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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Tenchusatsu who wrote (642913)	1/20/2012 3:27:34 PM
From: J_F_Shepard	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1571699

"The pipe dream of making America an oil-free nation?" That's a certifiable pipe dream....how low would the price of gas have to go before tar sands oil is too expensive??? Is that why we're exporting more than we're importing? ie to keep the price up?

To: Tenchusatsu who wrote (642913)	1/20/2012 4:58:36 PM
From: joseffy	1 Recommendation Respond to of 1571699

Holder, Breuer connected to players in foreclosure fraud? (Did DOJ heads represent fraudsters?) JANUARY 20, 2012 \| ED MORRISSEY hotair.com For years, the Left has asked why the Obama administration hasn’t pursued prosecutions against lenders who arguably engaged in fraud when foreclosing on mortgages in the wake of the housing-bubble collapse. It turns out that these lenders had friends in high places in the Department of Justice. Reuters reports that both Attorney General Eric Holder and his lieutenant Lanny Breuer, who ran the DoJ’s criminal division, were partners in a law firm that worked on behalf of those very same firms (via JWF’s Just A Grunt): U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder and Lanny Breuer, head of the Justice Department’s criminal division, were partners for years at a Washington law firm that represented a Who’s Who of big banks and other companies at the center of alleged foreclosure fraud, a Reuters inquiry shows. The firm, Covington & Burling, is one of Washington’s biggest white shoe law firms. Law professors and other federal ethics experts said that federal conflict of interest rules required Holder and Breuer to recuse themselves from any Justice Department decisions relating to law firm clients they personally had done work for. Both the Justice Department and Covington declined to say if either official had personally worked on matters for the big mortgage industry clients. Justice Department spokeswoman Tracy Schmaler said Holder and Breuer had complied fully with conflict of interest regulations, but she declined to say if they had recused themselves from any matters related to the former clients. Holder and Breuer aren’t alone. Reuters lists a couple more former Covingtom & Burling associates at the DoJ that have since returned to their law practice, including Holder’s deputy chief of staff John Garland and Breuer’s deputy chief of staff Steven Fagell. The law firm itself lists almost two dozen former attorneys now working in the DoJ and another dozen in US Attorney offices around the country. That’s quite an impressive footprint of influence for Covington & Burling, and a valuable one for its clientele. It’s not as if the fraud was particularly esoteric, either. Reuters began its own reporting on massive numbers of forged endorsements, part of the robo-signing scandal that halted foreclosure processing for more than a year. Those forgeries got submitted to courts on many occasions as part of the foreclosure process. Despite this, Holder has done nothing — at least publicly — to press an investigation into these forgeries, and as Reuters reports today, more are on their way: Recent calls for a wide-ranging criminal investigation of the mortgage servicing industry have come from members of Congress, including Senator Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., state officials, and county clerks. In recent months clerks from around the country have examined mortgage and foreclosure records filed with them and reported finding high percentages of apparently fraudulent documents. On Wednesday, John O’Brien Jr., register of deeds in Salem, Mass., announced that he had sent 31,897 allegedly fraudulent foreclosure-related documents to Holder. O’Brien said he asked for a criminal investigation of servicers and their law firms that had filed the documents because they “show a pattern of fraud,” forgery and false notarizations. I suspect this information will animate the Left against Holder much more than Operation Fast & Furious, but both need extensive investigation. Perhaps this will be the straw that broke the camel’s back and convinces Barack Obama to get a new Attorney General. If not, Republicans and Democrats alike will have plenty of opportunity to ask Obama why his Department of Justice seems more interested in cover-ups and political machinations than in law enforcement.

To: Tenchusatsu who wrote (642913)	1/21/2012 2:11:43 PM
From: bentway	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1571699

Benen: "A look at the recent track of the religious right movement and its spectacularly unsuccessful attempts to dictate the Republican presidential nominating contest. Dana Milbank takes stock today and ponders, “God knows what has become of the religious right.” The movement of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson has been in decline for some time, but recent events suggest that they are wandering in the political wilderness. A fresh symptom of the trouble came this month during the meeting of 150 evangelical leaders in Texas, where the deeply divided deacons of the religious right had to take three votes before opting to endorse Rick Santorum, who has no real chance of winning the Republican presidential nomination. […] Things have not gone well generally in this electoral cycle for the once-vaunted movement. Preferred candidates, particularly Mike Huckabee, didn’t run. The front-runner belongs to a church that some Christian conservatives consider a cult. The one religious conservative remaining in the race, Santorum, has virtually no chance. Michele Bachmann flopped. Rick Perry flamed out — and, upon exiting the race, endorsed Newt Gingrich the same day that the former House speaker was publicly accused by a former wife of seeking an “open marriage.” We can take this accurate observation much further, though, by looking back at the last several cycles and noticing that this isn’t the first time the religious right has struggled. In 1980, as the movement was just coming together in earnest, the religious right wasn’t sold on Reagan, and didn’t want to see H.W. Bush on the ticket. In 1988, the movement fought to prevent H.W. Bush from winning the nomination. In 1996, the religious right had no use for Dole. In 2000, the movement desperately wanted John Ashcroft to run, but he didn’t. In 2008, the religious right rallied behind Huckabee in the hopes of derailing McCain. And in 2012, leading social conservatives threw their support to Santorum, hoping to give him a major boost in advance of the South Carolina primary, only to see him slip to fourth place in the polls. If readers looked hard enough, I suspect they could find me contradicting myself about the relative strength of the religious right movement, and I’ll concede I go back and forth on this. On the one hand, evangelicals and other social conservatives maintain large numbers, help provide foot-soldiers for the Republican Party, have access to GOP leaders, and can get prominent party officials to routinely pander to them. On the other, Republicans tend not to put the movement’s agenda very high on the national to-do list, and when push comes to shove, the GOP presidential nomination invariably goes to candidates the religious right doesn’t like at all. But if Santorum continues to fade immediately after a high-profile, enthusiastic endorsement from the movement, it’ll be time for the religious right to pause to consider a disconcerting realization: it doesn’t have the influence it thinks it does."