“Now they have one day to return to work before the state loses out on the chance to refinance debt, saving taxpayers $165 million this fiscal year,” Walker’s spokesman Cullen Werwie said in a statement.

“Failure to return to work and cast their votes will lead to more painful and aggressive spending cuts in the very near future,” the statement said.

And what image does Reuters pick as its lead photo?

And the caption?

Michaela Torcaso of Madison, Wisconsin is overcome with emotion as demonstrators continue to occupy the state Capitol in protest against proposed budget cuts in Madison, February 27, 2011.

Not to sound like an insensitive prick, but give me a fu@$ing break….

Gov. Walker’s proposal would require teachers to pay a higher share of their health insurance and pension contributions, and they’d forfeit the right to collective bargaining.

In response to this unspeakable assault on “worker’s rights,” Reuters runs a huge photograph of a woman who looks like an F-5 just ripped through her trailer. I get it Reuters. You’re just trying to promote the narrative, rally the masses. These poor mistreated teachers! With their paid holidays, and their cushy pensions and their two months off every summer. Isn’t it terrible what this evil Republican is doing?

Seriously. This woman looks like Gov. Walker just murdered her family.

Suck it up, honey. We’re in the middle of a goddamn recession.

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker has declared war on state workers, almost literally.

First, he proposed a state budget that would cut retirement and healthcare for workers like teachers and nurses, and strip away nearly all of their collective bargaining rights. But even more significantly, he announced last Friday that he had alerted the National Guard to be ready for state workers to strike or protest, an unprecedented step in modern times.

This would be the first time in nearly 80 years that the National Guard would be used to break a strike by Wisconsin workers, and the first time in over 40 years that the National Guard would be used against public workers anywhere in the country. The last time was the Memphis sanitation strike in 1968, just before Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination.

The cultural and historical significance of Gov. Walker’s action can’t be ignored. When he proposes using the National Guard to break a strike, he conjures a period of American history in which labor and capital were locked in violent, terrible struggle, when income inequality had reached epic heights, and workers had to bleed to organize.

So Gov. Walker has “almost literally” declared war on state workers? Really?

Apparently, at least in Stephanie Taylor’s eyes, if Walker calls on the National Guard to provide security, or riot control, in the next few days, its akin to a declaration of war. Its Birmingham in the ’60s, its Kent State all over again!

Look, we’re all a little guilty of dipping in the hyperbole well every now and again, but this borders on the absurd.

What’s worse, Taylor’s entire argument is based on a completely bullshit premise – that Gov. Walker threatened to sick the Guard on these poor, mistreated union workers.

Gov. Scott Walker has been in communication with the Wisconsin National Guard to help run the state’s prisons should correction officers stay home in protest over proposed changes to collective bargaining rules for public employees.

But since the governor announced the news last week, his political opponents — and some media outlets — have raised the alarm over the prospect that the Guard would be used to keep protestors in line.

A common theme of the union demonstrators in Madison today was that Governor Walker is a “dictator.” This showed up on sign after sign. It sheds light, I think, on how public union members in particular, and liberals in general, think. What is going on here is that the voters of Wisconsin have elected a Republican Governor and–overwhelmingly–a Republican legislature, precisely so that they can get the state’s budget under control.

What the Democrats don’t like isn’t dictatorship, it is democracy. That is why the Democrats in the Wisconsin Senate fled the state en masse–they prevented a quorum, so that a vote they were going to lose couldn’t take place. Once again, it is democracy they are trying to frustrate, not dictatorship.

This sort of fanaticism amongst public workers is nothing new, especially in Europe. Hell, most of the European workforce has taken to the streets at one time or another to voice their opposition to any attempt to reduce pension benefits, or raise the retirement age, or eliminate any number of public sector handouts.

What’s interesting about these developments in Wisconsin are (1) when you add up union members, their families, and the thousands of other voters on the public payroll, big government Democrats have a staggering number of “surefire votes”, each and every election cycle; and (2) the fact that Republicans took control of the Wisconsin legislature in such overwhelming fashion – in spite of the public sector workforce (who typically turn out to vote in mass) – reflects just how much outrage and resentment there is from the private sector.

A group of Democratic Wisconsin lawmakers blocked passage of a sweeping anti-union bill Thursday, refusing to show up for a vote and then abruptly leaving the state in an effort to force Republicans to the negotiating table.

As ever-growing throngs of protesters filled the Capitol for a third day, the 14 Democrats disappeared around midday, just as the Senate was about to begin debating the measure, which would eliminate collective bargaining for most public employees.

They were not in their offices, and aides said they did not know where any of them had gone. Hours later, one member of the group told The Associated Press that they had all left Wisconsin.

“We’re not in Wisconsin right now,” Erpenbach said. “The reason why we’re doing this is because there are some jurisdictional issues that we’d be dealing with.”

The Senate’s Sergeant at Arms cannot compel Senators’ attendance in an open session if they are outside of state lines.

According to the Twitter account of Democrat State Senator Chris Larson from Bay View, “For those looking for us, we are right here, standing with the people of Wisconsin.”

When asked by TODAY’S TMJ4′s Tom Murray why he would not divulge his location, he said “I don’t want those details to take away from the message being sent by the people of Wisconsin.”

Did you catch that last part? Wisconsin Democrats high-tailed it out of Wisconsin, to “stand with the people of Wisconsin.”

I’m not sure what’s more embarrassing – the hysteria displayed by the teacher’s union, whose members are faced with the unspeakable horror of joining the 88% of the American workforce who have no collective bargaining ability – or the conduct of Wisconsin Democrats, who ran to the confines of another state to avoid the issue coming to a head.

If their goal was to simply delay the vote, they’ve succeeded, albeit temporarily (they can’t hide out in Illinois forever).

If they had hoped to use the delay to garner more public support, I suspect those efforts will fail. Badly. Especially among the private sector folks.

The foreclosure lawyers down in Jacksonville had warned me, but I was skeptical. They told me the state of Florida had created a special super-high-speed housing court with a specific mandate to rubber-stamp the legally dicey foreclosures by corporate mortgage pushers like Deutsche Bank and JP Morgan Chase. This “rocket docket,” as it is called in town, is presided over by retired judges who seem to have no clue about the insanely complex financial instruments they are ruling on — securitized mortgages and laby rinthine derivative deals of a type that didn’t even exist when most of them were active members of the bench. Their stated mission isn’t to decide right and wrong, but to clear cases and blast human beings out of their homes with ultimate velocity. They certainly have no incentive to penetrate the profound criminal mysteries of the great American mortgage bubble of the 2000s, perhaps the most complex Ponzi scheme in human history — an epic mountain range of corporate fraud in which Wall Street megabanks conspired first to collect huge numbers of subprime mortgages, then to unload them on unsuspecting third parties like pensions, trade unions and insurance companies (and, ultimately, you and me, as taxpayers) in the guise of AAA-rated investments. Selling lead as gold, shit as Chanel No. 5, was the essence of the booming international fraud scheme that created most all of these now-failing home mortgages.

Give. Me. A. Break.

So boo-fucking-who that Florida judges are bit too overwhelmed “to penetrate the profound criminal mysteries of the great American mortgage bubble of the 2000s, perhaps the most complex Ponzi scheme in human history — an epic mountain range of corporate fraud in which Wall Street megabanks conspired first to collect huge numbers of subprime mortgages, then to unload them on unsuspecting third parties like pensions, trade unions and insurance companies…”

In Taibbi’s world, everything gets boiled down to the little guy getting fucked over by corporate America. Nevermind the fact that “the insanely complex financial instruments” which Taibbi bitches about have absolutely nothing to do with the fact that these homeowners stopped paying their fucking mortgages.

Yes, the securitization of these mortgages has created headaches when trying to figure out who the hell owns your mortgage. And yes, Wall Street probably pulled off an epic scam by bundling sub-prime shit mortgages and passing them off as safe investments.

But that’s not the point.

Its undeniably clear that someone owns that mortgage, just as its undeniably clear that Average Joe Homeowner either made his monthly payment or not. If you haven’t paid, the issue of “who owns my mortgage?” takes a backseat to the issue of “you’ve got no damn right to turn your home loan into some sort of debt-free property grab.”

What’s the alternative? Let homeowners stay in their property – for free – until we’re 100% certain that The Bank of New York, as trustee for the certificate holders CGSS, Inc – Mortgage Pass Through Trust 2007-4 owns your mortgage, instead of Chase Bank?

It doesn’t make a damn bit of difference, one way or another. You sign a promissory note and mortgage, you stop paying, you lose your house, and you sleep in a van down by the river. That’s the way it works. If the obligations that come along with homeownership are a bit too burdensome, let me suggest you rent a place instead.

The truth of the matter is this: As long as homeowners aren’t exposed to a second lawsuit for a deficiency judgment – which they are not – the issue of who owns your mortgage is a battle to be fought between the banks, after they’ve kicked your ass out. And in Florida, that foreclosure process already takes upwards of 12-16 months. meaning from the day you stop making your mortgage payment, you’re already looking at over a year of rent-free living.

And we’re supposed to feel sorry about any of this?

“What this amendment is going to do is officially disfavor and condemn the Muslim community as being a threat to Oklahoma,” Muneer Awad, executive director of CAIR’s Oklahoma chapter and the lead plaintiff in the suit, said earlier this month. In addition, he said, the amendment would invalidate private documents, such as wills, that are written in compliance with Muslim law.

The amendment would require Oklahoma courts to “rely on federal and state law when deciding cases” and “forbids courts from considering or using” either international law or Islamic religious law, known as Sharia, which the amendment defined as being based on the Quran and the teachings of the Prophet Mohammed.

In bringing suit, CAIR argued that the amendment violates both the establishment and free-exercise clauses of the First Amendment’s guarantee of religious freedom. Awad has said the amendment passed “under a campaign of fearmongering” about Islam.

Just when you think CAIR had reached the outer limits of faux-persecution, we get this. I’m not sure which is more absurd: (1) the idea that this amendment – which doesn’t refer to any particular religion or ethnicity – would somehow “condemn” the Muslim community as being a threat to Oklahoma, or, (2) the fact that we actually need a constitutional amendment to remind courts that they’re obligated to rely on federal and state law when deciding cases.

Ezra Klein’s “JournoList 400” is the epitome of progressive and liberal collusion that conservatives, Tea Partiers, moderates and many independents have long suspected and feared exists at the heart of contemporary American political journalism. Now that collusion has been exposed when one of the weakest links in that cabal, Dave Weigel, was outed. Weigel was, in all likelihood, exposed because – to whoever the rat was who leaked his emails — he wasn’t liberal enough….

Source: Andrew Breitbart

I’m not sure what’s more disturbing: the fact that 400 or so influential political journalists, who pride themselves as being “objective gatekeepers,” are about to be outed as nothing more than biased, partisan hacks…

….or, that these twenty-something d-bags feature predominately in this fiasco.

The fact that these clowns have any influence, no matter how slight, in shaping political discourse in this country is frightening on a number of levels.

Walter Lippmann, c. 1919:

Just as the most poisonous form of disorder is the mob incited from high places, the most immoral act the immorality of a government, so the most destructive form of untruth is sophistry and propaganda by those whose profession it is to report the news. The news columns are common carriers. When those who control them arrogate to themselves the right to determine by their own consciences what shall be reported and for what purpose, democracy is unworkable. Public opinion is blockaded. For when a people can no longer confidently repair “to the best foundations for their information,” then anyone’s guess and anyone’s rumor, each man’s hope and each man’s whim becomes the basis of government. All that the sharpest critics of democracy have alleged is true, if there is no steady supply of trustworthy and relevant news. Incompetence and aimlessness, corruption and disloyalty, panic and ultimate disaster, must come to any people which is denied an assured access to the facts. No one can manage anything on pap. Neither can a people.

Klein, Yglesias, Weigel, et al, have pissed all over that legacy.

Francisco Olvera says Sealy Police Sgt. Justin Alderete’s charge of “illegal photography” baffled him and several witnesses.

Olvera says the trouble started when Alderete responded to a complaint of loud music coming from his home. In front of the home, Alderete asked Olvera to show identification and as Olvera walked into his house to get it, Alderete followed him in.

Olvera claims that Alderete saw a can of beer on a kitchen counter, next to Olvera’s wallet, and immediately handcuffed him.

“Olvera was then transported to the City of Sealy jail and charged with ‘public intoxication’ and ‘loud music,’” according to the complaint.

Putting aside the fact that a police officer can not follow you into your home uninvited, two of these charges – public intoxication and “illegal photography” (whatever the hell that means) – are such pure bullshit that this officer should be canned, like right now. Depending on what he wrote in his police report, criminal charges should follow.

I get the whole camaraderie vibe that local prosecutors and cops share, but until local D.A’s actually grow a goddamn backbone and start charging cops who knowingly lie and break the law, this type of abuse of police power isn’t going to stop. The fact that this clown was a police sergeant, meaning he’s had at least 3-4 years on the job, makes his behavior even more inexcusable.

On theories that he was the victim of a plot, he said, “There are very powerful people who would probably do a lot to bring me down. Does it change the reality of what I did? No.”

He said he relates to people who feel betrayed by his hypocrisy.

“How do you think I feel?” he said, eyes misting. “At one point, I stood for something that was important and useful.

“I was in a place in time where I had a purpose, where it mattered. And then I destroyed it.”

From the NY Post

MUCH LIKE Ashley Dupree’s assets, I find Eliot Spitzer’s narcissism both stunning and unrivaled. It’s telling that when Spitzer was questioned about his betrayal of family, friends, political supporters, etc, Spitzer’s super-colossal-lawyer-ego can’t help but immediately shift the focus back to his own feelings, which is particularly rich coming from a married guy who admittedly spent wads of cash on high priced hookers. He was the one injured by all this, you see. He was king of the world, he had a place, a purpose, and then he destroyed it. Poor Spitzer.

The academic at the centre of the ‘Climategate’ affair, whose raw data is crucial to the theory of climate change, has admitted that he has trouble ‘keeping track’ of the information.

Colleagues say that the reason Professor Phil Jones has refused Freedom of Information requests is that he may have actually lost the relevant papers. … The data is crucial to the famous ‘hockey stick graph’ used by climate change advocates to support the theory.

CAN YOU IMAGINE another scenario where the leading proponents of a multi-trillion dollar overhaul to the world’s economy (and our collective daily lives) get a free pass from the media, politicians, etc., all by using the same bullshit excuse (I have it, but I lost it) that Ms. Kellman shot down in my fourth grade reading class?