This'n'That;October 30th[Ingrates;Hypocrisy;Lil'Bastards;"25"]

Have They "Nothing Better To Do?"

[Look what segments of the 535 member "congressional moron caucus" are doing. Rather than represent their constituents, they haggle over professional sports!! Tell me "it ain't all about the control!!!" Control and the continued pissing away of taxpayers' money by these ingrates. ]

[NATIONAL FOOTBALL LEAGUE:] Committee chairman John Conyers (D-Mich.) asked National Football League commissioner Roger Goodell if there was a link between head injuries in players and the contraction of future brain conditions such as dementia, Alzheimer's disease, and clinical depression. Goodell danced around the question, responding that "we want to make sure our game is safe. that's why we have engaged aggressively in making changes to our game," citing rule changes and educational efforts to teach players and staff about head trauma. Conyers was not pleased. "You've testified to that, but I just asked you a simple question. what's the answer?" he asked. "The answer is the medical experts are no better than I would with respect to that," Goodell responded. Again displeased, Conyers said "Alright, Ok, I've heard it." Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.), whose husband played in the NFL, also engaged in a heated conversation with Goodell. At one point she said the NFL's antitrust exemption should be removed after she expressed dissatisfaction with one of his answers. During the hearing, Conyers pushed for an independent review of head trauma in the league. Ranking member Lamar Smith (R-Texas), along with other Republicans, questioned the purpose of the hearing. "The NFL does not need Congress to referee this issue," he said.

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[WORLD SERIES:] Sen. Kirsten Gillirbrand (D-N.Y.) had a strong message for Sen. Arlen Specter (D-Pa.) on Wednesday: "you're going down!" No, she wasn't talking about a piece of legislation or his primary against Rep. Joe Sestak (D-Pa.) This jab was about the World Series between the New York Yankees and Philadelphia Phillies, which starts tonight in the Bronx. Gillibrand tweeted today: @SenArlenSpecter Respectfully, Senator, sir...you're going down! @twittificatious Just a friendly wager w/ @SenArlenSpecter over who will win the World Series Twitter users @twittificatious was originally confused by her message. He tweeted: @SenGillibrand Why doe Sen. Specter deserve your unkind words? The smack talk started when New York's and Pennsylvania's senators made a bet on who would win the Word Series this week. If the Phillies win, Specter and Sen. Robert Casey will receive a shipment of New York cheesecake courtesy of the Empire State's delegation. If the Yankees win, Sens. Gillibrand and Charles Schumer will get a serving of Philly cheesesteaks from the Keystone Staters. Specter, like a good, boisterous Philadelphia fan, started the trash talking, tweeting "I look forward to enjoying NY cheesecakes, although nothing will be as sweet as the Phillies' back-to-back titles."

...And They Censured Joe Wilson?!?!

[The House of RepresentaRATs officially rebuked Rep Joe Wilson for yelling out the truth {"You Lie!!"} during a recent "Clown Prince" propaganda "Blather-Op." All Mr Wilson did was tell the truth!! BUT, when a democRAT questions the "part-time work" of a DC lobbyist.... Nuttin' happens!! Just another example of democRAT hypocrisy.]

Rep. Alan Grayson (D-Fla.) , talking to radio talk show host Alex Jones, called the woman a ‘K Street whore.’ Grayson plucked the oldest gender-biased term in history to criticize a female, though when he made the statement he claimed he didn’t remember her name. Media assumed Grayson was referencing Linda Robertson [the Fed's head lobbyist] and a later statement from his office appeared to confirm it.Graves issued a statement on Tuesday, shortly after the story broke though Grayson’s slur was made in September. Grayson made news earlier for his publicity push, complete with signage and a website, telling the public Republicans want people to die quickly, earning him the moniker the 'Die Quickly Democrat' in some quarters. The US Report made small waves by responding that if Republicans want us to die quickly, Democrats want us to die broke. Ironically, though he pegged Ms. Robertson as a “whore,” he did not identify the name of whomever he perceives as her pimp. No democRAT organizations protested, a reflection perhaps of an established attitude towards women exhibited by well-documented DemocRAT philanderers like Presidents Franklin Delano Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, and Bill Clinton, as well as the late senators Bobby and "Phatt" Kennedy!!

More "Lil' Bastards!"

[Rochester, N.Y., seems to have more than it's share of "Lil' Bastards!" Well, two more materialized recently; Jaquan Clark and Leon Woods-MISERABLE PRICKS, all!!! Is it any wonder that Rochester's population has dropped nearly 6% in 8 years {2000-2008}??} Continued thinning of the welfare ranks!!]

Jaquan Clark has been convicted of killing four people last December.A jury returned a guilty verdict Thursday on four counts of second-degree murder and two counts of criminal possession of a weapon. Clark was 17 when he killed Alfred Ocasio, 37, on Skuse Street two days before Christmas 2008.

Four days later, he killed Arielle Griffin, 17, Jeffrey Szymkowski, 33, and Donald MacMaster, 62, on Bernice Street.

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A 23-year-old Rochester man has been arrested, accused of assaulting a referee at a semi-pro football game. Western New York Cougars football player Leon Woods has been charged with 2 counts of assault on referee Pete McCabe. McCabe was deliberately hit in the face with a football helmet Saturday night in a game against the Glove City Colonials at Edgerton Park in Rochester. McCabe will undergo facial reconstructive surgery Friday. Woods was arrested last night around 11 p.m. on Empire Boulevard. Bail has been set at $10,000 cash and $30,000 property bond.

Twenty-Five Nincompoops [& Nincompoopettes]

[I found these 25 morons; better yet--self-centered, greedy assholes; on one of Time, Inc's websites. Think the "Clown Prince" will ever demand personal accountability by the perpetrators?? Nah-They're "KoolAid Drinkers!!!"]

25 Most Responsible For The Financial Crisis Angelo Mozilo co-founded Countrywide in 1969 and built it into the largest mortgage lender in the U.S. Countrywide; offered exotic mortgages to borrowers with a questionable ability to repay them. Phil Gramm Chairman of the Senate Banking Committee from 1995 through 2000. Gramm was Washington's most prominent and outspoken champion of financial deregulation. He played a leading role in writing and pushing through Congress the 1999 repeal of the Depression-era Glass-Steagall Act, which separated commercial banks from Wall Street. Alan Greenspan The super-low interest rates Greenspan brought in the early 2000s; long-standing disdain for regulation are now held up as leading causes of the mortgage crisis--admitted that he had "made a mistake in presuming" that financial firms could regulate themselves. Chris Cox The ex-SEC chief's ignoring of repeated allegations of fraud in the Madoff scandal is mind-blowing; says his agency lacked authority to limit the massive leveraging that set up last year's financial collapse. In truth, the SEC had plenty of power to go after big investment banks like Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch for better disclosure, but it chose not to. American Consumers In the past 40 years Americans have been borrowing, borrowing, borrowing — living off and believing in the wealth effect, first in stocks, which ended badly, then in real estate, which has ended even worse. Household debt in the U.S. — the money we owe as individuals — zoomed to more than 130% of income in 2007, up from about 60% in 1982.

Hank Paulson Left the top job at Goldman Sachs to become Treasury Secretary in 2006. He ended up almost single-handedly running the country's economic policy for the last year of the Bush Administration. The three main gripes against Paulson are that he was late to the party in battling the financial crisis, letting Lehman Brothers fail was a big mistake and the big bailout bill he pushed through Congress has been a wasteful mess. Joe Cassano As a founding member of AIG's financial-products unit, pushed CDSs. In good times, AIG's massive CDS-issuance business minted money for the insurer's other companies. But those same contracts turned out to be at the heart of AIG's downfall. So far, the U.S. government has invested and lent $150 billion,keeping AIG afloat. Ian McCarthy [NOTE: This blogger has a financial position in BZH] CEO of Beazer Homes since 1994. McCarthy has become something of a poster child for the worst builder behaviors. The Charlotte Observer in 2007 highlighted Beazer's aggressive sales tactics, including lying about borrowers' qualifications to help them get loans. The FBI, HUD and IRS are all investigating Beazer. Employees of its mortgage unit violated regulations — like down-payment-assistance rules —at least as far back as 2000. It is cooperating with federal investigators. Frank Raines The Fannie Mae mess is the progeny of many parents: Congress, which created Fannie in 1938 and loaded it down with responsibilities; President Lyndon Johnson, who in 1968 pushed it halfway out the government nest and into a problematic part-private, part-public role in an attempt to reduce the national debt; and Jim Johnson, who presided over Fannie's spectacular growth in the 1990s. Raines, a Clinton Budget Director, was at the helm when things really went off course. Raines was the first African-American CEO of a Fortune 500 company when he took over in 1999. He left in 2004 with the company embroiled in an accounting scandal just as it was beginning to make big investments in subprime mortgage securities that would later sour. Last year Fannie and rival Freddie Mac became wards of the state. Kathleen Corbet By slapping AAA seals of approval on large portions of even the riskiest pools of loans, rating agencies helped lure investors into loading on collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) that are now unsellable. Corbet ran the largest agency, Standard & Poor's, during much of this decade, though the other two major players, Moody's and Fitch, played by similar rules. How could a ratings agency put its top-grade stamp on such flimsy securities? A glaring conflict of interest is one possibility: these outfits are paid for their ratings by the bond issuer. As one S&P analyst wrote in an email, "[A bond] could be structured by cows and we would rate it." Dick Fuld Steered Lehman deep into the business of subprime mortgages, bankrolling lenders across the country that were making convoluted loans to questionable borrowers. Lehman even made its own subprime loans. The firm took all those loans, whipped them into bonds and passed on to investors billions of dollars of what is now toxic debt. For all this wealth destruction, Fuld raked in nearly $500 million in compensation during his tenure as CEO. Marion and Herb Sandler In the early 1980s, the Sandlers' World Savings Bank became the first to sell a tricky home loan called the option ARM. And they pushed the mortgage with increasing zeal and misleading advertisements over the next two decades. The couple pocketed $2.3 billion when they sold their bank to Wachovia in 2006. Losses on World Savings' loan portfolio led to the implosion of Wachovia, which was sold under duress late last year to Wells Fargo. Bill Clinton "Slick-Willie's" tenure was characterized by economic prosperity and financial deregulation and set the stage for the excesses of recent years. His free-wheeling capitalism led to the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, which repealed the Glass-Steagall Act, a cornerstone of Depression-era regulation. He also signed the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, which exempted credit-default swaps from regulation. In 1995 Clinton loosened housing rules by rewriting the Community Reinvestment Act, which put added pressure on banks to lend in low-income neighborhoods. "Slick" played a role in creating a permissive lending environment. George W. Bush Embraced a governing philosophy of deregulation which trickled down to federal oversight agencies, which eased off on banks and mortgage brokers. Bush did push early on for tighter controls over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, but he failed to move Congress. After the Enron scandal, Bush backed and signed the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. SEC head William Donaldson tried to boost regulation of mutual and hedge funds, he was blocked by Bush's advisers and quit. The meltdown began on Bush's watch. Stan O'Neal Merrill Lynch CEO until 2007; guided the firm into the lucrative game of creating collateralized debt obligations (CDOs), which were largely made of subprime mortgage bonds. To provide a steady supply of the bonds, O'Neal allowed Merrill to load up on the bonds and keep them on its books. By June 2006, Merrill had amassed $41 billion in subprime CDOs and mortgage bonds. As the subprime market unwound, Merrill went into crisis, and Bank of America swooped in to buy it. Wen Jiabao Think of Wen--proxy for the Chinese government--which supplied the U.S. with an unprecedented amount of credit over the past eight years. China is now the largest creditor to the U.S. government, holding an estimated $1.7 trillion in dollar-denominated debt; linked to China's efforts to control the value of its currency. China didn't want the renminbi to rise too rapidly against the dollar, in part because a cheap currency kept its export sector humming — which it did until U.S. demand cratered last fall. David Lereah As chief economist at the National Ass'n of Realtors, did more than issue rosy forecasts. He regularly trumpeted the infallibility of housing as an investment in interviews and on TV. Lereah says he grew concerned about the direction of the market in 2006; in a January 2007 statement: "It appears we have established a bottom." John Devaney By buying up mortgage loans, he and other hedge-fund managers made it profitable for lenders to make questionable loans and then sell them off. Devaney wasn't just a big buyer of mortgage bonds — he had his own $600 million fund devoted to buying risky loans — he was one of its cheerleaders, but in early 2007, talking about option ARM mortgages, he said "The consumer has to be an idiot to take on one of those loans, but it has been one of our best-performing investments." Bernie Madoff His Ponzi scheme inflicted more than $50 billion in losses on society types, retirees and nonprofits. Madoff pulled off the biggest financial fraud in history right under the noses of regulators. The banks and hedge funds that neglected due diligence were stupid and paid for it, while the managers were reprehensibly greedy. Government and industry regulators were grossly incompetent. Lew Ranieri The father of mortgage-backed bonds. In the late 1970s,he coined the term securitization to name a bit of financial alchemy in which home loans were packaged together by Wall Street firms and sold to institutional investors. In 1984 Ranieri boasted that his mortgage-trading desk "made more money than all the rest of Wall Street combined." As homeownership exploded in the early '00s, the mortgage-bond business inflated Wall Street's bottom line. When subprime borrowers started missing payments, the mortgage market stalled and bond prices collapsed. Investors lost fortunes. Burton Jablin The programming czar at Scripps Networks, helped inflate the real estate bubble by teaching viewers how to extract value from their homes. Programs like Designed to Sell, House Hunters and My House Is Worth What? developed loyal audiences. Jablin didn't act alone: shows like Flip That House (TLC) and Flip This House (A&E) also came on the scene. Fred Goodwin The former boss of Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS), was "Fred the Shred," due to his knack for paring costs. A slew of acquisitions changed that; RBS investors saw him as a megalomaniac, but is simply "the world's worst banker." Goodwin got greedy. More than 20 takeovers helped him transform RBS. But he couldn't stop there. As the gloom gathered in 2007, Goodwin couldn't resist leading a $100 billion takeover of Dutch rival ABN Amro. The result: the British government pumped $30 billion into the bank, which expects 2008 losses to be the biggest in U.K. corporate history. Sandy Weill He cobbled together the first great financial supermarket, Citigroup. Rivals followed Citi. The swollen banks are now one of the country's major economic problems. The government's spent hundreds of billions of dollars to keep them afloat. The government has already spent $45 billion trying to fix Citigroup.

Til Nex'Time....