Black Friday Open Thread
Welcome to your Black Friday open thread! Have you trampled anyone while shopping for bargains? I’m typing at you from my brand-new iPad (yes, I gave in to gadget lust).
One thing we should all be thankful for is Elizabeth Warren. She helped to kill the bill to allow mortgage fraud by banks.
Elizabeth Warren was the first senior Obama administration official to recognize the potentially incendiary impact of a bill that would have made it significantly easier for mortgage companies to foreclose on homes, and her subsequent warnings played a crucial role in persuading the President to veto the measure, according to freshly released documents and people familiar with the deliberations.
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State officials across the country–who have been pursuing probes looking into wrongdoing within the foreclosure process– feared that those jurisdictions with lax standards could have become hotbeds for foreclosure documentation fraud. Lenders and mortgage companies could have used those states as central clearing houses to produce bogus foreclosure paperwork, and then export those documents to other states with more stringent regulations–an expedient bypass around the strictures.
Obama ultimately declined to sign the law, and the House of Representatives failed to override the veto.
Officials said Warren was among the first federal officials to recognize the significance of the notary bill, titled the Interstate Recognition of Notarizations Act of 2010. She met with authorities from several states and then relayed their concerns to influential administration officials.
Republicans have already promised oversight of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. If only Republicans had decided oversight of the financial industry was as important.
The outlook is not so good for peace in the Koreas. Tension is still building:
Tension mounted on Friday near a South Korean island bombarded this week by North Korea as Pyongyang’s military again fired artillery, this time in what appeared to be a drill on its own territory. The North’s state-run media warned that a planned United States-South Korean military exercise could push the Korean Peninsula closer to “the brink of war.”
Meanwhile, South Korea struggled with the domestic political fallout from Tuesday’s deadly attack, which exposed the weakness of South Korean defenses and brought public criticism of President Lee Myung-bak for failing to retaliate more forcefully. On Friday, he appointed a new defense minister, whose predecessor resigned on Thursday for failing to keep forces at ready in an area that has seen repeated military clashes with North Korea.
The U.S. is going to going to participate in joint military exercises with South Korea. I’m sure this will do nothing to ease the tensions there. This is one area to keep a watch over.
Tags: Open Thread
“No one starts a war-or rather,no one in his senses ought to do so-without being clear in his mind what he intends to achieve by that war and how he intends to conduct it”. Clausewitz
If it’s Black Friday, then it is time for the annual (edited) broadcast of the Ig Nobel Prizes presentation. It is on Talk of the Nation – Science Friday on your local NPR station. Here in Delaware, that is WHYY at 2pm.
Comment by Capt.Willard @ 12:16 pm:
“No one starts a war-or rather,no one in his senses ought to do so-without being clear in his mind what he intends to achieve by that war and how he intends to conduct it”. Clausewitz
“If Koreans want to reunify their country, then fuck Clausewitz” – Delacrat
US Government Seizes Torrent Search Engine Domain Slashdot 11/26/10
http://torrentfreak.com/u-s-government-seizes-bittorrent-search-engine-domain-and-more-101126/
Voulnet writes with this excerpt from TorrentFreak:
“This morning, visitors to the Torrent-Finder.com site are greeted with an ominous graphic which indicates that ICE has seized the site’s domain. ‘My domain has been seized without any previous complaint or notice from any court!’ the exasperated owner of Torrent-Finder told TorrentFreak this morning. ‘I firstly had DNS downtime. While I was contacting GoDaddy, I noticed the DNS had changed. GoDaddy had no idea what was going on and until now they do not understand the situation and they say it was totally from ICANN,’ he explained. Aside from the fact that domains are being seized seemingly at will, there is a very serious problem with the action against Torrent-Finder. Not only does the site not host or even link to any torrents whatsoever, it actually only returns searches through embedded iframes which display other sites that are not under the control of the Torrent-Finder owner.”
Have they seized the Google yet?
Why would they seize Google? Google already gives the Feds access to all your data.
@delacrat-well, that is the question.
Re-unification,under his tyrannical reign doesn’t seem to be the object of the thrust of the MADMAN of the NORTH.
He seeks to shake down the West to ease the suffering he causes in his own country.
He counts on the benevolence of us.
It is a tragic situation.
China, should step up, and man,or woman up to this tin-horn shit-head.
Capt W.,
Let the Koreans sort out their country themselves.
We got our own “tin-horn shit-heads” over here to deal with.
Good call on Warren. BoA is trying to snap up homes they don’t even have a mortgage on. It is corrupt and wrong.
DRK just needs another bribe behind the scenes. It is winter. Do you notice they do some type of nonsense whenever they need supplies? ROK should cut them off for 2 weeks for killing two of its people. Naturally, you can not let people attack you then tell you that defense exercises will raise tensions. You do them twice as big.