WE SURROUND THEM!

“You look good in brown, Mr. dOOdnoser.”

“I don't recall asking you opinion....”

“I hide my nose too if it matched my shoes as well as those match yours.”

“My 12 year old is more mature than you...”

“Just giving back your childish follower ways of having not one clue about what you speak. You are a perfect tea bagger, you know just enough to stick you nose in too far.”

“Who are;'The researchers'? The acorn kids?”

“Are we finally going to be surrounded today?!?”

“Takes a while to copy some more bagger crap, be patient, Sir Almost Rounded.”

“RASMUSSEN POLL...

Obama Approval Falls to New Low: 42%
Obama Approval Index: -20
Strongly Approve 24%
Strongly Disapprove 44%
Total Approval 42%”

“When Liberals get their way you can still drink the water and eat the fish.”

“Tuesday, June 15, 2010
Fallout from the Spill


Our new Louisiana poll has a lot of data points to show how unhappy voters in the state are with Barack Obama's handling of the oil spill but one perhaps sums it up better than anything else- a majority of voters there think George W. Bush did a better job with Katrina than Obama's done dealing with the spill.

50% of voters in the state, even including 31% of Democrats, give Bush higher marks on that question compared to 35% who pick Obama.

Overall only 32% of Louisianans approve of how Obama has handled the spill to 62% who disapprove. 34% of those polled say they approved of how Bush dealt with Katrina to 58% who disapproved.

While the poll results indicate a lot of unhappiness with the President, ultimately BP is getting the largest amount of blame from voters in the state. 53% of voters say they're angriest at the oil company to 29% who say their greatest unhappiness is with the federal government. And 78% say BP has the greatest responsibility for cleaning up the spill to only 11% who say that onus lays with the federal government. 44% think BP CEO Tony Hayward should be fired to 29% who think he should not and 26% who are not sure.

One thing the oil spill has not done is created a spike of opposition to offshore drilling in Louisiana. 77% of voters still support it with only 12% against. Only 31% say the spill has made them less inclined to be in favor of drilling while 42% say it hasn't made a difference to them and 28% say they're now stronger in their support.

If there's any 'winner' in this unfortunate event it's Governor Bobby Jindal. 63% of voters approve of the job he's doing, the best PPP has found for any Senator or Governor so far in 2010. There's an even higher level of support, at 65%, for how he's handled the aftermath of the spill.”

“The people in the area who sold out to the oil companies for over half a century are now reaping the whirlwind.

And demanding that someone else clean up the mess.


The legacy of Rebublican environmental degradation will last for decades..... and this time it's not hidden away in Alaska. Millions of people will be affected, and for a very long time.

So give yourselves a big pat on the back.

Tell another treehugger joke.

Then go down to the Gulf and take a swim.

”

“What has Jindal done except beg for money from BP , the gov or anyone else that'll give, where's his little gov - BIGBIZ crap that so important to his republican base, where are the BIGBIZ givers---hypocrites all.”

“What about the money given to Jindal from the Feds that he hasn't spent?

Hmmmm Bobby Agenda?”

“Well, Stovie sure looks surrounded!”

“Obama biggest recipient of BP cash
Tags:


BP has also spent millions each year on lobbying — including $15.9 million last year alone — as it has tried to influence energy policy.
BP has also spent millions each year on lobbying — including $15.9 million last year alone — as it has tried to influence energy policy. Reuters

While the BP oil geyser pumps millions of gallons of petroleum into the Gulf of Mexico, President Barack Obama and members of Congress may have to answer for the millions in campaign contributions they’ve taken from the oil and gas giant over the years.

BP and its employees have given more than $3.5 million to federal candidates over the past 20 years, with the largest chunk of their money going to Obama, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Donations come from a mix of employees and the company’s political action committees — $2.89 million flowed to campaigns from BP-related PACs and about $638,000 came from individuals.

On top of that, the oil giant has spent millions each year on lobbying — including $15.9 million last year alone — as it has tried to influence energy policy.

During his time in the Senate and while running for president, Obama received a total of $77,051 from the oil giant and is the top recipient of BP PAC and individual money over the past 20 years, according to financial disclosure records.

An Obama spokesman rejected the notion that the president took big oil money.

“President Obama didn’t accept a dime from corporate PACs or federal lobbyists during his presidential campaign,” spokesman Ben LaBolt said. “He raised $750 million from nearly four million Americans. And since he became president, he rolled back tax breaks and giveaways for the oil and gas industry, spearheaded a G20 agreement to phase out fossil fuel subsidies, and made the largest investment in American history in clean energy incentives.”

In Congress, Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.), who last week cautioned that the incident should “not be used inappropriately” to halt Obama’s push for expansion of offshore drilling, has been one of the biggest beneficiaries of BP’s largesse. Her comments created some blowback, with critics complaining that she is too blasé about the impact of the disaster, even though she was among the first lawmakers to call for a federal investigation into the spill.

As the top congressional recipient in the last cycle and one of the top BP cash recipients of the past two decades, Landrieu banked almost $17,000 from the oil giant in 2008 alone and has lined her war chest with more than $28,000 in BP cash overall.

“Campaign contributions, from energy companies or from environmental groups, have absolutely no impact on Sen. Landrieu’s policy agenda or her response to this unprecedented disaster in the Gulf,” said Landrieu spokesman Aaron Saunders. “The senator is proud of the broad coalition she’s built since her first day in the Senate to address the energy and environmental challenges in Louisiana and in the nation. This disaster only makes the effort to promote and save Louisiana’s coast all that more important.”

Several BP executives have given directly to Landrieu’s campaign, including current and previous U.S. operation Presidents Lamar McKay and Robert Malone. Other donors include Margaret Hudson, BP’s America vice president, and Benjamin Cannon, federal affairs director for the U.S. branch. Donations ranged from $1,000 to $2,300 during the past campaign cycle.

Environmentalists complain that Landrieu has played down the impact of oil spills.

“I mean, just the gallons are so minuscule compared to the benefits of U.S. strength and security, the benefits of job creation and energy security,” Landrieu said at a hearing last month on offshore drilling. “So while there are risks associated with everything, I think you understand that they are quite, quite minimal.”

Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0510/36783.html#ixzz0r2BFjjvp”

“Playboy: Confessions of a Tea Party Consultant
by Publius

The July issue of Playboy (available on news stands Friday) has an awesome feature story, “Rogues of K Street: Confessions of a Tea Party Consultant.” The piece is by Anonymous.

Everything I know about being a good consultant comes from Fight Club. Discretion is everything. Rule number one is you don’t talk about consulting for the Tea Party. Rule number two is you don’t talk about consulting for the Tea Party. The story about the wild characters who are shaping this campaign cycle is worth telling, but please excuse my anonymity.


I hold as many meetings as possible over Tanqueray and tonics at the St. Regis hotel on K Street in Washington, D.C. The bar is dark and private, with comfortable couches. Even the gin tastes better there. On weekday afternoons the only people in the bar are foreigners and political consultants long past caring about who actually wins.

“You’re going to see something spectacular,” an old friend who has a knack for black-bag operations said as he proudly downed his vodka. “About a month from now you’ll see ACORN explode from within.” Right on schedule a video was released that showed undercover conservative activists James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles getting advice from employees at the Baltimore office of the Association of Community Organizers for Reform Now on how to smuggle underage El Salvadoran girls into a fictitious brothel.

That’s when I realized this isn’t an average fringe movement. This one is credible, legit and-for the first time in a decade-scaring the crap out of the left. In my years as a campaign hack and then as a consultant, I’ve created more than my share of fake grassroots organizations. Some were downright evil but effective beyond expectations. Did you get an automated call from the sister of a 9/11 victim asking you to reelect President Bush in 2004? That was me. Did you get a piece of mail with the phrase ’supports abortion on demand as a means of birth control’? That may have been me too.

Conservatives had been trying to take down ACORN for three decades. Where they failed, BigGovernment.com and my friends succeeded. In one magnificent explosion, a loose group of troublemakers, libertarians and Republicans took its first scalp. Sonja Merchant-Jones, former co-chair of ACORNís Maryland chapter, told The New York Times in March, “That 20-minute video ruined 40 years of good work.”

The ACORN blood tasted good. Shortly after, a core group of about 30 of us convened for the first time. It was the kind of conference call during which no one, except the handful with nothing to lose, offered last names. But it didn’t matter. I’d been around long enough to know many of the people by voice. Most of our talk was devoted to rants about the K Street lobbyists who are ruining the GOP. There I sat, in the quiet corner of a coffee shop on K Street, listening to a conference call beating the #&%!$ out of the people who keep me in business.

The cynical among us think it’s a group of peasants with pitchforks controlled by an underground cabal of Glenn Beck, wealthy donors and the guys who killed JFK. But the worst thing I can say about the Tea Party I work for is that it can make lots of noise but can’t win without professional help. I love the irony of helping run this organization from the St. Regis Bar.

This cause is worthier and more real than anything I’ve done in the past. I’m all in. When I met the colorful characters behind the organization, I was really all in. None of them were prom king, none went to college east of the Appalachians (even the Jews), and a lot of them smoke a pack a day just because they’re not supposed to. Unlike most of the tired, airbrushed conservatives living in D.C., the homegrown activists I work with are the real deal. They may not read much, but they all know their Ayn Rand.”

“Now your quoting Playboy?!?


LMAO!”

“They don't understand that their glorification of a creature like Beckkk damages their reputations more than anything anyone else might possibly say or do.

It's all self-inflicted.


Here's a classic case of Beckkk desperately trying to stay in the public eye. I suppose Social Injustice is more consistent with the tenets of his 'religion.'


Funny....I don't recall any of his fans pasting in page after page about this back in March.

Was it too insane, even for them?”

“Are there Glen Beck fans on here tilt?

Who?”

“"“Are there Glen Beck fans on here tilt?

Who?”
HiGHPLAiNSDRiFTER
4:55:09 AM
6/17/10"



BAAAWWWWAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAaaaaaaaaaaa!”

“still waiting”

“FLMAO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”

“Pretty funny.”

“France-0-0-Mexico”

“I waited all day to be surrounded. Nada, zippo, nothing.”

“rack 'em up, q ball”

“Where's surrOund-ah-dOOd? Maybe he is somewhere else surrounding?”

“We had 8 years of Bush & Cheney and America suffered for it.

You didn�t get mad when the Supreme Court stopped a legal recount & appointed a President.

You didn�t get mad when Cheney allowed Energy company officials to dictate energy policy.

You didn�t get mad when a covert CIA operative got ousted.

You didn�t get mad when the Patriot Act got passed.

You didn�t get mad when we illegally invaded a country that posed no threat to us.

You didn�t get mad when we spent over 3.5 trillion (& counting per Stiglitz & Bilmes) on said illegal war.

You didn�t get mad when over 10 billion dollars just disappeared in Iraq.

You didn�t get mad when you found out we were torturing people.

You didn�t get mad when the government was illegally wiretapping Americans.

You didn�t get mad when we didn�t catch Bin Laden.

You didn�t get mad when you saw the horrible conditions at Walter Reed.

You didn�t get mad when we let New Orleans drown.

You didn�t get mad when we gave a 900 billion tax break to the rich.

And now you're mad? LOL.”

“Did you enjoy your "vacation" from TT?”

“rosey, and now you're not?

LOL!”

“I've never said I'm not mad at some of Obama's actions, in fact, I've copt to it when I am. But you guys are a day late and a dollar short, per usual.”

“*snicker*”

“OK, it didn't happen yet AGAIN today.

No surrounded!


I feel like I'm getting jipped.”

“Look again maybe you're Sir Squared.”

“t*lt reported for homosexual slur”

“I notice that the "damn hole" still isn't plugged....”

“Maybe you guys should surround it?”

“How anyone can blame the government for this is beyond me.”

“Today's the day to be surrounded. Maybe some money will come out of overly priced gold and can be loaned to small biz so we can get this party started. Thanks Glenn.”

“Fannie and Freddie tab is $146B and rising
By BINYAMIN APPELBAUM
NEW YORK TIMES
06/20/2010

CASA GRANDE, Ariz. — Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac took over a foreclosed home roughly every 90 seconds during the first three months of the year. They owned 163,828 houses at the end of March, a virtual city with more houses than Seattle. The mortgage finance companies, created by Congress to help Americans buy homes, have become two of the nation’s largest landlords.

Bill Bridwell, a real estate agent in the desert south of Phoenix, is among the thousands of agents hired nationwide by the companies to sell those foreclosures, recouping some of the money that borrowers failed to repay. In a good week, he sells 20 homes and Fannie sends another 20 listings his way.


“We’re all working for the government now,” said Bridwell on a recent sun-baked morning, steering a Hummer through subdivisions laid out like circuit boards on the desert floor.

For all the focus on the historic federal rescue of the banking industry, it is the government’s decision to seize Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in September 2008 that is likely to cost taxpayers the most money. So far the tab stands at $145.9 billion, and it grows with every foreclosure of a three-bedroom home with a two-car garage one hour from Phoenix. The Congressional Budget Office has predicted that the final bill could reach $389 billion.

Fannie and Freddie increased American home ownership over the last half-century by persuading investors to provide money for mortgage loans. The sales pitch amounted to a money-back guarantee: If borrowers defaulted, the companies promised to repay the investors.

Rather than actually making loans themselves, the two companies — Fannie older and larger, Freddie created to provide competition — bought loans from banks and other originators, providing money for more lending and helping to hold down interest rates.

“Our business is the American dream of home ownership,” Fannie Mae declared in its mission statement, and in 2001 the company set a target of helping to create 6 million new homeowners by 2014. Here in Arizona, during a housing boom fueled by cheap land, cheap money and population growth, Fannie Mae executives trumpeted that the company would invest $15 billion to help families buy homes.

As it turns out, Fannie and Freddie increasingly were channeling money into loans that borrowers could not afford to repay. As defaults mounted, the companies quickly ran low on money to honor their guarantees. The federal government, fearing that investors would stop providing money for new mortgage loans, placed the companies in conservatorship and took a 79.9 percent ownership stake, adding its own guarantee that investors would be repaid.

The huge and continually rising cost of that decision has spurred national debate about federal subsidies for mortgage lending. Republicans want to sever ties with Fannie and Freddie once the crisis abates. The Obama administration and congressional Democrats have insisted on postponing the argument until after the midterm elections.

In the meantime, Fannie and Freddie are editing the results of the housing boom at public expense, removing owners who cannot afford their homes, reselling the houses at much lower prices and financing mortgage loans for the new owners.

The two companies together accounted for 17 percent of real estate sales in Arizona during the first four months of the year, almost three times their share of the market during the same period last year, according to an analysis by MDA DataQuick. The signs of their presence — small placards hung beneath the real estate agent’s standard for-sale sign — often are planted in the front yards of several homes on the same street.

Valarie Ross, who lives in the Phoenix suburb of Avondale, has watched six of the nine homes visible from her lawn chair emptied by moving trucks during the last year. Four have been resold by the government.

“One by one,” she said. “Just amazing.”

The population of Pinal County, where Bridwell lives and works, roughly doubled to 340,000 over the last decade. Developers built an entirely new city called Maricopa on land assembled from farmers. Buyers camped outside new developments, waiting to purchase homes. One builder laid out a 300-lot subdivision at the end of a three-mile dirt road and still managed to sell 30 of the homes.

Bridwell sold plenty of those houses during the boom, then cut workers as prices crashed. Now his firm, Golden Touch Realty, again employs as many people as at the height of the boom, all working exclusively for Fannie Mae. The payroll now includes a locksmith to secure foreclosed homes and two clerks devoted to federal paperwork.

Golden Touch gets more listings from Fannie Mae than any other firm in Pinal County. Bridwell said he was ready to jump because he remembered the last time the government ended up owning thousands of Arizona houses, after the late-1980s collapse of the savings and loan industry.

“The way I see it,” said Bridwell, whose glass-top desk displays membership cards from the Republican National Committee, “is that we’re getting these homes back into private hands.”

Selling a house generally costs the government about $10,000. The outsides are weeded and the insides are scrubbed. Stolen appliances are replaced, brackish pools are refilled. And until the properties are sold, they must be maintained. Fannie asks contractors to mow lawns twice a month during the summer, and pays them $80 each time. That’s a monthly grass bill of more than $10 million.

All told, the companies spent more than $1 billion on upkeep last year.

“We may be behind many loans on the same street, so we believe that it’s in everyone’s best interest to aggressively do property maintenance,” said Chris Bowden, the Freddie Mac executive in charge of foreclosure sales.

Prices have dropped significantly. So by the time a home is resold, Fannie and Freddie on average recoup less than 60 percent of the money that the borrower failed to repay, according to the companies’ financial filings. In Phoenix and other areas where prices have fallen sharply, the losses often are larger.

Foreclosures punch holes in neighborhoods, so residents, community groups and public officials are eager to see properties reoccupied. But there also is concern that investors are buying many foreclosures as rental properties, making it harder for neighborhoods to recover.

Real estate agents tend to favor investors because the sales close surely and quickly and there is the prospect of repeat business. But community advocates say that Fannie and Freddie have an obligation to sell houses to people as a place to live, creating new homeowners.

David Adame worked for Fannie Mae’s local office during the boom, on programs to make ownership more affordable. Now with prices down sharply, Adame sees a second chance to put people into homes they can afford.

“Yes, move inventory,” said Adame, now an executive focused on housing issues at Chicanos por la Causa, a Phoenix nonprofit group, “but if we just move inventory to investors, then what are we doing?”

Executives at both Fannie and Freddie say they have an overriding obligation to limit losses, but that they are taking steps to sell more homes to families.

Fannie Mae last summer announced that it would give people seeking homes a “first look” by not accepting offers from investors in the first 15 days that a property is on the market. It also offers to help buyers with closing costs, and prohibits buyers from reselling properties at a profit for 90 days, to discourage speculation. Fannie Mae said that 68.4 percent of buyers this year had certified that they would use the house as a primary residence.

Freddie Mac has adopted fewer programs, but the company said that it has sold about the same share of foreclosures to owner-occupants.

The companies also have agreed to sell foreclosed homes to nonprofits using grants from the federal government’s Neighborhood Stabilization Program. Chicanos por la Causa, which won $137 million under the program in partnership with nonprofits in eight other states, plans to buy more than 200 homes in Phoenix in the next two years. The group plans to renovate the houses, then sell to local families.

The scale of such efforts is small. The home ownership rate in Phoenix continues to fall as foreclosures pile up and renters replace owners.

But John R. Smith, chief executive of Housing Our Communities, another Phoenix-area group using federal money to buy foreclosures, said that he tried to focus on salvaging one property at a time.

“I tell them, ‘OK, you want to unload 10 houses to that guy, fine,’” he said. “‘Now give me this one. And this one. And one over here.’””

“The gov determined the prices that those houses were sold at? WRONG!!!!! Remember only runaway trains and greed can build so much velocity to the upside that the inevitable down turn can really have no bottom.”

“Prove it”

“I am, just look at all the repoes coming out of the shadow inventory. Price , the thing no one whats to talk about. If all that fiancing had been way worse it wouldn't have mattered if the houses had cost some reasonable amount , but oh no, triple the price and no one will make the payments.

Start putting blame where it belongs.”

“Remember, I was building and selling my houses since 1985. Each year things got more out of hand with finance to the point, since I had made mine , I threw in the towel in disgust in the middle of 2005 and predicted this thing to a TT at that time.”

“When will we get the nightly snicker report on his state of surroundtivity?”