Trump's Abject Failure Towards Veterans

Republicans always talk about "supporting the troops" and "honoring veterans" with talk being the operative word.  Republican talk and actions never coincide with the objective reality experienced by veterans and under the Trump/Pence regime the situation has grown far worse.  Many veterans find themselves waiting on benefits payments and facing eviction for non-payment of rent.  And then there is the issue of waiting to receive medical benefits - something my son-in-law can cite chapter and verse on.  A piece in New York Magazine looks at the growing scandal surrounding the VA and the plight of veterans.  When Trump says he honors and supports veterans, like so much that comes out of his mouth, it's a lie.  Here are article highlights:

Donald Trump did not go to Arlington Cemetery on Veterans Day. He was “extremely busy,” he told reporters in a press call on Friday. But his conscience does not appear to trouble him. During a recent visit to the Marine barracks in Washington, he even congratulated himself for his commitment to veterans. “The fact is I’ve done a lot,“ he said. But as is often the case, reality does not exactly comport with Trump’s version of events. [Trump] The president hasn’t accomplished much for veterans, as a burgeoning scandal within the Department of Veterans Affairs demonstrates.

The VA owes GI bill payments to thousands of veterans, NBC News reported on Thursday. Some have waited months for their benefits, which cover living expenses in addition to tuition bills, and the VA has admitted that it has received several complaints from veterans who now face eviction because they haven’t been able to pay rent. VA officials have blamed the backlog on the department’s IT system. Though NBC has reported delays in payments since August, a Thursday hearing conducted by the U.S. House Committee on Veteran Affairs underscored the new extent of the crisis.

[V]eterans continue to struggle. “I can’t afford rent. I can’t afford groceries. It’s a lot of emotional strain and aggravation,” Daniel Gorman, an Iraq War veteran and Fordham University student, told the Washington Post on Thursday. “I’m supposed to graduate in May 2019, but I don’t know if that’s feasible if this persists.”

The flaws of the VA’s IT system predate the Trump administration. But as CNN reported on Thursday, the Forever GI bill Trump signed in 2017 may have exacerbated certain long-standing technology issues. “The legislation did not address the VA’s antiquated IT system used to account for those changes, and the department’s failure to implement changes to that system has resulted in a cascading series of errors affecting the distribution of housing allowances to veteran students,” CNN wrote. Congress provided $30 million for the VA to resolve its IT problems, but the Post reported that the department is six months late on a status update. Meanwhile, the department has over 45,000 unfilled job vacancies, no permanent information chief, and VA Secretary Robert Wilkie said in early November that he is planning unspecified budget cuts, at Trump’s request.

So though Trump doesn’t bear sole responsibility for the GI bill crisis, the issue illustrates the wide chasm between Trump’s professed affection for veterans, and the way veterans experience his preferred policies. Trump’s federal hiring freeze, which he temporarily instated not long after taking office, affected many veterans who relied on the federal government as a pathway to work. [Trump] The president has also repeatedly expressed interest in privatizing more of the VA’s functions, something most major veterans’ service organizations oppose.

Other Trumpian scandals threaten the department’s reputation, as well as its ability to fulfill its responsibilities to veterans. ProPublica reported in August that three Trump cronies — Palm Beach, Florida physician Bruce Moskowitz, Marvel Entertainment CEO Ike Perlmutter, and attorney Marc Sherman — wielded unprecedented influence over VA policy, though all three lack experience serving in either political office or in the U.S. military. The three are perceived by critics to favor the privatization of certain VA benefits, occasionally in ways that benefit their own business interests.

Public-private partnerships don’t always work out for veterans who are enrolled in the VA. Passed in 2014, the Veterans Choice Program, which allowed veterans burdened either by geographic distance from a VA facility, or by long waits for VA appointments, to seek alternative private care, should have reduced wait times. Efficiency was the program’s raison d’etre. But in June 2018, the Government Accountability Office concluded that the Choice program didn’t quite work as advertised. “The Choice program was aimed at reducing wait times through increased access to private health care, but the GAO’s performance audit conducted from April 2016 through May 2018 found that, in many cases, veterans would have been better off making appointments at VA facilities,” reported Military.com.

According to a November 13 story from Stars and Stripes, a separate GAO report found that private contractors hired to examine veterans who file disability claims often failed to meet basic standards for timeliness and accuracy. “Most contractors fell into the ‘unsatisfactory performance’ category, meaning 10 percent or more of their reports contained errors. The worst-performing contractor had errors in 38 percent of their exam reports,” Stars and Stripes reported.

As the GI bill crisis mushrooms and thousands of jobs go unfilled, the prospect of progress looks faint.

Upon first, superficial glance, Trump’s approach to the VA may look like hypocrisy. After all, he’s repeatedly claimed to love the troops. But hypocrisy is too simplistic a frame. Of course Trump says he loves the troops; try finding a politician in national office who’d say otherwise. And yes, [Trump] the president has failed to demonstrably improve conditions for veterans enrolled in the VA. But hypocrisy didn’t produce that outcome; instead, it was an inevitability, created by Trump’s commitment to small government.

Trump may not bear sole responsibility for the GI bill crisis, but his VA is in especially poor shape to remedy the problem. As a result, he’s inadvertently revealed the full consequences of a war on welfare. America may elevate veterans — may even bestow on them benefits she denies to civilians who have never taken up arms — but her benevolence is bounded by her more capitalist commitments. In the end, veterans are just citizens, subject to the same incompetencies and cruelties we all endure.

Wolff's Trump Book on Sale Four Days Early; Wolff Taped Sources

While Der  Trumpenführer continues to lash out at Steve Bannon over statements Bannon made in Michael Wolff's new book on the insanity and malfeasance of the Trump White House, word is out that (i) sales of the book are starting tomorrow instead of next week, and (ii) Wolff has tapes of his sources to back up his allegations. Obviously, the tapes will make it far harder for Trump apologists to claim that Wolff's sources never made the statements attributed to them. And meanwhile, the furor coming from the White House and efforts to attack the book and its publisher - a cease and desist demand was sent by a Trump attorney to both Wolff and the publisher - will only serve to make sales even more brisk (you can pre-order it on Amazon now - I did).  A piece in Axios looks at how Wolff documented the book and his sources.  Get out your popcorn as the shit storm begins in earnest.  Here are Axios excerpts:

Michael Wolff has tapes to back up quotes in his incendiary book — dozens of hours of them.

Among the sources he taped, I'm told, are Steve Bannon and former White House deputy chief of staff Katie Walsh.

·        So that's going to make it harder for officials to deny embarrassing or revealing quotes attributed to them in "Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House," out Tuesday.
·        In some cases, the officials thought they were talking off the record. But what are they going to do now?
·        Although the White House yesterday portrayed Wolff as a poseur, he spent hours at a time in private areas of the West Wing, including the office of Reince Priebus when he was chief of staff.
·        The White House says Wolff was cleared for access to the West Wing fewer than 20 times.
·        Wolff, a New Yorker, stayed at the Hay Adams Hotel when he came down to D.C., and White House sources frequently crossed Lafayette Park to meet him there.
Some reporters and officials are calling the book sloppy, and challenging specific passages.·        How could Wolff possibly know for sure what Steve Bannon and the late Roger Ailes said at a private dinner?
·        It turns out Wolff hosted the dinner for six at his Manhattan townhouse. 

Part of Wolff's lengthy index entry for Bannon:

9th Circuit Deals Blow to Imperial — and Incompetent — President

Conservative columnist Jennifer Rubin - although, I suspect Der Trumpenführer would describe her as an enemy of American security - continues on her quest to atone for years of apologizing from GOP misrule and misconduct that set the stage for the 2016 election results.  In a column she looks at the stinging rebuke dealt to the Trump/Pence regime by the United States Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit.  Not only did the court refuse to reverse the stay of Der Trumpenführer's Muslim ban, but it did so in strong language and made it clear that the president is not above judicial review or Constitutional limits.   Rubin's column looks at not only the incompetence of the regime but the dangerous mindset of Der Trumpenführer who views himself above the law.  Here are column excerpts:

The Post reports:

A federal appeals court panel has maintained the freeze on President Trump’s controversial immigration order, meaning previously barred refugees and citizens from seven Muslim-majority countries can continue entering the United States.

In a unanimous, 29-page opinion, three judges with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit flatly rejected the government’s argument that the suspension of the order should be lifted immediately for national security reasons and forcefully asserted their ability to serve as a check on the president’s power.

The opinion tells us much about the hubris and sheer incompetence of the new administration as the court rebuked it at every turn, pointing to errors in law and lawyering.

The administration made the argument that the case was not even reviewable, despite ample precedent from the George W. Bush years. In its most memorable line of the opinion the judges held, “There is no precedent to support this claimed unreviewability, which runs contrary to the fundamental structure of our constitutional democracy.” . . . . Given the president’s recent public hectoring and threats to hold the court responsible for any terror attacks if it upheld the lower court’s order, the court had every reason to eviscerate the claim of what amounts to executive supremacy. 

The executive order — drafted, we are told, during the campaign — was so sweeping and egregiously dismissive of constitutional niceties that the court made easy work of it. The most fatal flaw was the inclusion of green card holders, which the Department of Homeland Security apparently warned the White House not to include. This gave the court a significant group of people with due process rights who would be subject to presidential whim without any procedural recourse. Both green card holders here in the U.S. and those seeking to come back into the country were affected.

The court found that “the States have offered evidence of numerous statements by the President about his intent to implement a ‘Muslim ban.'” On this, Trump dug his own legal grave.

In then weighing the “irreparable injury” that might be done by staying the ban, the court observed that the administration provided “no evidence that any alien from any of the countries named in the Order has perpetrated a terrorist attack in the United States.” In biting criticism the court found, “Rather than present evidence to explain the need for the Executive Order, the Government has taken the position that we must not review its decision at all.” This too was a complete failure of lawyering. 

The White House seemed to believe that issuing an executive order was no different than putting out a campaign white paper. The court to its credited reminded the administration that presidents have ample, but not unlimited power. Constitutional restraints still apply to the president, even on national security.

A more rational president who actually believed national security was at risk would heed the court’s directions, issue a narrower ban that would pass muster and roll that out with proper coordination. But Trump must “win” and can never accept error — even if his aides deserve some of the blame. He’ll persist, he says, to the Supreme Court (or perhaps first to an en banc review). If he truly believes that we are in peril, it is he who is endangering the country by choosing to leave the country with no travel ban whatsoever. And of course, with regard to real risks — radicalized Americans, lone wolves, etc. — the president is doing nothing, thereby leaving the country no safer than it was under his predecessor.

This is a humiliating defeat for the White House, revealing just how amateurish the president and his advisers are. The frightful part is that if they cannot handle a simple executive order, what makes anyone think they can handle far more difficult challenges?

Jeb Bush's Reformer Myth

Jeb "Jebbie" Bush - who is campaigning without using his last name when possible - is trying to (a) market himself as a "reformer" and (b) trying to distance himself from his brother's disasters Iraq and Afghanistan (and the 2008 financial meltdown).   In reality, Jebbie is offering little more than a warmed over version of his brother, the Chimperator's, failed policies.  Indeed, he is even surrounding himself with many of the same failed advisers as his brother, including those who took the nation into the Iraq War disaster.  A piece in Politico looks at the myth that Jebbie is spinning that he is a reformer.  The true picture is that Jebbie surrounded himself with cronies and corrupt individuals and even appointed a far right Christian extremist to head up the state Department of Children and Families.   And in the area of justice, young blacks had a mysterious pattern of dying in state custody.  Here are excerpts:

In his highly touted speech on government reform this week, Jeb Bush accused President Barack Obama of waiting too long to remove tainted appointees, saying he would take on “Mount Washington” in the same way he made “Mount Tallahassee” more accountable when he was governor of Florida.

But Bush’s eight-year record shows he often stood by appointees who were mired in scandal or mismanagement until long after damaging revelations emerged, and in only three reported instances clearly fired agency heads — including one in the wake of a sexual harassment allegation and another who was implicated in a kickback scheme.

Meanwhile, Bush stood behind embattled appointees at the Department of Children and Families — even amid revelations that the agency lost track of 515 children under state care, including a child who was murdered. He supported his corrections chief throughout a scandal involving guards engaging in beer-soaked brawls, stealing state property, selling steroids and impressing inmates into forced labor. Bush finally fired the prison chief, Jimmy Crosby, in early 2006 when it became clear he was part of a bribery and kickback scheme, for which he was later convicted.

The problems and controversies in running Florida government plagued Bush’s predecessors and successors. Even Bush’s critics acknowledge that his administration was hardly unique in having its share of scandals and managerial failures. But, they say, Bush is trying to rewrite history by suggesting he was far more willing to be held accountable than other political leaders.

Ron McAndrew, a Florida Republican who once backed Bush and had served as the warden of Florida State Prison, scoffed at Bush’s comment that he cracked down on “incompetence or scandalous behavior.”

“Jeb Bush has excellent experience with political hacks and crooks because he surrounded himself with them,” McAndrew, who was succeeded as prison warden by Jimmy Crosby, told POLITICO. “He has little experience with real accountability, taking responsibility or firing people who needed to be fired.”

Data breaches, but not hacking, happened on Bush’s watch in Florida as well. In 2006, the Florida Department of Management Services reported that the personal information of about 100,000 state employees was improperly sent to a subcontractor in India by the Convergys Corp.

The Bush administration at the time promised to strengthen security measures and monitor the case. But Convergys kept its $350 million contract despite other troubles managing the state’s human-resources system. Bush’s DMS agency head at the time, Bill Simon, kept his job and now heads a nonprofit political committee backing Bush’s presidential bid.

McAndrew, the former prisons chief, said he warned Bush officials not to pick Crosby as his successor because he was part of its corrupt culture, along with his longtime friend and ally, Allen “A.C.” Clark.  But Bush supported Crosby and Clark through various questionable activities.

One of the state legislators, Miami Republican Rep. Gus Barreiro, said at the time that FDLE agents seemed “more concerned about the critics of the boot camp than with the officers who beat Martin Anderson to death.”

[S]tate legislators accused the head of the Department of Juvenile Justice, which oversaw the boot camps, of lying to them as they investigated Martin’s death. Some called for the ouster of DJJ Secretary Anthony Schembri. Bush publicly supported him. One of Schembri’s predecessors at the agency, Bill Bankhead, had taken a different tack and quietly resigned in 2004 when another teen, Omar Paisley, died in agony from an untreated ruptured appendix in a state lockup where he was denied medical care.

Amid criminal investigations, dismissals of lower-level DJJ employees and public hearings, Bush stood by Bankhead.

Bush’s willingness to stand behind his DJJ appointees mirrored his posture after the disappearance of another child in state care, 5-year-old Rilya Wilson, rocked Bush’s Department of Children and Families in 2002.

Wilson’s death came after DCF case workers placed her in the care of a woman named Geralyn Graham, despite Graham having a history of fraud and having been diagnosed as psychotic. A case worker falsified reports and lied about having checked on Wilson in Graham’s care. By the time another DCF case worker took over the case, Wilson was gone. More than a decade later, Graham was convicted of torturing and murdering the child.

To replace Kearney, Bush tapped an Oklahoma official named Jerry Regier. A co-founder of the Christian conservative Family Research Council, Regier had once written that parental corporal punishment was acceptable — even if it left “bruises or welts” — statements that provoked swift criticism when Bush named him to head the child-welfare agency.

But Bush stood firmly behind him. Then, in August 2004, Regier announced his resignation after a scathing inspector general’s report criticized him for accepting gifts from lobbyists and for running an agency in which top administrators awarded big contracts to friends.

The Vatican Buys Europe's Biggest Gay Sauna

Image from Europa Multiclub Webpage

Whether it was a (i) mistake and yet another part of the Vatican's administrative incompetence or (ii) a secret plan to offer a new "retreat" to the closeted members of the Church hierarchy, we will never know, but The Independent is reporting that the Holy See has purchased a €23 million (£21 million) - roughly US$30 million - share of a Rome apartment block that houses Europe’s biggest gay sauna.  Obviously, the news is hysterically funny in my view with the conclave to elect the next pope set to begin tomorrow.  Perhaps the cardinals will mosey on by Europa Multiclub once they are done casting their secret ballots.  Here's a portion of the club president's greeting:

EMC is a place created by males and for males only. Our aim is to let you appreciate the taste and the satisfaction of meeting other persons in a unique and special place... Here you will find: king Turkish bath, Finnish sauna, giant whirlpool, waterfall whirlpool, relaxation rooms with videos, gym with Tecnogym equipments, cinema, aesthetics - solarium - massage, parties - shows - surprises,  .  .  .  .  The "BEAR" area speaks for itself.  Bears, hunters and admirer are welcome in Europa Multiclub!

Here are highlights from The Independent article:

A day ahead of the papal conclave, faces at the scandal-struck Vatican were even redder than usual after it emerged that the Holy See had purchased a €23 million (£21 million) share of a Rome apartment block that houses Europe’s biggest gay sauna.

The senior Vatican figure sweating the most due to the unlikely proximity of the gay Europa Multiclub is probably Cardinal Ivan Dias, the head of the Congregation for Evangelisation of Peoples, who is due to participate in tomorrow’s election at the Sistine Chapel.

This 76-year-old “prince of the church” enjoys a 12-room apartment on the first-floor of the imposing palazzo, at 2 Via Carducci, just yards from the ground floor entrance to the steamy flesh pot. There are 18 other Vatican apartments in the block, many of which house priests.

The Holy See is still reeling from allegations that the previous pontiff, Benedict XVI, had quit in reaction to the presence of a gay cabal in the curia.

And with disgraced Scottish cardinal Keith O’Brien lending new weight to charges of hypocrisy against the Church’s stance on homosexuality, La Repubblica newspaper noted that the presence of “Italy’s best known gay sauna in the premises is an embarrassment”.

Cardinal Dias, who is seen as a social conservative even by the current standards of the church hierarchy, is no doubt horrified to learn of the activities taking place a floor below.

It is not known, however, if the former archbishop of Bombay has popped downstairs to give spitiual guidances to the clients of the Europa Multiclub, given his belief that gays and lesbians can be cured of their “unnatural tendencies” through the “sacrement of penance”.

The sauna’s website promotes one of its special “bear nights”, with a video in which a rotund, hairy man strips down before changing into a priest’s outfit. It says Bruno, “a hairy, overweight pastor of souls, is free to the music of his clergyman, remaining in a thong, because he wants to expose body and soul”.

There was further embarrassment for the Holy See when the press observed that thanks to generous tax breaks it received from the last Berlusconi government, the church will have avoided hefty payments to the Italian state. The properties are recognized as part of the Holy City.

 As the boyfriend likes to say, you can't write stuff this good.  Here's the "Bear" video:
 

Anti-Gay Preacher Bails From Inaugural Line Up

Anti-Gay pastor Louie Giglio who had - in another display of Obama staff incompetence - been slated to give the inaugural benediction has withdrawn from the inaugural event line up ostensible to avoid becoming a distraction from the ceremony.  In the process, Giglio also attempted to down play the viciousness of his past anti-gay statements.    The situation is noteworthy for two reasons.  First, how incompetent are the Obama folks that they did not do a simple Google search on Giglio?  Second, Giglio claims that he's not anti-gay, but the man is a liar based on his past statements - statements that he has never disavowed.  Andrew Sullivan sums up the incompetence of the Obama staffers and Giglio's disingenuousness very well:

So the second Inaugural benediction for Obama turns out to be another clusterfuck. First, they had the fatuous Rick Warren, whose campaign against marriage equality was deemed irrelevant to the cause of uniting the country. Now we have Louie Giglio,  .  .  .  .  who, like most evangelicals, still believes that gay relationships, let alone marriages, are anathema.

[I]t is quite clear that Giglio has never stopped believing that what he calls "the gay lifestyle" is a terrible crime against God. He also calls it one of the most important issues of the time. He proposes the horrifying abuse of "ex-gay therapy." He cites Leviticus, which mandates the death penalty for gays, and says it is the lynchpin of the teaching against homosexuality. In fact, he doesn't just cite Leviticus; he goes on for ever about it. He describes gay people as living a "lie," a term my born-again uncle accused me of doing when he found out I was gay. He calls us engaged in "depraved, lustful behavior" and being haters of God. He calls for his congregation to "firmly respond to the aggressive agenda" of gay equality.

His defense is that "clearly, speaking on this issue has not been in the range of my priorities in the past fifteen years." But in that sermon, he described it as possibly the most important moral battle of the time. And get a load of this: "Those who practice such things are worthy of death." And this:

Homosexuality is not an alternate lifestyle. Homosexuality is not just a sexual preference. Homosexuality is not gay. But homosexuality is sin.

[W]hat clueless administration official did not do due diligence on this figure? After the Rick Warren mess, could no one in the White House do the same research as Think Progress? 

There's only way forward on this and that is to choose as his replacement a minister who endorses gay unions and full gay inclusion in the Christian community. Why would Obama object to that? He has "evolved" now, hasn't he?

Why is it every time that Obama builds good feelings within the LGBT community he seems to without thinking do something stupid and cause a great deal of bad feeling? 

City of Norfolk Makes $200,000 Gift to Chick Fil-A

Despite much controversy and out cry from the Ghent neighborhood in Norfolk in particular, the Norfolk City Council voted to sell a parcel of land on Monticello Avenue to Chick Fil-A - that's right the controversial anti-gay company that has funded millions of dollars to hate groups - for $200,000 less than it's current forth and $300,000 less than a local developer had offered.  Frankly, it's all too typical of  homophobic Mayor Paul Fraim and some of his gang that couldn't shoot straight fellow council members.  The LGBT community should take note of where Fraim's loyalties lie.  Here are excerpts from the Virginian Pilot's coverage:

Chick-Fil-A has acquired a 1.2-acre parcel on Monticello Avenue, but the Atlanta-based company still must woo the city's planning officials.

The City Council voted Tuesday to sell the property to Chick-Fil-A. The proposed terms of the land transaction were the source of controversy earlier this year when the council gave city staffers the unofficial go-ahead to sell the property for less than Norfolk purchased it in 2007.

The city purchased the property from the Union Mission Ministries for about $2.1 million. The property, now assessed at $1 million, was sold to Chick-Fil-A for $800,000.

Matthew Stellmaker, a development manager for Chick-Fil-A, said this week that the company is modifying the building based on feedback from the design and planning boards, and expects to present its new plans next month.

City Attorney Bernard Pishko said the sale would be voided if the company does not get city approval for its building design.

What's next?  Will the city cut a deal with a KKK or neo-Nazi backed company?  I for one will never set foot in the facility if it is built and I hope that the design and planning boards put Chick Fil-A through the wringer.

No Settlement Should Be Made with Mortgage Lenders

As the economy continues in recession (if one is honest in their assessment we ARE still in recession) and the residential housing markets remains in the toilet, everyone is suffering except for those who created the mess: reckless mortgage lenders and Wall Street racketeers who knowingly packaged questionable loans in what's called "securitizing" and sold them to investors. The end result is that investors got burned big time and that no one was accountable for handling foreclosures - and it seems at times even servicing the loans.

Years into the mess, and lenders still are not being held to account and the utter mismanagement and incompetence of servicers and those allegedly in charge of loan modifications make the Three Stooges look like highly competent rocket scientists. I have clients who deserve loan modifications based on changed circumstances, etc., yet all they get is the run around and find themselves dealing with morons who lose paperwork over and over and over again. These irresponsible lenders were seeking a global settlement with the state attorney generals - which would have let them get off in an obscene way. Now, that effort seems to be unraveling as California has pulled out of the deal. Rather than letting the real villains off while prosecuting small bit players, the states need to go after the real culprits and send them to jail. The Los Angeles Times looks at California's decision not to let the lenders and Wall Street off easy. Here are some highlights:

A slew of state attorneys general banded together 11 months ago to try to extract a multibillion-dollar settlement from banks for the way they mishandled foreclosures. The prospects of a deal have been clouded, however, by dissension in the AGs' ranks. On Friday, California Atty. Gen. Kamala Harris became the latest to drop out, announcing that she would pursue her own investigation. Top prosecutors in half a dozen other states, including New York, Nevada and Massachusetts, have already pulled out of the multi-state talks, saying they were concerned that the group wasn't demanding enough from banks in exchange for settling the states' claims.

We're all for holding lenders and loan servicers accountable for the illegal shortcuts they've taken and misrepresentations they've made, and Harris' frustration with the slow pace of negotiations is understandable.

In addition to fairly compensating those who were directly harmed, the AGs' goal should be to make sure struggling borrowers are treated reasonably, rationally and efficiently — something that overwhelmed lenders have failed to do.

Even a borrower who has no chance of avoiding foreclosure has rights, and banks ignored them in their sloppy and corner-cutting responses to the skyrocketing number of defaults. There's also a good argument to be made that banks violated consumer protection laws by making promises they didn't keep about loan modifications for troubled borrowers.

That includes enabling more borrowers in hardship to write off some of their debt, making it easier for troubled borrowers to sell homes that are worth less than their mortgages, and ending the indefensible practice of lenders foreclosing on homes while the owners are negotiating with them for more affordable loans.

The truth is that the lenders don't give a damn about fair treatment of borrowers. And they don't give a damn about the ultimate cost to taxpayers who will end up paying the price as lenders are bailed out by HUD, FHA, VA and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The lenders have been winning while everyone else gets screwed over. It's time for this to end.

Who's in Charge of the BP Oil Spill, Anyway?

Today's Mobile Press-Register main editorial asks a relevant question that focuses on the ineptitude of the federal government/White House's response to the BP oil spill disaster. It's a simple question of who is in charge. Clearly, it's not the feds or the White House. BP continues to dither rather than simply explode the well and seal it permanently. BP would clearly rather turn the entire Gulf of Mexico into a dead zone as opposed to lose a potentially profitable well. It's a travesty, yet the U.S. government continues to sit by with it's thumb up its butt rather than dictate to BP what WILL be done to stop the oil leakage now. Here are some highlights from the editorial (P.S. I once lived in Fairhope):
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A MONTH ago, according to Fairhope’s assistant public works director, BP pledged to put out boom to protect the city from the effects of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. But the oil company never followed through. Last week, when oil began showing up on Alabama beaches, the Fairhope City Council quit waiting on BP.

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At an emergency meeting Friday, council members voted to spend about $626,000 of the $650,000 the city has received through the state from BP, and a contractor immediately began deploying boom in two layers, from the Grant Hotel Marriott in Point Clear northward to the Fairhope Yacht Club.

Fairhope’s experience does not seem to be unique along the Alabama Gulf Coast. From Gov. Bob Riley to a beachside condominium manager, people dealing with the oil spill say BP isn’t following through. Some say they’ve called for cleanup assistance and have gotten no response. So who is in charge of picking up tarballs and scraping oil off beaches?
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Should it be local governments? Local officials know their sections of coastline better than anyone, and when a city like Fairhope sees no progress for a month, its leaders are right to take action to protect their shores. But they aren’t concerned with the big picture, and their individual actions are piecemeal.
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But should the federal government be in charge of the cleanup, too, in addition to acting as watchdog over BP’s efforts to contain the catastrophic leak? And where’s FEMA? After all, as implied by its very name — the Federal Emergency Management Agency — FEMA is the government agency that’s designed to coordinate the federal response to emergencies.
*
Meanwhile, municipal and county governments can’t ignore the threat at the edge of their shores. Short of breaking the law, no one can blame them for taking matters into their own hands.

German Pope Disgraces the Catholic Church

UPDATED: CNN is reporting that the Conference of German bishops is demanding that Williamson must go. Would that they'd grow more balls and challenge some of Benedict's other lunacy. Here are highlights:

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Germany's Catholic bishops are calling for the expulsion of a bishop, recently brought back into the church by Pope Benedict XVI, after new reports that Richard Williamson denies the Holocaust. . . . "Mr. Williamson is impossible and irresponsible," Zollitsch, chairman of the German Bishops' Conference, told the magazine in an article published Saturday. "I now see no room for him in the Catholic Church."

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The German publication, Der Spiegel, has a lengthy and anything but flattering article on Nazi Pope, Benedict XVI which among other things suggests that Benedict may be kept in a cocoon much like that in which the Chimperator liked to remain. The result, of course is that he's utterly out of touch with the reality of the outside world - not to mention being locked in a Medieval mindset. The rehabilitation of Holocaust denier Bishop Richard Williamson combined with the ongoing cancer of the world wide sex abuse scandal - at least to me - indicates that the Vatican refuses to understand that we are no longer living in the 12th Century where the Pope/Church can in essence tell the world to go screw itself.

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Preaching the same old tired "natural law" mantra despite ever increasing advances in medical and mental health knowledge at some point will drive away those who represent the Church's future. True, the Church's membership is growing in ignorant, uneducated parts of the world (Africa in particular), but it is falling else where, especially in the modern western world that provides most of the cash flow that supports the entire structure. If Papa Ratzi isn't careful, he may do to the Catholic Church what the Chimperator did to the USA. On the other hand, perhaps only a free fall in Church membership and severe drop in monies will force change on what has become a very corrupt and out of touch Vatican. Here are some highlights from the Der Spiegel article:

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The decision by Pope Benedict XVI to reinstate the bishops of this brotherhood of St. Pius, who were excommunicated in 1988, has been the source of astonishment, disillusionment and outrage both inside and outside the Vatican. . . . What triggered the scandal, as SPIEGEL reported two weeks ago, was the fact that one of the priests brought back into the fold, Bishop Richard Williamson, is a notorious Holocaust denier.

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During a visit to Germany only two weeks ago, the British cleric told Swedish television: "Not a single Jew died in a gas chamber." . . . With a single, perhaps imprudent gesture, Benedict XVI has reignited old fears among Jews the world over, fears that the Catholic Church has in fact never really shed its old anti-Semitism. . . . And then there is the question that has the entire world worried: How can it be that a German pope, of all people, is pardoning a Holocaust denier?

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"How can such a liar be granted the protection and pardon of the leader of the Catholic Church?" It is a question that many Catholics are asking themselves, especially in the pope's native Germany. "People here are simply dismayed," says Klaus Mertes, a Jesuit priest and rector of the Maria Regina Martyrium Church, a commemorative church for the victims of the Nazi era in Berlin's Charlottenburg neighborhood. This sense of outrage, he says, is reason enough to speak out on the incident. "There is outrage over Bishop Williamson, on the one hand, as well as over the decision coming from Rome.

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In the northern city of Münster, where Joseph Ratzinger was once a theology professor, almost the entire Catholic faculty signed a sharply worded letter of protest and criticized the shift in the Vatican. . . . Some German Catholics have already made their way to their local registry offices to officially leave the church. The mood among many is reflected in the succinct words of Helmut Reinhard, a 62-year-old Munich Catholic: "I've had it!" Fifteen members of his family were lost in Auschwitz-Birkenau. "They were all gypsies," he says, "and all Catholics." His cousin Markus Reinhard, 50, lives in Cologne. Last Tuesday, on Germany's Holocaust Remembrance Day, he, his wife and his four sisters left the Catholic Church.

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The slip-up involving the St. Pius bishops could not have turned into a scandal but for two, closely-related problems associated with this pontificate. The first is the growing isolation of Benedict XVI. And the second is his trepidation when it comes to interacting with the modern world.

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The pope, says one member of the Curia, has surrounded himself with a team of yes-men, devoid of any critical voices. The team even shields the 81-year-old pontiff from unfavorable reports in the media. "As a rule," says the official, "he is only presented with excerpts from the international press. And in many cases, his staff members say: No, no, we cannot show him that article."

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"His current life," says a German theologian, "is reminiscent of Louis XVI. He hears snippets of what is happening in the world, signs something here and there, performs his duties, studies documents and has generally made a comfortable life for himself at court. But he is not the master of the machine that surrounds him."

Ex-Iraq Commander: Bush Administration Guilty of Goss Incompetence

Tell us something that we don't already know! Nonetheless, it is telling that Lt. General Ricardo Sanchez, the former Commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, in a new memoir provides new stark details of the misdoings at high levels of the Chimperator's regime in the first year of the Iraq War. His assessment of the Chimperator's invented war:

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"Hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars were unnecessarily spent, and worse yet, too many of our most precious military resource, our American soldiers, were unnecessarily wounded, maimed, and killed as a result. In my mind, this action by the Bush administration amounts to gross incompetence and dereliction of duty."

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Exerpts from the book can be found at Time.com. Naturally, Rumsfeld who was one of the master minds of the disaster tried to claim ignorance as shown by this statement:
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"Mr. Secretary, when V Corps ramped up for the war, our entire focus was at the tactical level. The staff had neither the experience nor training to operate at the strategic level, much less as a joint/combined headquarters. All of CFLCC's generals, whom we called the Dream Team, left the country in a mass exodus. The transfer of authority was totally inadequate, because CENTCOM's focus was only on departing the theater and handing off the mission. There was no focus on postconflict operations. None! In their minds, the war was over and they were leaving. Everybody was executing these orders, and the services knew all about it." Starting to get a little worked up, I paused a moment, and then looked Rumsfeld straight in the eye. "Sir, I cannot believe that you didn't know I was being left in charge in Iraq."

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One can only hope that some day Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and the others that lead the USA into this venture based on lies and false propaganda will be held accountable for the death and destruction that they have wrought on others.