The Baby Whisperer Poll

By now President Obama's reputation as a baby-whisperer is legendary.









Of course, we need the video to get the full impact of that last one.



So let's check out his would-be challenger on that score.









No contest...Obama takes it, hands down

:-)

Now that we've settled that, lets end with the photo of the week for me. This one speaks more than words can capture.

New York Attorney General Schneiderman files lawsuit against major banks

Last week we learned that President Obama had established a new unit to investigate the abusive lending practices that led to the great recession. He also appointed NY Attorney General Eric Schneiderman to co-chair the unit. A few days later, Schneiderman was on Rachel Maddow's show and said this:

New York and Delaware...have a unique place because all of the mortgage-backed securities were actually pools of mortgages deposited into New York trusts or Delaware trusts...To get this done you need resources, you need jurisdiction and you need will...

What we realized...is that we all needed to work together. New York's securities law is a stronger securities law in some ways than the federal law. Some of our statutes of limitations, though, are shorter so we can't go as far back. The federal statute is longer. We need everyone together.

What he did was outline two factors we need to keep in mind when looking for accountability. First of all, no matter where a mortgaged home is located in the U.S., the securities into which they were bundled and traded were deposited in trusts located in New York or Delaware. In other words, that is where jurisdiction for some of these crimes will lie.

And secondly, he pointed out that New York's securities law is stronger than federal law. In other words, in cases where the statute of limitations has not run out, a New York state prosecution will be stronger than a federal prosecution.

With all this in mind, its interesting to see that today, AG Schneiderman announced a major lawsuit against several banks for deceptive and fraudulent use of the electronic mortgage registry known as MERS.

Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman today filed a lawsuit against several of the nation’s largest banks charging that the creation and use of a private national mortgage electronic registry system known as MERS has resulted in a wide range of deceptive and fraudulent foreclosure filings in New York state and federal courts, harming homeowners and undermining the integrity of the judicial foreclosure process. The lawsuit asserts that employees and agents of Bank of America, J.P. Morgan Chase, and Wells Fargo, acting as "MERS certifying officers," have repeatedly submitted court documents containing false and misleading information that made it appear that the foreclosing party had the authority to bring a case when in fact it may not have. The lawsuit names JPMorgan Chase Bank, N.A., Bank of America, N.A., Wells Fargo Bank, N.A., as well as Virginia-based MERSCORP, Inc. and its subsidiary, Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems, Inc.

The lawsuit further asserts that the MERS System has effectively eliminated homeowners' and the public's ability to track property transfers through the traditional public records system. Instead, this information is now stored only in a private database – which is plagued with inaccuracies and errors – over which MERS and its financial institution members exercise sole control. Additional defendants include BAC Home Loans Servicing, LP, Chase Home Finance LLC, EMC Mortgage Corporation, and Wells Fargo Home Mortgage, Inc.

This suit is not being handled by the new federal unit Schneiderman is co-chairing. But its exactly the kind of thing he was talking about in the interview with Maddow - states and the federal government will work together to use the right jurisdiction to gain maximum accountability.

Poutragers are already jumping on this as a signal that Schneiderman is pulling out of the settlement deal still being negotiated on foreclosure fraud between the banks, 50 state attorney generals, and the feds. What they continue to miss is that that suit is focused narrowly on the robo-signing aspect of foreclosures. The MERS registry is a whole other issue.

Of course they're also missing what Schneiderman said above about the importance of working toether to use the right jurisdiction.

Its looking more and more to me like the banks involved in all of this are in for one very long difficult season. I suspect this is merely the opening salvo of more to come.

What will Republicans run on now?

Conventional wisdom for the last few months has been that President Obama's re-election would hinge on the economy. If news like today's jobs report continues, the Republicans have lost their ability to stall the recovery and blame it on the president.

So where do they go for a message that will resonate with voters?

The old tried and true issue for Republicans has usually been to scare Americans about some foreign threat and attempt to paint the Democrats as "weak on defense" (it worked to beat Sen. John Kerry, didn't it?) Obviously Romney is relying on that old canard when he tries to get people to believe that President Obama is an "appeaser." But with the American public's weariness with war and Obama's demonstrated competence in focusing our efforts to not only get out of Iraq, but to kill bin Laden and defeat al Qaeda, its not working this time. The one tool they'll try to exploit will be Iran...so watch for MUCH more talk about that in the coming months.

The other issue Republicans try to make hay with is the federal deficit. But as I've mentioned before, with the looming defense cuts agreed to in the debt ceiling deal and the Bush tax cuts set to expire, they'll have to be focused this year on bills that would actually increase the deficit. So I doubt we'll be hearing much on that one in the months ahead.

What President Obama and the Democrats have done over the last couple of years is take away from Republicans three of their standard issues...the economy, foreign policy, and the deficit.

That's the good news.

But the bad news is the question of what they have left...cultural wedge issues and racist dog whistles. Expect the rhetoric to ramp up along those lines.

As an example, take a look at what Romney posted on his web site today. Is he cheering the drop in the unemployment rate and the fact that the economy is obviously improving? Of course not. He's warning you that your religious freedom is being threatened because the Obama administration is working to ensure that all women have access to contraception.

On January 20, 2012, the Obama administration affirmed a rule that would force Roman Catholic hospitals, charities, and universities to purchase health insurance for their employees that includes coverage for contraception, abortifacients, and sterilization, in violation of their religious principles. This is wrong...

But, now, more than two centuries after the drafting of the Bill of Rights, religious liberty is facing the most serious assault in generations. And the assault is coming from liberalism itself...

What the Obama administration has done is indefensible. But this is about even more than President Obama denying America’s Catholics their constitutionally protected rights. This is about the preservation of our freedom.

Make no mistake about it...just as the fight over Civil Rights was framed as an assault on Woolworth's right to deny African Americans a seat at the lunch counter, Republicans will now side with the Catholic Bishops to deny women access to contraception.

In case you haven't heard, this is about the ACA regulation that requires all health care plans to cover contraception. The administration did grant a waiver to churches and religious institutions who primarily cover people of the same faith. But religious universities and hospitals who tend to employ the general public have been given one year to come in to compliance.

Due to my own personal history, I want to emphasize that this is not just an issue of birth control. Many women like me have also needed some of these medications for other health issues and Romney would side with the Catholic Bishops in denying that access to thousands of women.

This is likely the kind of battle we'll be having to fight this election year. While it makes me sad to think that we'll have to go back to struggles we thought we won in the 60's and 70's, I don't think the Republicans will be successful in "taking our country back" to those days.

"This isn't just a good jobs report...it's a recovery jobs report"

Thus sayeth Ezra Klein.

The strangest [?] thing about January’s jobs report is that it’s pretty much all good. The headline numbers are great, of course: payrolls are up by 243,000 jobs. Unemployment is down to 8.3 percent. But the inside numbers are good, too...

Revisions are positive, too. November goes from 100,000 new jobs to 157,000 new jobs. December goes from 200,000 new jobs to 203,000 new jobs. So the real number for the just-released jobs report is 303,000 jobs: that’s how many we added in January, plus what we just added to the numbers from November and December. Nicely done, economy...

The bottom line is that this isn’t just a good jobs report. It’s a recovery jobs report. It’s showing the sort of numbers that win elections.

Via Steve Benen: red = Bush, blue = Obama

Change Happened

Watch it...share it.

What we can learn from the Romney/Gingrich slugfest

For all of you Obamabots out there - remember how sick and tired we got of hearing complaints from the left about how President Obama needed to throw more punches at the teapartier Republicans? The thinking behind this kind of thing has been that a verbal punch in the face is more effective than out-maneuvering them. In other words, braun beats brains.

I couldn't help but think about that as I read Al Giordno's take on what just happened in Florida.

But the costs of this victory to Romney go far beyond the $17 million in attack ads he and his Super PACs deployed to stop – now for the second time in a young campaign – the rise of rival Newt Gingrich. Hell hath no wrath like a Gingrich scorched. The former House Speaker is the Keith Richards of US politics: no matter what debauchery he passes through he never dies. Newt is the zombie candidate. Burn him, bomb him, poison him, hack him into a thousand pieces and he quickly reassembles and gets back up again, madder than before and coming right back at ya'.

This is what sociologists call backlash and its something our macho-infused culture seems to not understand at all. How does Gingrich (representing the tea partiers at this point) respond to the nose punches Romney dished out in Iowa and Florida? Does he simply wither and go away? I think not! He comes back with an even more deadly scorched-earth approach. Its what Gandhi was referring to when he said that "an eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind"...everyone loses.

David Frum gets it and that's why he worries about a Romney win in the primaries coupled with a loss in the general election - it will lead to a tea party backlash.

For non-tea party Republicans, this second outcome opens all kinds of ugly, ominous possibilities. If candidate Romney loses, tea party Republicans will claim that the GOP lost because it failed to nominate a "true conservative." That claim may fly in the face of political math (how would a more extreme candidate win more votes?), but it will pack a lot of emotional punch. Intense partisans are always ready to believe that the way to win is to be more intense and more partisan.

There ARE alternatives to the tit-for-tat nose-punching that feeds backlash. In perhaps the most macho arena of all, Mohammed Ali showed us that "float like a butterfly - sting like a bee" can be successful against braun any day. What it takes is the endurance to engage the "long game" rather than going for the immediate knock-out and the smarts to know just the right moment for the bee sting (my gawd, where was Michael Moore and his talk about "tutu's" when Ali was referencing butterflies and bees in the boxing ring?)

Remind you of anyone?

Romney runs against a figment of his imagination

Last night I was struck by Andrew Sullivan's response to Romney's victory speech in Florida.

Everything this man says is a lie. He's doubling down on the big lies I tried to counter in that Newsweek piece. The president Romney is describing does not exist. Obama is demonizing and denigrating every sector of the economy? That is a pure lie. As is the repeated lie that Obama is an appeaser. Has Romney understood what has happened to the Iranian economy these past few months? Does he think Osama bin Laden thinks he was appeased?

Let me just say right now: this speech is the most dishonest, manipulative, disgusting series of lies I've heard in a very long time. And its core premise: that the president hates this country, whereas Romney believes in it.

I didn't listen to it, so this morning I read the transcript. Sullivan is right.

The truth is that in order to challenge President Obama, Republicans have had to develop a caricature of the man that has absolutely no bearing on reality. Bill Maher did a great job of explaining it. Last night Romney continued those lies.

President Obama wants to grow government and continue to amass trillion dollar deficits...

President Obama’s view of capitalism is to send your money to his friends’ companies...

On one of the most personal matters of our lives, our health care, President Obama would turn decision making over to government bureaucrats...

Like his colleagues in the faculty lounge who think they know better, President Obama demonizes and denigrates almost every sector of our economy...

President Obama believes America’s role as leader in the world is a thing of the past.

And the big dog-whistle finale...

President Obama wants to “fundamentally transform” America. We want to restore America to the founding principles that made this country great.

The question I have is how all that will shake out when folks actually pay attention to what President Obama says and what he's done. For base voters who live in the bubble of Faux News and conservative talk radio - I suppose it will continue to go over pretty well.

But for independents and low information voters who will only start to really pay attention next fall - they'll have the contrast of being able to weigh what Romney says (if he's the nominee) against what they actually hear and see from the President. I'd suggest that will only serve to demonstrate what a liar Romney really is.

Things aren't going real well for Romney right now with independents. He's dropped 20 points in favorability with them since November. You have to wonder what happens to that when folks see the reality that he's actually running against a figment of his imagination.