The real John McCain-Maverick my ass...

Great read from Tim Dickinson on Rolling Stone via TO. It's called Make-Believe Maverick. An excerpt:

There's a distance between the two men that belies their shared experience in North Vietnam - call it an honor gap. Like many American POWs, McCain broke down under torture and offered a "confession" to his North Vietnamese captors. Dramesi, in contrast, attempted two daring escapes. For the second he was brutalized for a month with daily torture sessions that nearly killed him. His partner in the escape, Lt. Col. Ed Atterberry, didn't survive the mistreatment. But Dramesi never said a disloyal word, and for his heroism was awarded two Air Force Crosses, one of the service's highest distinctions. McCain would later hail him as "one of the toughest guys I've ever met."

Dramesi knows the real McCain and its not one of a Maverick. Let me leave you with this, also from the article:

In its broad strokes, McCain's life story is oddly similar to that of the current occupant of the White House. John Sidney McCain III and George Walker Bush both represent the third generation of American dynasties. Both were born into positions of privilege against which they rebelled into mediocrity. Both developed an uncanny social intelligence that allowed them to skate by with a minimum of mental exertion. Both struggled with booze and loutish behavior. At each step, with the aid of their fathers' powerful friends, both failed upward. And both shed their skins as Episcopalian members of the Washington elite to build political careers as self-styled, ranch-inhabiting Westerners who pray to Jesus in their wives' evangelical churches.

In one vital respect, however, the comparison is deeply unfair to the current president: George W. Bush was a much better pilot.

Doesn't really say much about both men does it?

Give me a break...

William Ayers is a terrorist? The Rethugs are desperate..truly desperate. From their dumbass in lipstick:

"Our opponent is someone who sees America as imperfect enough to pal around with terrorists who targeted their own country,"

Fuck that deranged freak that thinks living in AK makes her a foreign policy expert....seriously. Ayers is a professor, there was no case to be made against him or the lawd knows the federal government would of made it.

Obama was all of eight years old when the Weather Underground was founded.

Desperate times call for desperate lies evidently.
Graphic courtesty of deathstrikesquirrel on deviantART

VP debates...did Palin answer any of the moderators questions?

Not that I could tell. Add to that... if I had a joint for every time she used the term 'team of mavericks', I would have a pound of medicinal cannabis right about now..

But that said, she didn't fall on her face, or off the stage.

The moderator didn't throw any real hard ones out there, or follow up for direct answers like Lehrer did. She disappointed me.

McCain pulls out of Michigan.

Wow. McNasty won this state in the 2000 primary. From Politico:

John McCain is pulling out of Michigan, according to two Republicans, a stunning move a month away from Election Day that indicates the difficulty Republicans are having in finding blue states to put in play.

McCain will go off TV in Michigan, stop dropping mail there and send most of his staff to more competitive states, including Wisconsin, Ohio and Florida. Wisconsin went for Kerry in 2004, Ohio and Florida for Bush.

A McCain aide confirmed the move and chalked it up to the state's Democratic tilt and the resources Obama had put in place there.

Is he short on cash? hmmm....

Tags: McCain Pulls out of Michigan, McCain

Ted Stevens trial might be tossed out. DOJ screwup

Is the fix in? I believe so...or the governments lawyers are retarded. From TPM:

A judge suspended the trial of Sen. Ted Stevens today, while he considers the request of the defense for a mistrial.

The defense's motion stems from the prosecutions' failure to turn over FBI reports of interviews with their star witness, former VECO CEO Bill Allen, until late Wednesday night. Stevens' attorneys claimed the prosecutors were withholding evidence that would help the defense.

From the AP:

Judge Emmet Sullivan lashed out at prosecutors, asking them, "Why shouldn't I dismiss the indictment?" He then ordered a recess.

Prosecutors said it was an honest mistake when they waited until late Wednesday night to turn over FBI reports about interviews with the government's star witness, oil pipeline contractor Bill Allen.

Honest mistake my ass....

Leftwing 527 ad hits McCain and the Keating connection

Keep it front and center, McCain was dirty in the Keating Five mess.
From the Clean Money Clean Elections folks:

October 2nd 1968-We can not forget

America, specifically the Federal Government and our CIA, have blood on their hands. They aided and abetted the brutal murder of untold numbers of Mexican citizens in what has become known as The Tlatelolco Massacre. Thank you to Peter, an anonymous commenter here, for reminding me of this day in Mexico's history. It is Mexico's Tiananmen Square.

The link above goes to the George Washington University's archives on this incident. Thanks to FOIA requests we can piece together what role our government played in this massacre of innocent students, children and adults by the Mexican government on October 2, 1968.

The exact number of dead will probably never be known because Mexico refuses to confirm how many died and were injured, although the government has admitted that the horrendous murders were committed without provocation by the protesters that held a rally that day.

The Mexican government has consistently refused to release key records of this incident of mass murder in their history. Former mexican President Luis Echeverría Alvarez, interior secretary at the time of Tlatelolco, was charged with genocide, but the charges were dropped...even though he is believed to be the mastermind of the military attack on thousands of unarmed peaceful citizens.

May he rot in hell for all eternity for what he did. Bastardo.

An excellent first person account can be read here. That is the link Peter left in my comments below. The picture at the top of the post is from that article. The picture below is a monument to honor the fallen from that day in Mexico City.

Our government is responsible for the deaths and injury to hundreds if not thousands of Mexican citizens on that day, as we sent killing tools to the Mexican government ahead of their hosting of the 1968 Olympics which began ten days later.

From the intro to the GWU archives on this incident, which were released on the 30th anniversary of the massacre:

To commemorate this thirtieth anniversary, the National Security Archive has assembled a collection of some of our most interesting and richly-detailed documents about Tlatelolco, many recently released in response to the Archive's Freedom of Information Act requests, all obtained from the secret archives of the CIA, FBI, Defense Department, the embassy in Mexico City and the White House. The records provide a vivid glimpse inside U.S. perceptions of Mexico at the time, and discuss in frank terms many of the most sensitive aspects of the Tlatelolco massacre which continue to be debated today: the political goals of the protesting students, the extent of Communist influence, Diaz Ordaz's response, and the role of the Mexican military in helping to crush the demonstrations.

But while the declassified U.S. documents reveal new details about Tlatelolco, perhaps most important is the challenge their release poses to Mexico today. Thirty years after the massacre, the Mexican government continues to deny its people basic facts about what happened -- refusing to open Army and police records to public scrutiny on the grounds of "national security," denying Congress the right to hear testimony by agents of the state who were present at Tlatelolco. The valiant investigative efforts by reporters, scholars, historians, and an official congressional committee have helped clarify the events of 1968 enormously. But Mexico's secret archives are also critical for a full understanding of Tlatelolco -- and until they are opened, doubts about the truth of the Tlatelolco massacre will linger on.

Will all the truth ever come out? Somehow,I doubt it...but a thank you to all the hard work done by Kate Doyle to get the truth released to the world. Oh, and thank you again Peter for reminding me.

Tags: Tlatelolco Massacre, Kate Doyle, Luis Echeverría Alvarez

25 percent of senators vote no on Bailout bill.

They haven't posted the vote tally yet, but when they do, it will be here. Both sets of assholes are touting their respective candidate as leading the charge on this bill..

McCain did NOT speak on the floor of the Senate regarding the bill..Obama did.

Grandstanding fucktards all.

McNasty rears his ugly head in Des Moines..

From E&P:

John McCain, on a visit to the newspaper's office, took questions from the Des Moines Register editorial board on Tuesday and the results -- available in a series of videos -- revealed his combative side.

He bristled when accusing of running false charges against his opponent in ads, defending them as "100% accurate" and going beyond that saying in his entire career he had been wholly accurate in all matters.

McCain also replied sharply when asked about the qualifications of his running mate, declaring that he "uncategorically" believed she was fully capable, citing her years as mayor and governor -- and even at the PTA. Going well beyond poll results, he stated that the American public "overwhelmingly" embraced her. A new Pew survey finds today that 51% of Americans now believe that Palin is unqualified, up from 37% after her announcement.

Hot damn.... The Des Moines Register writeup is here w/complete video.

Why are so many banks failing..is the government covering the wrong asses?

It’s a legitimate question. I think the reasons are similar. Over at ProPublica, a great site btw, they have a good piece up entitled: Anatomy of a Bank Failure. In the writeup, they examine the failure of California’s IndyMac, aka Independent National Mortgage Corporation. IndyMac was the first big bank to fail in this nightmare on wall street. They hit the skids in July.

The article is interesting in that it points a finger at the federal government office known as the Office of Thrift Supervision or OTS. John Reich, the head cheese at OTS has faced questioning before, and usually blames someone else it seems, namely a Senate banking committee member.

On June 26th of this year, Chuckie Schumer wrote a letter to the OTS and the SEC asking wtf was going on with IndyMac. The letter was published in the media and immediately customers started pulling out their money. The ProPublica article paints a different picture of what was going down:

While Schumer’s famously ill-timed letter clearly hastened IndyMac’s end, a detailed review of filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Office of Thrift Supervision for December 2007 and March 2008 suggest that prospects for keeping the S&L afloat were all but nonexistent: The lender’s demise was a matter of when, not if.

The filings raise the question of whether federal regulators felt it was more important to protect the bank’s shareholders and executives than to safeguard the Federal Deposit Insurance Fund that would ultimately pay for the losses. The current cost of the IndyMac failure, according to the FDIC, is $8.9 billion - a number that would undoubtedly have been smaller had the OTS called in the FDIC six months earlier.

As was the case with WaMu IndyMac, also a Savings and Loan, was neck-deep in the subprime mortgage debacle. When it was known that IndyMac was struggling, the OTS didn’t do what they could of to keep the taxpayers ass covered, in other words, they covered the banks ass. Again from the ProPublica writeup:

A conservative strategy by the OTS would have been to downgrade the S&L, and thereby limit the risk to the FDIC fund that protects insured deposits. Instead, to buy time in the hope that a new business plan would improve IndyMac’s earnings, regulators let the firm take modest write-downs of 5 percent or so in some of its troubled mortgage assets. This helped IndyMac keep its risk-based capital ratio barely above the 10 percent floor and allowed it to qualify as “well-capitalized,” thus avoiding being added to the FDIC’s list of problem institutions.

As a result, IndyMac was able to keep borrowing from the Federal Home Loan Bank and pulling in insured deposits. The insured deposits rose to $16 billion as of March 31, compared with $8.8 billion on June 30, 2007. The result: much greater exposure for the FDIC when IndyMac finally collapsed.

That was wrong on every level. This is a nation of people, not corporations. Or its supposed to be. It’s disgusting that time and time again, the OTS refused to turn IndyMac over to the control of the FDIC, buying their bullshit lines that things were getting better, when in reality they were lying their collective asses off.

In other words, they protected the CEO’s and shareholders as long as they could…to the detriment of the American Taxpayer which was left holding the bag of toxic mortgages and covering all the checking and savings accounts insured by the FDIC. IndyMac was sucking wind in 2007 and the OTS knew it. As this article from the Boston Herald notes about the loans IndyMac was holding at the time they collapsed:

IndyMac had 742,000 mortgages in its portfolio at the time - 60,000 of which were 60 days delinquent or at some stage of foreclosure.

That is a lot of payments that were not being made. But remember, these loans were primarily crap loans known as “Alt-A loans, dubbed “stated income” or “liar” loans, because people who received them often couldn’t demonstrate they could pay the interest on the loan, particularly if, after a period of time, the loan reset at a higher rate.“~ProPublica.

The first thing the FDIC did when they took over IndyMac was to halt all foreclosure proceedings and reexamine the loans and the individuals that got them. Of the 60,000 non-paying mortgages, 40,000 will most likely qualify for the governments mortgage loan rewrite program. This was not only a good thing for the homeowners it is also a good thing for the folks holding those ‘mortgage-backed securities’. As this Reuters article explains:

Restoring troubled loans into performing ones has yielded 87 cents on the dollar for a mortgage later sold, compared with 32 cents for nonperforming mortgages, Bair said, citing data over the past few years.

Of course Ms. Bair, the FDIC chairwoman could be full of shit too. The government is…cough..banking on older financial models for their optimistic data, plus they are praying to God that once the loans are rewritten, the individuals will continue to make the mortgage payments.

The truth is…no one friggin knows how this crap is going to turnout. No one..and its gonna take years to figure it the hell out because so many people got home loans they never would of gotten if rules, regulations and just common-fucking-sense had not been ignored.