As Spencer reported yesterday, the incoming Chair of the House Armed Services Committee Buck McKeon wants to revisit and expand the 2001 AUMF authorizing our war against al Qaeda. The objective wouldn’t the “drop a new Authorization to Use Military Force, but to reaffirm and strengthen the existing one,” says an aide to McKeon who [...]

If only David Stern were being treated as badly as he treats homeowners, this would bring real schadenfreude. In a regulatory filing published today, Stern’s publicly traded company revealed that one of its subsidiaries failed to pay rent in November on its towering office building in Plantation, Florida, and had received a notice of default. [...]

A month ago, the Financial Fraud Task Force first started to get around to investigating the systemic fraud in our foreclosure system. Federal investigators are exploring whether banks and other financial firms broke U.S. law when using fraudulent court documents to foreclose on people’s homes, according to sources familiar with the effort. The criminal investigation, [...]

In the last week or so, two public reports have cataloged the growing insecurity of Americans. Last week, CDC reported that the number of people without health insurance topped 59 million in the first quarter of this year (up 400,000 from last year and 2.7 million from 2008). And today, USDA reported that 50.2 million [...]

The Telegraph reports that a High Peace Council convened by Hamid Karzai may request that some Gitmo detainees be freed so they can participate in peace talks. (h/t Carol Rosenberg) Taliban prisoners would be freed from Guantánamo Bay to potentially join peace negotiations under a proposal from the Afghan council appointed to find a settlement [...]

The WaPo has a story on the growing realization that the banksters have been engaging in massive fraud to keep churning out foreclosures. It includes a detail about Chicago Sheriff Thomas Dart’s refusal to enforce foreclosures I did not know: that when he had a sample of foreclosures reviewed, he found that only 5% of [...]

There are a lot of things wrong with Obama’s apparently imminent decision to just let Khalid Sheikh Mohammed rot in jail without a formal trial. Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the self-proclaimed mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, will probably remain in military detention without trial for the foreseeable future, according to Obama administration officials. The [...]

A little late to the post with Trash this weekend, had an issue crop up last night after a long week. But we are getting down to crunch time in both Formula One, last race of the season and it will decide the Drivers’ Crown, and it is now down to the last make it [...]

I am very very grateful that Ryan Grim exposed Bush as a plagiarist on Thursday. When Crown Publishing inked a deal with George W. Bush for his memoirs, the publisher knew it wasn’t getting Faulkner. But the book, at least, promises “gripping, never-before-heard detail” about the former president’s key decisions, offering to bring readers “aboard [...]

There are rapidly emerging signs the Obama Administration is actively, quickly and covertly working furiously on a plan to retroactively legitimize and ratify the shoddy, fraudulent and non-conforming conduct by MERS on literally millions of mortgages. they are again going to give a bailout and retroactive immunity to craven banks and financial institutions that have wrecked the economy