This lady is one of the most talented singers I have heard in the last few years.
That is one smooth, smoky voice. This one looks graceful, since she incorporates sign language:
For something a little peppier:
I know this makes me sound like an old fart, but most singers today seem more like produced products where looks matter more than talent. That is not true of Ms. Furler. Exceptional talent, great voice, and still cute and peppy without being slutty or trashy.
This is how the mortgage system works. The problem here is that the documentation is lost, and no one knows who owes what money to whom. So the banks simply manufacture new paperwork and foreclose.
photo courtesy of the New York Times.
First, it was GMAC that had to suspend foreclosures because they were caught manufacturing the paperwork needed to take people’s homes.
Then, JPMorgan Chase was forced to do the same, citing problems with documentation. From the Chase article:
The Associated Press said that the company has acknowledged its employees “signed some affadavits about loan documents without personally verifying the files,” and said the bank has asked judges to hold off on entering judgments on the foreclosures in question until its review is complete.
Now, Bank of America is following suit. These banks, their employees, and their attorneys are being caught committing perjury, yet there are still people out there who are blaming this economic meltdown on the borrowers by accusing them of borrowing money they couldn’t afford to repay. They blame the Government for “requiring” banks to lend to people who couldn’t pay.
They blame everyone except the banks, who took in trillions in profits by making sub-prime loans, then got a government bailout when the loans collapsed, and are now committing fraud to take people’s homes.
Why aren’t people being put in jail for this? Why are these lawyers not being disbarred?
Another problem being overlooked is this: When a foreclosure is found to have been awarded because of fraud, that foreclosure is void or voidable. When a lawyer, who is considered to be an officer of the court, is found to have fraudulently presented facts to court so that the court is impaired in the impartial performance of its legal task, the act, known as “fraud upon the court”, is a crime deemed so severe and fundamentally opposed to the operation of justice that it is not subject to any statute of limitation.
What does this mean for the future of Real Estate? That means that no one can issue title to a single piece of property without considering the possibility that someone can have a previous foreclosure voided, and that property returned to the previous owner. Think about the implications of this, and the effect it will have on prices.
The 10 largest mortgage lenders in the Nation control 78% of the mortgages. They are:
1 Bank of America- 26% market share – suspended foreclosures due to fraudulent documentation
2 Wells Fargo – 24% market share
3 JP Morgan Chase- 10% market share – suspended foreclosures due to fraudulent documentation
4 GMAC- 4% market share- suspended foreclosures due to fraudulent documentation
5 Citigroup – 3.5% market share
6 US Bank Home Mortgage – 3% market share
7 PHH Home mortgage – 2.5% market share
8 SunTrust – 1.75% market share
9 Provident Funding -1.65%
10 Branch Banking and Trust 1.6%
So the US Military is trying to railroad some soldiers because they posed for pictures with a few dead Afgans. From the article:
Troops allegedly shared the photos by e-mail and thumb drive like electronic trading cards. Now 60 to 70 of them are being kept tightly shielded from the public and even defense attorneys because of fears they could wind up in the news media and provoke anti-American violence.
“We’re in a powder-keg situation here,” said Eugene R. Fidell, president of the National Institute for Military Justice and a military law professor at Yale University.
There are so many things wrong with this. First of all, they are denying defense attorneys access to the evidence, because of “National Security.” I thought Obama said we wouldn’t do that anymore. These guys have a right to a fair trial. Period. If National Security issues are so important that you cannot release the evidence to afford the accused a fair trial, then you let them go. I agree that sometimes National Security concerns require that we not release certain facts. However, I also feel that when such secrets cannot be released, then that means that you cannot throw people in jail by saying, “National Security, we can’t let you see it, but trust us, this evidence proves his guilt.”
Next, they are worried about anti-American violence? Have we really turned into a nation of pussies? We are constantly deluged with pictures and films of Jihadis killing and torturing our soldiers, but “OMG!!! Someone just found out that we killed a few people! I hope we didn’t make anyone angry.”
Look, I think that we have no business over there, but if we are going to be there, then you fight to win. This is exactly how Vietnam turned into the mess that it did, because we weren’t serious about winning. You win a war, any war, by destroying the enemy’s ability to fight back. How do you do that? Well, you destroy their ability to support the war effort when you blow up power plants, factories and bridges. You bomb railways, dams, and anything else that can be used to build war materiel. That also includes blowing up the people who will work in , and rebuild, the factories, bridges, and power plants.
There is also the psychological effect: The people are so afraid of what you will do to them, that they lose the will to fight. We need to stop pussyfooting around, and get this over with. The United States won a World War by bombing the crap out of the enemy. We leveled entire cities.
This is the reason why I did everything in my power to keep my kids out of the military. I have been watching as we prosecute and micromanage our military forces, placing them at a disadvantage. Somehow the American public has gotten the idea that you can fight a war without anyone getting hurt, and I believe that this is the reason why we are so quick to go to war and use our military.
Guess what? War is a dirty, nasty business, where you win by attrition. It is not to be entered into on a whim, and once you enter into war, you need to be prepared to do whatever it takes to win. Destroy the enemy. If you aren’t ready and willing to do that, then war is not the answer.
Shooters like defenseless victims. The recent suicide at the University of Texas is proof yet again that gun free zones do not work. Many, including myself, would like to see Colleges and Universities removed from the list of places where I cannot carry a firearm. After all, I can carry a firearm nearly anywhere else I would like to go, so what is it about a campus that will convert me from law abiding citizen to raging killer?
Have you ever noticed that these sorts of events only happen where the shooter knows that due to law or policy, there will be no armed resistance? Police say that armed citizens would only confuse what are potentially chaotic situations because the police would not know who the bad guys are versus the good guys.I call bullshit on that. Why? Because police unions supported LEOSA, which is a law allowing police and retired police to carry concealed weapons nationwide, with few restrictions. How can a responding cop tell the difference between a shooter and a plainclothed, retired cop with a gun? Exactly.
John Woods, a UT graduate student who organized an anti-gun rally last year, disagreed. He said that having more guns on campus wouldn’t improve security.
“If there were multiple students running around with guns, it would’ve made the police’s job a lot harder this morning,” Woods said Tuesday. He was a student at Virginia Tech University in 2007 when a gunman killed 32 people, including Woods’ girlfriend.
Because having an unarmed victim zone at Virginia Tech worked out so well. The law banning carry didn’t stop the VT shooter, why would it? John Woods, other than being an unarmed, defenseless target, what experience do you have that would support your stupid, idiotic opinion?
What the police are demanding is that YOU are disarmed, so that they can enter the scene and not have to make a decision based on intelligence and reason, they merely want to be able to shoot everyone who appears to have a weapon.
The criminals have guns. The cops have guns. In the middle are the defenseless students, fish in a barrel.
I think that the silliness and futility of the ‘war on drugs’ is perfectly illustrated with this article here. Trying to eradicate a plant that grows wild. What would be especially funny is if there were some snail or bird that was endangered and required this plant to survive. What would the Feds do then?
You hear so much lately about how the recession is over, but one only has to look at the number of bankruptcies being filed to see that this is far from over. Looking at the statistics for the Bankruptcy court for the Middle District of Florida, we can see a trend. In August of each year since 2006, the bankruptcy filings for the year were:
2006 August filings to date: 9,547
2007 August filings to date: 16,263
2008 August filings to date: 26,723
2009 August filings to date: 40,536
2010 August filings to date: 45,600
As long as people are still going bankrupt and are still out of work, they will not have any money to spend. As long as they have no money to spend, there can be no recovery. Bankruptcy filings are still increasing, and even though 2009 was a record year for bankruptcy filings, 2010 is 10 percent higher than that.
The only year that came close to last year’s record pace was 2005, when many people rushed to file bankruptcy in order to beat the effective date of the bankruptcy reform laws that the Republicans made law that year.
Ask anyone who works in EMS, and they can tell you a hundred stories of people who abuse the EMS system. I have seen my share, and the stories have infinite variety:
The thermostat:
It was 2 o’clock in the morning when we went to this woman’s house for a complaint of “difficulty breathing.” When we got there, the “patient” didn’t want to go to the hospital, she just wanted help. Having just moved into her house, she didn’t know how to program her electronic thermostat and wanted us to show her how. It wsa 82 degrees in her house, nowhere near being a medical emergency.
Incarceritis:
People fake seizures, unconsciousness, chest pains, you name it, in the belief that they will not be arrested if they go to the hospital. The sad fact is that they are sometimes right. The officer sometimes doesn’t want to sit around the hospital for several hours, waiting for his prisoner to be discharged for minor misdemeanors. Felony arrests? Forget it, you are going to jail as soon as the hospital is done with you.
A variation of this was one morning’s call:
A man was required to be in court at 8 o’clock in the morning for a child support hearing. He walked from his home towards the courthouse 10 miles away. (Why he didn’t take the bus is a mystery.) He made it about 3 miles, and then called 911 with reported shortness of breath and chest pain at about 10 after 7. When we arrived, he wanted to go to the hospital that, coincidentally, was two blocks from the courthouse. When we arrived and asked him what was going on, his first words were, “I am trying to get to court because my wife…”
We all knew that this was a fake call intended to get him to the hospital closest to the courthouse, so that he could walk out and be in court faster. Since there is no penalty for failure to pay for the ambulance ride OR the ER bill, this is the equivalent of a free taxi. We decided that the best thing for this patient was to go to a different hospital. Why? Well, if he really was having chest pain, the patient would be less likely to walk out of that one, opting instead to use the ER bill to show the court why he had a medical reason for missing court. IF he wasn’t really having chest pains, then he didn’t need to go anyhow. Besides, to reach the hospital he wanted, we would have had to pass another, closer one, and there was no medical reason to pass a perfectly good hospital to go to the other one.
Lest anyone think that we were being mean or lazy, he still got a complete workup. His vitals were: SaO2 98% on room air, 100% on 2 lpm of O2. HR 82, RR24, BP 142/94. Monitor showed SR, and 12 lead showed nothing important. He was hot and sweaty, but that is unsurprising considering that he was about 60 pounds overweight, and it was 82 degrees with 80% humidity. He still got 325 mg of aspirin, NTG spray x2, and transport to the closest hospital (rather than the one he wanted)
People abuse the system every day. This is why universal, “free” health care will never work.
Rigging elections. The Census is now complete, which means that the gerrymandering drawing of districts can now commence. The Democrats are angry because they don’t rule Florida’s electoral process. The areas of Florida that have historically voted Democrat are the southeast coast near Miami, and the area around Jacksonville. (The 2008 election saw other areas in blue, but in my opinion that was more a result of the Democrats all running against former President Bush than a true shift in political power.)
To counter this, the Democrats want to redraw districts to create an advantage for themselves. It won’t work. You cannot thwart corruption in politics.
From a recent Email:
Tax rate cuts don’t give anything to the so-called rich. They don’t “get” someone else’s money. Tax cuts allow people to keep more of their own money to spend and invest as they see fit.
Exactly. Look where the money goes:
The total Federal Budget is $3.7 trillion for FY’10
Income: $2.164 trillion
Outlay: $3.720 trillion
Deficit: $1.556 trillion
Here are the top 5 spending categories and the percentage of total outlays:
1 Social Security $722 billion 19.4%
2 Defense $719 Billion 19.3%
3 Welfare $557 billion 15%
4 Medicare $457 Billion 12.3%
5 Welfare, healthcare (like medicaid) $335 Billion 9%
Add together the money we give people not to work (all of the above, except Defense) and you get $2.071 trillion, or an amount equal to virtually all of the taxes collected.
For 2004 (the last year I could find data) The top 25% of wage earners in the country comprise everyone making more than $139,491 (per return, not per person). That top 25% paid 84.8% of all income taxes.
(Source: http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-soi/04in06tr.xls)
Yeah, the problem is the rich.