all, it seems more and more), keeps us proles in our place, I guess.

[Extraneus]

Did Jane and Caro catch a ride with the Prime Minister?

Norway leader goes undercover as taxi driver

[matt]

It may not have been his personality, Mark, but rather the fact that he had so many casualties and was seen as immune to the terrible suffering under his command.

There were bad commanders left too long in place, sometimes for political reasons, i.e. allies.

Italy was a red headed stepchild.

[Extraneus]

Holder originally said the defendants had victimized more than 73,000 American homeowners. That number was revised to 17,185, while estimates of homeowner losses associated with the frauds dropped to $95 million from $1 billion.

You know what I'd like to see? Prosecutions of people who lied on their mortgage applications. Isn't that who actually tanked the market?

[Danube of Thought]

Stand by for the NY crime rate to go up:

In a repudiation of a major element in the Bloomberg administration’s crime-fighting legacy, a federal judge has found that the stop-and-frisk tactics of the New York Police Department violated the constitutional rights of tens of thousands of New Yorkers, and called for a federal monitor to oversee broad reforms.

In a decision issued on Monday, the judge, Shira A. Scheindlin, ruled that police officers have for years been systematically stopping innocent people in the street without any objective reason to suspect them of wrongdoing. Officers often frisked these people, usually young minority men, for weapons or searched their pockets for contraband, like drugs, before letting them go, according to the 195-page decision.

[Clarice]

Raosh's article was still there when I looked a while ago just no longer the lead.

[Clarice]

http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/08/history_as_ideology_further_thoughts_on_american_betrayal.html

Yes, it is still there.

[Threadkiller]

I blame the people that sold new cars and boats and stereos to the people who injected cash, mortgaged from their house, into the market.

They were idiots for accepting the infusion of fake wealth.

[Danube of Thought]

Matt, to what does your 10:23 refer?

[jimmyk]

Re DoT's 10:29

"Instead of ordering an end to the practice, however, U.S. District Court Judge Shira Scheindlin appointed an independent monitor to oversee changes to the policy."

So it could be worse.

Can't provide a good link from my iPhone, but this was a CBS news item.

[Captain Hate on the iPhone]

TC, I love Squire Valleeview farm. It's only 7 miles from chez Hate and is perfect to just walk around in. It's surely the best perq I've realized from attending CWRU.

Marlene I expect nothing more intelligent from those dunces.

[Captain Hate on the iPhone]

Stedman isn't very good with numbers.

[Extraneus]

This isn’t the first time Holder has been caught cooking the books, Weil reminds us:

This was the second time, mind you, that Holder’s Justice Department had pulled a stunt like this. In December 2010, Holder held a press conference to tout a supposed sweep by the president’s Financial Fraud Enforcement Task Force called “Operation Broken Trust.” (The mortgage-fraud program was part of the same task force.) As with the mortgage-fraud initiative, Broken Trust wasn’t actually a sweep. All the Justice Department did was lump together a bunch of small-fry, penny-ante fraud cases that had nothing to do with one another. Then it held a press gathering.

[JIB]

DoT,

I think Matt is referring to Mark Clark, whom Mark Folkstead had commented on meeting.

OT: The most charming man alive - Alan Grayson - calls Sarah Palin a dictator. Ha!

Poor bgates lives close enough that he must have to fumigate his house every time he opens a door or window.

[jimmyk]

"You know what I'd like to see? Prosecutions of people who lied on their mortgage applications. Isn't that who actually tanked the market?"

Both sides were trying to make fast buck, but somehow the buyers have become "victims," like Tourre's supposed victims.

[JIB]

CH,

Did you notice that they must have moved the TV tower on No. 15 yesterday?

[The idea was suggested, no?]

Yeah, and West's is still not there, though AT has had it since Saturday. I think you got bamboozled.
=====================

[Diktat.]

West's book has been out for a couple of months. Why the full-court press now, all of a sudden?
===========

[Captain Hate on the iPhone]

Yes I did notice that, JiB, and would have mentioned it if I were posting on a regular computer. I'm guessing some pointed complaints were made.

[JIB]

CH,

My bad. They didn't move the tower they moved the pin position more toward the middle that's why you couldn't see the shadow. Just went to Golf Channel for the highlights video and you can see the tower off to the left of the green.

[I hope I'm wrong, but silence is not convincing.]

Look, I'd barely heard of Radosh, Horowitz, or West before this kerfuffle, and wouldn't know a Venona Paper from a piece of toilet paper, but I've watched this play by play, and West looks assaulted and purse snatched by a gang of thugs. I think Clarice got gulled into this out of friendship and deadline pressure.
=====================

[Cecil Turner]

If West is seriously suggesting the D-Day landings were adopted as a sop to the Soviets (which she seems to be defending in the comments of the latest AT article), then she's in fact "out there"™. The same goes for any theory that requires us to believe the Red Army was a "hollow force" after the Berlin assault.

Moreover, citing experts is not "appeal to authority"; numbers of footnotes do not demonstrate tenability, and her Eisenhower quote is exactly the sort of misdirection by cherry-picking that has apparently been charged.

[2_cathyf_6]

She learned in The Wall Street Journal how to make a killing in the futures market. (It didn't cover the market back then.)

Ok, Ext, that one is just goofy. Of course the Journal covered markets back then (and for many decades before.) What's the obvious lie about the WSJ claim is that it's like saying "I learned how to do surgery by watching reruns of Ben Casey, MD," or "I learned how to captain a whaling ship by reading Moby Dick."

[sbwaters]

I hope I'm wrong, but silence is not convincing.

Of course, it is just my opinion, but I think comment authors who constantly change their names are inconsiderate assholes and, because there are too many assholes in the world already, I ignore those who decide voluntarily to contribute greater assholery.

[Style critics, bah. Blind ones, too.]

================

[Toodle ooh, Toots.]

I need the protective coloration, sbw; some here understand why. I am very glad you don't need it.
=======================

[2_cathyf_6]

You know what I'd like to see? Prosecutions of people who lied on their mortgage applications. Isn't that who actually tanked the market?

What I'd like to see is prosecutions of a bunch of the sleazy mortgage brokers who convinced formerly-honest people who had never had anything bigger than a used-car loan that lying on mortgage applications was "how it's done." There is a reason why suborning perjury is ALSO a crime as well as perjury.

The whole point of the (bi-partisan!) homeownership-for-all crap is that they took people who never should have been homeowners and roped them into signing 30-year mortgages. If you look at something like Habitat For Humanity, they are not just about selling people houses that have been built as a charitable endeavor, they are a religious social-service agency that first teaches the potential homeowners about financial responsibility, and homeownership, and expects sweat equity and just plain old responsibility out of the recipients.

You know the market has spent thousands of years figuring out how to correctly price loans to high-risk people, and manage those risks to minimize the cases of default. A lot of low-income rental property is a simple and straightforward credit spread -- the landlord borrows money at a low good-credit interest rate and buys a building, and then rents out to renters who would have to pay a much higher interest rate. The mortgage part of the rent is more than the landlord is paying in mortgage but less than the tenant would have to pay if the tenant took out the loan, so it's a textbook case of a mutually-beneficial exchange where all sides benefit. The markets have developed other things as well -- locally-sourced loans where the loan officer knows the borrowers personally and knows who is honest and believes in paying debts.

This is why Pope Benedict's encyclical Charity in Truth was so horrifying. We were right in the middle of a global financial meltdown which was primarily caused by the discovery that American mortgage lenders had systematically over-valued the credit worthiness of American home buyers. And the pope comes out advocating that it is OK for poor people to lie about their finances. (Although "charity in truth" IS a pretty clever turn of phrase for "lying.") So you have poor people, the exact people who don't have anything of value BESIDES a good name (i.e. creditworthiness) and the pope -- a significant moral teacher -- slanders them all as being entitled to be deadbeats. Any rational model of pricing risk would have to make credit MORE expensive to poor people in the wake of a pope encouraging them to welsh on their debts.

[pagar]

"What I'd like to see is prosecutions of a bunch of the sleazy mortgage brokers who convinced formerly-honest people who had never had anything bigger than a used-car loan that lying on mortgage applications was "how it's done." There is a reason why suborning perjury is ALSO a crime as well as perjury."

Amen!

I'd also like to see some action against those people who were supposed to check credit history, job history etc.

The lessons were learned so well in the mortgage fiasco we're now told that no one will check the Obamacare paperwork or the history of illegals who are to be accorded all the benefits of living in the US legally.

[Clarice]

Thank you, Cecil. And I'd add the blatherings of her loyal claque on every site where her work is questioned is not a mark of a serious groundswell of people in the know.

[Ignatz]

--Of course, it is just my opinion, but I think comment authors who constantly change their names are inconsiderate assholes and, because there are too many assholes in the world already, I ignore those who decide voluntarily to contribute greater assholery.--

Kim's comments are always immediately recognizable by the =========== so there is no intent to deceive and his/her names are often more entertaining and useful than some other people's comments.

[Ignatz]

Ditto to everything Cecil said at 11:44.

[Clarice]

HEH//

Do you suppose Kim is really an undercover EPA chieftain? Hell, let's start that rumor just for the fun of it and let the EPA best men go nuts.

[bgates]

The same goes for any theory that requires us to believe the Red Army was a "hollow force" after the Berlin assault.

I can understand the idea that by 1945 the Soviets had overcome the problems that plagued them earlier in the war (such as, they hadn't made/bought/been given much materiel yet, and Stalin had shot a lot of decent officers) such that they spent the last year of the war running downhill. I can also understand the idea that the Anglo-American alliance crawled across the finish line, exhausted by the strain of 4-6 years of casualties and running economies on a war footing.

I just realized I have trouble understanding both of those ideas at the same time - why were the Commies with their 20 million casualties and borrowed Ford trucks too much for a combatant country that had 2% as many fatalities, the world's only intact industrial base, and all of the world's atomic weapons? The logistic chain from Moscow to Berlin vs NY/London thereto? Political pressure on Truman and Churchill (and whichever gray Labor figure that came after Churchill) that Stalin didn't face?

[(A) nuther Bub]

Kim's pseudonyms, bgates's insights and daddy's travels bring endless delight and are among the main reasons for visiting JOM.

[Ignatz]

The Soviets not only had borrowed Ford trucks, they were churning out thousands of tanks and planes themselves.

Could we have defeated them? Possibly.
But because they were not "hollowed out" it would have been a close thing.

In the end, as bad as the Cold War was, its successful conclusion by the West I think demonstrates the wisdom of not beginning WWIII immediately after WWII.

[henry]

bgates, the log chain from LA/SF to Asia, the need for mass quantities of troops to invade Japan, the need to train / equip /supply 40-80 divisions of Chinese to push the Imperial Army off the continent cut into continued availability of resources for a European war. Stalin didn't face face this challenge, but jumped in late to grab as many pieces as possible in the clean up.

[Janet]

Kim's comments are always immediately recognizable by the =========== so there is no intent to deceive and his/her names are often more entertaining and useful than some other people's comments.

Amen to this!

[Janet]

posted by: ===== send other peoples' money.

[sbwaters]

"I need the protective coloration"

Dang. You mean I didn't recognize the gang paraphrenalia? I'll pay attention to the consistent ========== next time.

Years here. Still learning.

Still, other people settle for a single moniker that provides consistency with privacy.

[To be candid ...]

this is the only blog on the blogosphere where shallow clueless an pretentious blowhards like cecil sbw and clarice can get away with taking themselves too seriously.

[btw ....]

remind me again sbw why I should give a rat's ass what you think ... about anything?

[kim]

I regret getting down and dirty on Clarice. I have better ways to make the same points.
===========

[sbwaters]

Kim, thanks for helping me understand the circumstance. I've been trying to sort things out through pain meds all week and the extra effort was tiring.