Year: 2012

Well, He Does Look Kind of Dead

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Brains … Brains … Brains!!!!!

Florida Governor Rick Scott had to cast a provisional ballot in 2006 because the voter records said that he was dead:

Six years before he made national headlines, Gov. Rick Scott found himself being purged from voter rolls after local election officials thought he was dead.

Collier County election officials on Thursday confirmed that the governor was required to vote with a provisional ballot for the 2006 primary and general election after county officials mistook him for Richard E. Scott, who died in January 2006 and had the exact same birthday — 12/1/1952 — as Florida’s 45th governor.

Election officials said the governor was required to vote provisionally because local election officials had received a Social Security Death Index Death Record showing that Richard E. Scott died on Jan. 27, 2006.

The governor, whose full name is Richard Lynn Scott, recounted his voting difficulties in radio interviews on Thursday as the state tangles with the federal government over just that – how likely is it that elections officials might make a mistake and purge the wrong person from the voter rolls?

I’m not sure I believe him.

It’s very convenient for this story to come out now.

I’m just sayin’.

Jeebus

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Some of the provisions of the Trans-Pacific Partnership have been leaked, and this is absolutely awful:

  • limit how U.S. federal and state officials could regulate foreign firms operating within U.S. boundaries, with requirements to provide them greater rights than domestic firms;
  • extend the incentives for U.S. firms to offshore investment and jobs to lower-wage countries;
  • establish a two-track legal system that gives foreign firms new rights to skirt U.S. courts and laws, directly sue the U.S. government before foreign tribunals and demand compensation for financial, health, environmental, land use and other laws they claim undermine their TPP privileges; and
  • allow foreign firms to demand compensation for the costs of complying with U.S. financial or environmental regulations that apply equally to domestic and foreign firms.

Just in case you are wondering, there are proposal to make the agreement more people friendly, and less corporation friendly, but it appears that the Obama administration is opposing this at every level.

Note that this is not atypical of US foreign policy, though it it is in direct contravention of of what he promised during the 2008 campaign.

I guess that Austan Goolsbee was told the truth when he was said to representatives of the Canadian government that Obama’s populist statements regarding free trade agreements were lies.

About F%$#ing Time

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The AFL-CIO is going to fight voter suppression laws being enacted by Republicans:

The nation’s largest labor federation plans to mount an aggressive campaign against voter identification laws in a half-dozen battleground states that will be key in the presidential election.

AFL-CIO Executive Vice President Arlene Holt Baker told reporters on Tuesday that the labor federation will have boots on the ground registering and helping voters in Florida, Michigan, Nevada, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin in coordination with the group’s political program.

Labor is pushing back against voter ID laws, which they say suppress voting by minorities, the elderly, the poor and students. Supporters of the measures say showing identification to vote is needed to crack down on fraud and protect the integrity of elections.

They should have started this a year ago.

Consumer Protection Theater

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The DoJ is investigating to see if cable companies blocking videos from competitors is illegal anti-competitive behavior.

Of course it is. Their goal is to keep raping their customers:

The Justice Department is conducting a wide-ranging antitrust investigation into whether cable companies are acting improperly to quash nascent competition from online video, according to people familiar with the matter.

Justice Department officials have spoken to several online video providers, including Netflix Inc. and Hulu LLC, those people said. Investigators have also questioned Comcast Corp., Time Warner Cable Inc. and other cable companies about issues such as setting data caps, limits to the amount of data a subscriber can download each month, these people said.

Representatives of all those companies and the Justice Department declined to comment on the investigation.

Cable companies provide both television channels and high-speed Internet access for many consumers in the U.S. With broadband Internet, consumers can watch individual programs or channels through online video services like Netflix, Hulu or Amazon, bypassing the cable company’s traditional bundles of channels.

Having invested billions of dollars building their networks, some pay-TV companies have shown little inclination to get out of the business of packaging television channels and become mere conduits for other companies’ data. Some major entertainment companies also have an interest in preserving the current model of television viewing because they want cable companies to take bundles of their channels, rather than just cherry-picking the most popular ones.

It’s an election year, and so nothing is going to come of this.

It’s just political posturing from an administration that sees corrupt incumbents as partners in the process.

Dems Hold Giffords’ Old Seat

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I’m unsure of the significance, Ron Barber was a former Giffords aide, and he was shot when Giffords was, so there is the whole sympathy issue.

Additionally, his opponent, Jesse Kelly, is a major teabagger, and the movement is clearly not as strong as it was in 2010.

As to my feelings about this, it’s, “Meh.”

Giffords was a Blue Dog in Congress, and Barber seems to be cut from the same mold, waffling on voting for Pelosi in the caucus, and for Obama in the general election

He Would Have Liked to Help, But He Had to Wash His Hair

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That’s the reason that Obama gave for doing absolutely nothing with regard with the Scot Walker recall:

President Obama suggested Monday that he was too busy to campaign in Wisconsin ahead of the recall election that targeted Republican Gov. Scott Walker, whose victory last week has raised questions about whether there are broader implications for the president in the fall.

In his first public comments about the election, Obama responded to a question about his decision not to appear in the state to support the Democratic challenger, Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett, by explaining that he has “a lot of responsibilities” as president.

Obama had limited himself to sending a message on his Twitter account expressing support for Barrett on June 4, a day before voters went to the polls.

“I was supportive of Tom and have been supportive of Tom. Obviously, I would have loved to see a different result,” the president said in an interview with WBAY, an ABC TV affiliate in Green Bay, Wis.

Some political analysts concluded that Obama was hesitant to spend time in Wisconsin because he wanted to avoid being tainted by an embarrassing defeat if Barrett lost.

Seriously, does anyone in the Obama administration besides Hillary have any balls at all?

He’ll ask for a recount

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The count is now official, and Democrat John Lehman had defeated Van Wanggaard in the race for Wisconsin state senate, flipping the chamber to the Democrats:

Wisconsin Democrats moved a step closer to winning a recall challenge in the state Senate on Tuesday after a vote canvass in Racine County padded their candidate’s lead over state Sen. Van Wanggaard by 55 votes.

If the state elections board certifies the results, Democrats will have salvaged a single win after suffering bruising losses in the other five recall elections last week.

The canvass found that Democrat John Lehman had 36,351 votes, or 50.6 percent, while Wanggaard received 35,517 votes, or 49.4 percent. The margin of victory was 834 votes, surpassing the 779-vote difference that stood before the canvass was conducted.

Lehman’s victory isn’t official until the state Government Accountability Board certifies the results. That’s expected to happen next week.

800 votes might not sound like a not, but it’s more than 1% which means that there is not an automatic recount, but I’m sure that Wanggaard will ask for one.

It’s a long shot, but it also serves to forestall the Dems taking control of the Senate.

Think Norm Coleman/Al Franken writ small.

I’m sure that Wanggaard will be well rewarded for his efforts by the Koch brothers.

So, Now Your Credibility is Shot, and the Judge Hates You

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Shellie Zimmerman, George Zimmerman’s wife, has been arrested for perjury:

Shellie Zimmerman, wife of George Zimmerman, charged with murdering Trayvon Martin, was arrested Tuesday on one count of perjury, the Seminole County, Fla., Sheriff’s Department said.

………

George Zimmerman, 28, was charged with second-degree murder in the Feb. 26 shooting of Martin. He pleaded not guilty. Police say that he claimed on the night of the shooting that he acted in self-defense.

………

His $150,000 bond was revoked after allegations that during an April 20 bail hearing he and Shellie Zimmerman misled the court about their finances, neglecting to disclose they had raised at least $135,000 in a PayPal account.

The order issued Tuesday by Assistant State Attorney John Guy charged Shellie Zimmerman with knowingly making false statements during the April hearing.

George Zimmerman’s attorney, Mark O’Mara, said Tuesday evening outside his office that he had just returned from two days in court and had not heard previously of Shellie Zimmerman’s arrest. He would not comment further.

Today, I think that George Zimmerman’s lawyer has the worst job in the world.

IRS Yanks 501(c)4 from Phony Charity

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About f%$#ing time:

An Internal Revenue Service decision revoking the tax-exempt status of a small political nonprofit organization may foreshadow an investigation into groups such as Crossroads GPS and Priorities USA that spend millions on the 2012 U.S. presidential election.

At risk would be the groups’ nonprofit status, which lets them collect millions of dollars from individuals and corporations while keeping donors anonymous.

…………

The IRS decision released last month involved a so-called campaign school in which a partisan group trained candidates.

“You are not operated primarily to promote social welfare because your activities are conducted primarily for the benefit of a political party and a private group of individuals, rather than the community as a whole,” said the IRS letter telling the group it was losing its exempt status.

Unfortunately, it looks like there won’t be major action this year.

H/t Susie Madrak.http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-06-08/irs-denial-of-tax-exemption-to-u-s-political-group-spurs-alarms.html

Big Robosigning Case

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Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism is once again, all over the details.  The nickel tour is that there are forged documents, (not really news) and the trusts set up to securitize the loans are illegal under New York law (they’ve pretty much all been done under New York Law), which means that there are significant tax and ownership implications:

In a unanimous decision, the Alabama Court of Civil Appeals reversed a lower court decision on a foreclosure case, U.S. Bank v. Congress and remanded the case to trial court.

We’d flagged this case as important because to our knowledge, it was the first to argue what we call the New York trust theory, namely, that the election to use New York law in the overwhelming majority of mortgage securitizations meant that the parties to the securitization could operate only as stipulated in the pooling and servicing agreement that created that particular deal. Over 100 years of precedents in New York have produced well settled case law that deems actions outside what the trustee is specifically authorized to do as “void acts” having no legal force. The rigidity of New York trust has serious implications for mortgage securitizations. The PSAs required that the notes (the borrower IOUs) be transferred to the trust in a very specific fashion (endorsed with wet ink signatures through a particular set of parties) before a cut-off date, which typically was no later than 90 days after the trust closing. The problem is, as we’ve described in numerous posts, that there appears to have been massive disregard in the securitization for complying with the contractual requirements that they established and appear to have complied with, at least in the early years of the securitization industry. It’s difficult to know when the breakdown occurred, but it appears that well before 2004-2005, many subprime originators quit bothering with the nerdy task of endorsing notes and completing assignments as the PSAs required; they seemed to take the position they could do that right before foreclosure. Indeed, that’s kosher if the note has not been securitized, but as indicated above, it is a no-go with a New York trust. There is no legal way to remedy the problem after the fact.

The solution in the Congress case appears to have been a practice that has since become troublingly become common: a fabricated allonge. An allonge is an attachment to a note that is so firmly affixed that it can’t travel separately. The fact that a note was submitted to the court in the Congress case and an allonge that fixed all the problems appeared magically, on the eve of trial, looked highly sus. The allonge also contained signatures that looked less than legitimate: they were digitized (remember, signatures as supposed to be wet ink) and some were shrunk to fit signature lines. These issues were raised at trial by Congress’s attorneys, but the fact that the magic allonge appeared the Thursday evening before Memorial Day weekend 2011 when the trial was set for Tuesday morning meant, among other things, that defense counsel was put on the back foot (for instance, how do you find and engage a signature expert on such short notice? Answer, you can’t).

………

The lower court (in Alabama, what a surprise) ruled against the homeowner, but on appeal, it was remanded with instructions to use a more appropriate standard of evidence, and to better address her claims.

Go read the whole thing. It’s worth it.

If anyone ever decides to enforce the law, this whole corrupt mess implodes.

My take away is that something north of 50% of the home owners in the US probably do not have clear title on their homes.

China Mandates Compulsory Licensing of Pharmaceuticals

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China has proposed compulsory licensing of drugs:

China has overhauled parts of its intellectual property laws to allow its drug makers to make cheap copies of medicines still under patent protection in an initiative likely to unnerve foreign pharmaceutical companies.

The Chinese move, outlined in documents posted on its patent law office website, comes within months of a similar move by India to effectively end the monopoly on an expensive cancer drug made by Bayer AG by issuing its first so-called “compulsory license”.

The action by China will ring alarm bells in Big Pharma, since the country is a vital growth market at a time when sales in Western countries are flagging.

The amended Chinese patent law allows Beijing to issue compulsory licenses to eligible companies to produce generic versions of patented drugs during state emergencies, or unusual circumstances, or in the interests of the public.

For “reasons of public health”, eligible drug makers can also ask to export these medicines to other countries, including members of the World Trade Organisation.

Compulsory licenses are available to nations to issue under WTO rules in certain cases where life-saving treatments are unaffordable.

“The revised version of Measures for the Compulsory Licensing for Patent Implementation came into effect from May 1, 2012,” China’s State Intellectual Property Office said in a faxed statement to Reuters.

The changes can be found on the website of China’s State Intellectual Property Office at http://link.reuters.com/tus68s

Here is the Google Translate link.

Number one on the compulsory licensing hit parade will apparently be the AIDS anti-viral tenofovir.

One significant part of this is that compulsory licensing is not covered by the ban on drug re-importation, because they weren’t exported from the US.

WTO rules would seem to indicate that, absent an extension of the law to cover compulsory licenses, that they would be legal in the US.

Then again, the phrase, “Drugs made in China,” gives me less confidence than, for example, French manners or British cooking,.

H/t Naked Capitalism.

It’s On Girl!

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So, now both the ACLU and the Department of Justice are suing Florida over Governor Rick Scott’s voter purge, and Florida is suing DHS for access to their immigration database:

The American Civil Liberties Union sued Florida on Friday to stop its controversial program designed to purge noncitizen voters from the rolls.

The ACLU says the program, which overwhelmingly targets minorities, needs approval from the federal government under the 1965 Voting Rights Act — a claim already made last week by the U.S. Department of Justice when it ordered Florida to cease the purge.

Florida Secretary of State Ken Detzner, who is named as a defendant, has said Florida already received permission years ago to clean the voter rolls of noncitizens.

But the ACLU argues that the specific processes for the noncitizen-voter program — a new effort by the state — never received federal approval.

What’s more, the program is too much of a burden on, and too much of a threat to, lawful voters, who could risk being removed from the rolls due to government error, the ACLU says.

“The state of Florida is violating federal law by subjecting citizens to this new and unnecessary requirement in order to exercise their right to vote,” Julie Ebenstein, an ACLU Florida staff attorney, said in a written statement. “We are asking the court to protect the right to vote and stop this unlawful, targeted voting purge.”

Detzner’s office couldn’t immediately respond to all aspects of the suit, which was filed late Friday afternoon. But it insisted the program is fair and needed.

The program is needed of course, because, after all, it would chaos if they let sp**s and n*****s vote.

Here’s a paraphrase of Jeff Foxworthy, “If you think that people who will likely vote against you should be prevent from voting, you might not be a real American.”

It would be nice if someone went to jail over this crap.

And Now It’s Spain

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It looks like Spain is going to be getting a bailout for its banks:

Responding to increasingly urgent calls from across Europe and the United States, Spain on Saturday agreed to accept a bailout for its cash-starved banks as European finance ministers offered an aid package of up to $125 billion.

European leaders hope the promise of such a large package, made in an emergency conference call with Spain, will quell rising financial turmoil ahead of elections in Greece that they fear could further shake world markets.

The decision made Spain the fourth and largest European country to agree to accept emergency assistance as part of the continuing debt crisis. The aid offered by countries that use the euro was nearly three times the $46 billion in extra capital the International Monetary Fund said was the minimum that the wobbly Spanish banking sector needed to guard against a deepening of the country’s economic crisis.

On Sunday, Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy tried to deflect criticism for his government’s decision to seek assistance for Spain’s ailing bank. The winners, he said, were “the credibility of the European project, the future of the euro, the solidity of our financial system and the possibility that credit will flow again.”

What is interesting here is that this is a bailout for the banks, and not a bailout for the Spanish government.

What is even more interesting is that it appears that the bank bondholders will be at the back of the queue:

Investors holding bonds issued by Spain and its banks will probably rank behind official creditors in the queue for payment after the nation asked for a bailout of as much as 100 billion euros ($125 billion).

The funds will be channeled through the state-run FROB bank-rescue fund and Spain will “retain the full responsibility of the financial assistance and will sign” the agreement with the other partners, according to the statement issued June 9. The document did not make clear whether the European Stability Mechanism, the region’s permanent support fund, which is likely to start operating in July, or the temporary European Financial Stability Facility, will make the loan.

“This is state financing, and the risks of an equity injection into the banks will stay with Spain,” said Alberto Gallo, head of European macro credit research at Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc in London. “Spain needs a systematic restructuring of its banking system, which could entail haircuts to subordinated bank debt. Official lenders on the other hand are likely to demand seniority.”

Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy has been forced to abandon his attempt to recapitalize the nation’s banks without outside help as the country’s descent into recession obliged lenders to own up to spiraling losses. While Rajoy said yesterday the agreement was “the opening of a credit line,” rather than a bailout such as those received by Greece, Ireland and Portugal, and the conditions of the loan affected the financial industry, the sovereign is ultimately responsible.

Spain needs to insist on major haircuts for the bond holders.  The banks are insolvent, and like the chicken said, they knew the job was dangerous when they took it.

Florida County Clerks to Rick Scott: Drop Dead

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It looks like they are rejecting his plan for a little Jim Crow:

Florida’s noncitizen voter purge looks like it’s all but over.

The 67 county elections supervisors — who have final say over voter purges —are not moving forward with the purge for now because nearly all of them don’t trust the accuracy of a list of nearly 2,700 potential noncitizens identified by the state’s elections office.The U.S. Department of Justice has ordered the state to stop the purge.

“We’re just not going to do this,” said Leon County’s elections supervisor, Ion Sancho, one of the most outspoken of his peers. “I’ve talked to many of the other supervisors and they agree. The list is bad. And this is illegal.”

It is explicitly illegal.

You are not allowed to scrub voter rolls less than 90 days before an election under federal law, and the non-presidential Florida primaries are in August.

Additionally, for Florida, this has to be pre-cleared by the DoJ.

The party of Lincoln is not the party of Jim Crow.

Shop JC Penny

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And I should not that I have received no benefit or promise of benefit from them.

You see, the hate group known as One Million Mom’s was threatening a boycott because they had Ellen DeGeneris as a spokesperson, and JC Penney told those contemptible homopobes to go pound sand by putting two gay fathers in their latest Fathers day ad:

The anti-gay hate group One Million Moms has issued a boycott calling for JC Penney to fire spokeswoman Ellen DeGeneres due to her sexual orientation. JC Penney responded with this fabulous Father’s Day ad — featuring two gay dads for the first time in JC Penney history.

This is absolutely the right response.

When bigots threaten you, your response should be “F%$# You”.

On a deeper note, the fact that a major corporation has decided to do this indicates taht there is a major, and rather rapid, shift in attitude going on.