"We can not dedicate -- we can not consecrate -- we can not hallow -- this ground."

Remember when Candidate Obama promised trillion-dollar give-aways to investment bankers, humongous tax-cuts instead of help for the unemployed, and incomprehensibly wishy-washy healthcare "reform?"

Remember when Candidate Obama promised to maintain "the very same "state secrets" theories of the Bush administration" and "cordon off all secret actions from judicial scrutiny, immunizing the C.I.A. and its partners from the demands and limits of the law?"

Of course nobody remembers anything about the Obama campaign except bullshit, because there is nothing else to remember, and now, for the bullshit-loving voters of America...

A new star has arisen!

And what does the brand-new Republican Governor of Virginia, Bob McDonnell really believe?

At age 34, two years before his first election and two decades before he would run for governor of Virginia, Robert F. McDonnell submitted a master's thesis to the evangelical school he was attending in Virginia Beach in which he described working women and feminists as "detrimental" to the family. He said government policy should favor married couples over "cohabitators, homosexuals or fornicators." He described as "illogical" a 1972 Supreme Court decision legalizing the use of contraception by unmarried couples.

No more rubbers for you fornicators!

Now McDonnell has changed, he claims.

"Virginians will judge me on my 18-year record as a legislator and Attorney General and the specific plans I have laid out for our future -- not on a decades-old academic paper I wrote as a student during the Reagan era and haven't thought about in years."

But out of 15 proposals for a new Republican policy which McDonnell proposed in his thesis at Pat Robertson's law school in Virginia, McDonnell is still enthusiastic about at least ten of them.

During his 14 years in the General Assembly, McDonnell pursued at least 10 of the policy goals he laid out in that research paper, including abortion restrictions, covenant marriage, school vouchers and tax policies to favor his view of the traditional family. In 2001, he voted against a resolution in support of ending wage discrimination between men and women.

Listen up, ye female fornicators and other feminist trash! Your wages are about to crash!

So maybe it's worth examining that long-forgotten thesis, which Bob McDonnell apparently hasn't forgotten quite as much as he claimed, and since a photocopy of it is available online, and space is cheap on the internet, I extracted and appended McDonnell's 15-point agenda at the end of this diary, to save you the trouble of scrolling through 92 pages of theocratic garbage.

But Bob McDonnell didn't carry Northern Virginia and win the governorship by ranting at voters about fornicators and banning condoms! Instead he played those suckers just like... Barack Obama and David Axelrod play that game.

McDonnell avoided discussion of divisive social issues such as abortion and gay rights, crafting his campaign around particular concerns raised by voters from Alexandria to Aldie. He reached out to minority communities and drilled so deeply into local concerns that he was discussing Lyme disease in one neighborhood and Guantanamo Bay prisoners in another.

At a gathering of Hispanics in Fairfax, he greeted the group with "Buenas noches." In Falls Church, he spoke at a Vietnamese American shopping center draped in the colors of the flag of the former South Vietnam.

"He is a household name here," said Shandon Phan, 30, a nonprofit organization worker and a member of the Vietnamese American National Chamber of Commerce. "He runs ads in magazines and TV and radio, and he comes to meet-and-greet events with his wife. It was a very personal touch."

So watch out, Democrats! The Republicans have got a new guy who knows how to play the new game, and incomprehensibly wishy-washy healthcare "reform" along with double-digit unemployment won't send you back to Congress in 2010, or the White House in 2012.

Read more »

You might think that a Wall Street giant like Goldman Sachs, which has been reporting profits of about $1 billion per month for the last six months, wouldn't waste the time and talent of its fantastically well-remunerated employees on a penny-ante business like single-family foreclosures and evictions.

You would be wrong.

"Goldman spent years buying hundreds of thousands of subprime mortgages, many of them from some of the more unsavory lenders in the business, and packaging them into high-yield bonds. Now that the bottom has fallen out of that market, Goldman finds itself in a different role: as the big banker that takes homes away" from families like Tony Becker, Gladys Aguirre, and thousands of others, as described in McClatchy's excellent investigative article by Greg Gordon.

Meanwhile revelations continue to surface about Goldman's "pump-and-dump" operation with a mountain of financial derivatives which they claimed to believe were rock-solid...

In 2006 and 2007, Goldman Sachs Group Inc. peddled more than $40 billion in securities backed by at least 200,000 risky home mortgages but never told the buyers that it was secretly betting that a sharp drop in U.S. housing prices would send the value of those securities plummeting.

Goldman's sales and its clandestine wagers, completed at the brink of the housing market meltdown, enabled one of the nation's premier investment banks to pass most of its potential losses to others before a flood of mortgage loan defaults staggered the U.S. and global economies.

Only later did investors discover that what Goldman promoted as triple-A investments were closer to junk.

Nasty!

In an attempt at building awareness of Detroit's rotting, decaying neighborhoods, the Detroit Demolition Disneyland project finds long-abandoned structures and paints them with Tiggerific Orange paint.

Now almost a third of Detroit - covering a swath of land the size of San Francisco - has been abandoned. Tall grasses, shrubs and urban farms have sprung up in what were once stalwart working-class suburbs. Even downtown, one ruined skyscraper sprouts a pair of trees growing from the rubble.

The city has a shocking jobless rate of 29%. The average house price in Detroit is only $7,500, with many homes available for only a few hundred dollars. Not that anyone is buying. At a recent auction of 9,000 confiscated city houses, only a fifth found buyers.

But Detroit hasn't been totally forgotten by Barack Obama and his wonder-working economic stimulus!

On October 8, 2009, 50,000 people lined up in Detroit to apply for money from the Homelessness Prevention and Rapid Re-Housing Program.

50,000 people lined up...

50,000 people lined up...

But only 3,500 of them will get any money.

Either nobody understands the recent financial meltdown, or nobody who understands it can explain it to anyone who doesn't. This resembles a certain period in the history of India when everyone knew someone who had seen the "Indian rope trick," but no one had seen it themselves.

In the "Indian rope trick," a magician holds one end of a rope and throws the other end high up into the clouds. Then his boy-assistant (jamoora) climbs the rope and slowly disappears.

So anyone who has seen the "Indian rope trick" is obviously insane, and likewise with anyone who claims to understand the recent financial meltdown. Although a few traders probably understood a few varieties of vanilla derivatives, like the most basic credit default swaps, all that vanilla was compounded over multi-national networks with much more exotic flavors like Asian options, "path-dependent" options like lookbacks, and options depending on a multitude of related or unrelated indices, like Altiplano, Annapurna, and Atlas options.

This was a mix which literally ran away to infinity through a garden of forking paths and mutually dependent asymptotic series summed over terms which themselves depended on hypothetical truncations of other asymptotic series, and so on.

So it was already almost impossible to understand enough about this mess to understand that you didn't understand it, and it was exponentially more difficult to understand that nobody understood it, and...

Here we are again exactly where we began, because no one who understood that no one understood the infinite tangle of derivatives could explain that no one understood them to anyone who didn't already understand that no one understood them.

(This was the very first diary I ever posted on the internet, way back in June 2007, and some of it is dated, but since Dick Cheney has been all over TV recently urging President Obama to stop "dithering" and "do what it takes to win" in Afghanistan, I decided it was worth reposting.)

If you're a liberal, you can say that George Bush isn't very smart, and Dick Cheney isn't very nice, and that's about the end of it. A million liberal blogs and columns grind away at synonyms for "not nice" and "not smart" year after year, but the Republicans still control 49 seats in the Senate, and Fox News still has a license to broadcast.

Bush-Cheney chained up a 78 year-old Afghan man in a fetal position at Guantanamo for more than 24 hours, while he pissed and shat all over himself. The New York Times and the Washington Post are still a little fuzzy about what to call this procedure, and the rest of the media is even more obtuse. When John McCain sponsored a very weak bill to restrict this method of "interrogation," Dick Cheney ran through every office in the Capitol trying to defeat it, and he succeeded. The same sort of thing is happening at this very moment in a secret CIA prison somewhere, and if you don't know what to call it, I can tell you.

It's torture, Stupid!

Sometimes the CIA asks agents in training to undergo water-boarding for as long as they can possibly stand it, in order to familiarize themselves with this standard tool of the Agency.

They don't last a minute.

If you don't know what to call water-boarding someone for hour after hour, and then water-boarding him again the next day, and the next, and chaining him up in "stress positions" in the intermissions... if you don't know what to call it, I can tell you, Stupid!

It's torture.

Fox popularizes torture on its program "24," and this thing won the Emmy for best drama last year. The bomb is always ticking, and nothing can prevent the end of the world except torturing a prisoner.

In a recent debate, all the Republican candidates for the Presidential nomination in 2008 except John McCain endorsed torture under the pretext of this ridiculous scenario. Has such a thing ever occurred in the history of the world? When? Where? Nobody seems to know, or care.

Somehow the United States managed to destroy the Nazi juggernaut and outlast the Soviet Empire without torturing prisoners. Roosevelt never endorsed torture, and neither did Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, George H. W. Bush, or Bill Clinton, nor any of the Presidents who came before them, nor any of the Vice-Presidents who served with them.

Why now?

Any idiot could have alleged the same "ticking bomb" scenario for a Nazi counter-attack or Soviet missile launch at any time in the last 60 years. The armies of great industrial nations attacked us, we were threatened with weapons of apocalyptic power, but torture continued to be condemned as the most contemptible and disgusting of all human actions.

What changed?

We lost the concept of evil. Evil... it sounds a little quaint. Who would use such a word except for a few Bible-bangers in some forgotten valley? The word went away, and the concept went away, and we didn't recognize the thing when it came upon us.

George W. Bush and Dick Cheney are evil men, and you don't have to be a rocket scientist to figure it out, but somehow almost none of us have seen it or said it in all these years.

The men and women who chain up prisoners like pretzels and suffocate them in sound-proof chambers work for Bush-Cheney, and even if the blood and piss and shit of the prisoners never stains the fingers of Mr. Bush or Mr. Cheney, or their supporters in Congress, or the Generals who saved their careers instead of the honor of the United States, all of them are guilty of torture, and more guilty than semi-educated hillbillies who carry out their orders.

All these men must be driven out of every position of trust or authority. Every prisoner who underwent the obscenities of Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib and all the other nightmare installations must be compensated to the limit of our power to heal and restore them.

But the honor and decency of the United States cannot be reclaimed, and we cannot heal ourselves or our prisoners, until we recognize the thing that entangled us in the most contemptible and disgusting of all human actions, and name it with its ancient, forgotten name.

Evil.

1. Foreclosures Surge in Q3

RealtyTrac® (realtytrac.com), the leading online marketplace for foreclosure properties, today released its U.S. Foreclosure Market Report™ for Q3 2009, which shows that foreclosure filings -- default notices, scheduled auctions and bank repossessions -- were reported on 937,840 properties in the third quarter, a 5 percent increase from the previous quarter and an increase of nearly 23 percent from Q3 2008.

Also surging are profits for the financial services industry.

It's obviously lucky for the banks that we elected Barack Obama, but didn't that nauseating hypocrite also promise to do a little something for homeowners in trouble?

2. A Joke About Larry Summers

Someone asked Larry Summers' girlfriend if he really believes that women can't do math, and the girlfriend held up her pinky finger...

"He must believe it, because he told me that this is eight inches."

I was contemplating the nauseating hypocrite Obama's latest spit-on-the-public joke about regulating the financial services industry (a 29-year-old junior executive from Goldman Sachs was appointed Chief Enforcement Officer of the SEC), and really...

What can you say?

The guy in this video plugs his favorite sock-your-money-away-in-precious-metals operation for about 30 seconds, and then...