Friday Reads

Good Morning!

I’m really glad it’s Friday and I’m wondering what the markets will be doing.  There’s more extremist nonsense coming out of the Congress in the debt ceiling and deficit debate. Let’s take a brief look at the headlines.

First, it appears that Pell Grants are under attack. 

House conservatives who have stalled legislation to raise the national debt limit are angry that it includes $17 billion in supplemental spending for Pell Grants, which some compare to welfare.

Legislation crafted by House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) to raise the debt limit by $900 billion would directly appropriate $9 billion for Pell Grants in 2012 and another $8 billion in 2013.

There’s speculation that some of the teabots may have their districts cannibalized by an angry Speaker of the House in redistricting measures.

Jim Jordan’s open defiance of Speaker John Boehner’s efforts to solve the debt-ceiling crisis could cost the Urbana Republican his safe House seat in next year’s election.

Two Republican sources deeply involved in configuring new Ohio congressional districts confirmed to The Dispatch  today  that Jordan’s disloyalty to Boehner has put him in jeopardy of being zeroed out of a district.

“Jim Jordan’s boneheadedness has kind of informed everybody’s thinking,” said one of the sources, both of whom spoke only on condition of anonymity. “The easiest option for everybody has presented itself.”

Jordan’s rural 11-county district, which has a 60 percent Republican voter index, “is easy to cannibalize because it stretches so far,” the other source said.

Michele in Wonderland thinks the impasse on the debt ceiling is not an emergency.  Can some one please tell this woman to report to someplace where she can buy a clue or a brain or some sanity?

Republican presidential candidate Michele Bachmann again brushed off warnings from leaders in both parties that the country would face disastrous economic consequences if the government fails to raise the debt ceiling by next Tuesday.

“I do not believe for one moment that we will lose the full faith and credit of the United States,” Bachmann said Thursday during a question-and-answer session at the National Press Club in Washington.

Bachmann, a House member from Minnesota, has been a staunch opponent of the debt ceiling hike for months, saying the move poses no threat to the markets or to the American public and would only give President Barack Obama license to increase government spending.

Other insane Bachmann stories today including her defense of using Federal Loans for her own housing while lambasting the very agencies that helped her afford her house.  Evidently, it’s not welfare when she does it.

GOP presidential contender Michele Bachmann (R) has been in hot water in recent weeks for personally taking advantage of hundreds of thousands of dollars in government aid while denouncing the very programs she benefited from. Most recently, the Washington Post discovered that Bachmann and her husband signed for a $417,000 home loan backed by Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac just weeks before she called for the two mortgage giants to be entirely dismantled.

Bachmann has been a consistently fierce critic of mortgage lending programs and has advocated abolishing the government sponsored mortgage enterprises (GSEs) Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Yet she took out the maximum possible loan from those programs to finance her family’s move to a lavish 5,200-square-foot home on a golf course.

Bachmann also wants to declare her family business’ “pray away the gay” discredited therapy practice put off limits.

Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) visited the National Press Club in Washington on Thursday for a speech and question-and-answer session. The GOP presidential contender’s remarks focused mostly on her opposition to raising the debt ceiling under any circumstances. She did field one question on an issue we’ve covered: reports that the Christian counseling clinic she co-owns with her husband tries to cure gay people of homosexuality. Bachmann has repeatedly dodged questions on the issue, and even gone so far as to cut off interviews with Iowa reporters who broach the subject; when I caught up with her outside the MoJo DC office recently, she was a no comment (literally, she didn’t say anything).

On Thursday, Bachmann was asked if she believes homosexuality is a lifestyle decision that can be cured. So, with her husband sitting to her left at the Press Club, how’d Bachmann respond? By dodging the issue entirely and declaring her spouse, her children, her foster children, and her business off limits:

The next interesting trial on TV should be that of Polygamist Cult Leader Warren Jeffs who is being tried for sex assault on a 12 year old girl.  Jeffs wants to act as his own lawyer.

Prosecutors said they have an audio tape of polygamist leader Warren Jeffs sexually assaulting a 12-year-old child, The Salt Lake Tribune reported on its websiteThursday.

The revelation came during opening statements on Jeffs’ trial on child sexual assault charges.

The prosecutor also said DNA evidence would prove that Jeffs fathered a child with a 15-year-old girl, the Tribune reported.

Earlier Thursday, Jeffs threw the trial into disarray when he fired his defense lawyers and demanded the right to represent himself, which the judge then granted.

“It’s not as easy as it looks on TV, Mr. Jeffs,” State District Judge Barbara Walther told him. “You’re on your own.”

Jeffs refused to answer when Walther asked him whether he wanted to make an opening statement, the Tribune said.

Jeffs, the leader of a breakaway Mormon sect, is charged with child sexual assault and aggravated child sexual assault in connection with his “spiritual marriages” to a 12-year-old girl and a 14-year-old girl at the Yearning for Zion Ranch in remote west Texas.

There is also DNA evidence.

Here’s a great article from Alternet on how Wall Street broke the economy.   It’s an interview with Gretchen Morgensen on her new book.  Here’s a great conversation on how predatory lenders fed bad loans into Fannie and Freddie.

TM: After the S&L crisis, we were going to fix Fannie and Freddie, but things only got worse. When you ask the fox how to clean the henhouse…

GM: You make a good point about who’s to blame. Blame falls on both sides of the aisle in Congress. It’s not an either-or, Democratic or Republican issue, not a liberal or conservative issue — there’s enough blame to go around. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were primary movers in the push for home ownership. And there’s nothing wrong with that, owning your own home is a deep-seated wish in the American psyche. The problem was in the execution. You don’t lure people in who are unsophisticated, who don’t understand what they’re doing. You certainly don’t offer them the kinds of poisonous loans that were targeted to minority borrowers; low-income borrowers; first-time home buyers.

TM: Targeted by Fannie and Freddie or targeted by predatory mortgage lenders?

GM: This is where Fannie and Freddie step aside and the mortgage lenders step into the breach. Countrywide was Fannie Mae’s biggest provider of loans. A lot of the losses that taxpayers are footing at this moment came very late in the game, in 2005, 2006, mortgages that were really ugly and really poisonous. Fannie Mae led the way, pushing for home ownership, degrading underwriting standards, pushing for more relaxed lending standards. Then the predatory lenders take the ball and run with it because there’s so much money to be made.

TM: And because of Fannie Mae’s initiative, so little risk.

GM: So little risk. Fannie Mae was either guaranteeing the loans that Countrywide and other lenders were making or taking them into their own portfolios. The taxpayer was essentially taking on the risk. There is an unholy alliance between Fannie Mae, a government sponsored enterprise, and predatory lenders and Wall Street. Wall Street saw Fannie Mae creating pools of loans that they would sell to others to sell to investors. Wall Street took that ball and ran with it, issuing trillions of dollars in mortgage-backed securities bursting with predatory loans.

I’m glad to see her clarify the misunderstanding of the role of Fannie and Freddie in the mortgage meltdown.  It wasn’t their affordable housing role that created the bigger mess.  It was their lack of due diligence in investigating loans packaged by known predatory lenders and their managers who were dealing themselves quota bonuses.  Congress didn’t watch what they were doing either.  They just assumed they were following their mandate.

I’m happy to see that a Judge will allow a defamation suit against propagandameister Breitbart to proceed.  The suit was filed by Shirley Sherrod and dealt with the horrible edit job his site did to make her look like some kind of racist.  You may recall she used to work in the Department of Agriculture.

Last year, Breitbart published a video of Sherrod describing to an NAACP conference how she overcame her own racist attitudes. However, a video from that speech was deceptively edited to make it appear that she was describing how she used the power of the government against a white farmer.

She was fired from her post at the agriculture department within hours of the clip hitting Breitbart’s website, and for at least a day the world believed Sherrod was a racist who abused her power to harm a white farmer.

Once it became clear that was not the case, the government offered her the job back, but she declined. Even after a formal apology from the White House and an offer to talk to the president, Sherrod still refused.

Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack took it a step further and offered her a position dealing with civil rights and discrimination issues at the USDA, but Sherrod declined and vowed to sue Breitbart over his deceptive prank.

The suit also targets Breitbart colleague Larry O’Connor and one other unnamed defendant.

Lawyers for the defense argued that the suit was invalid because it was triggered by a matter of “pure opinion,” not statements of fact.

So, that should give you something to think on this morning.  What’s on your reading and blogging list today?  Please!  Share with us!