By Julian Borger and Charles Arthur, Guardian.co.uk, Jan. 27, 2012

[....] The company was accused of censorship by many users and threatened with a one-day boycott on Saturday after announcing that it could remove tweets in certain countries which have "different ideas about the contours of freedom of expression".

Twitter insisted that it would not use the gagging system in a blanket fashion, but would apply it on a case-by-case basis, as it happens when governments or organisations complain about individual tweets. But the reassurances were not enough to prevent a torrent of outrage from twitter users and freedom of speech campaigners [.....]

The grades for the president’s State of the Union are in and the critics have been kind. In fact, it's chilling to see just how few hits the president takes for couching his entire address in unqualified celebration of the US military.

It isn't as if we didn't know this already, but it is amazing how many people defend this man. As I've written before, no one is more cynical and destructive to the political process than Ron "things were better in 1912" Paul.

He is as repulsive as Gingrich, he has made the claim over and over again, he knew nothing about the contents of those newsletters, the lies fall out of his mouth as easily as they do Newt "I was the real president in the 1990's and responsible for all things good" Gingrich or  Donald "I might run as an independent" Trump.

Ron Paul is no better than David Duke.

Oh right, gold standard, gold standard, monetary policy is killing us, we don't need an income tax if we quit the fed.. Austrian School, Austrian School, No FEMA, the Constitution.

Remember this people, he is a fundamentalist Christian Reformer, they are fringe, he isn't progressive, in fact he might be the most regressive man standing on the stage with the rest of those nut cases.

Whether massive robo-signing occurred is no longer in issue. The question that needs to be investigated is why it was being done. The alleged justification—that the bankers were so busy that they cut corners—hardly seems credible given the extent of the practice.

The robo-signing largely involved assignments of mortgage notes to mortgage servicers or trusts representing the investors who put up the loan money. Assignment was necessary to give the trusts legal title to the loans. But assignment was delayed until it was necessary to foreclose on the homes, when it had to be done through the forgery and fraud of robo-signing. Why had it been delayed? Why did the banks not assign the mortgages to the trusts when and as required by law?

Here is a working hypothesis, suggested by Martin Andelman: securitized mortgages are the “pawns” used in the pawn shop known as the “repo market.” “Repos” are overnight sales and repurchases of collateral. Yale economist Gary Gorton explains that repos are the “deposit insurance” for the shadow banking system, which is now larger than the conventional banking system and is necessary for the conventional system to operate. The problem is that repos require “sales,” which means the mortgage notes have to remain free to be bought and sold. The mortgages are left unendorsed so they can be used in this repo market.

By Bernard Avishai, The Nation, Feb. 13, 2012 issue

(Book review of Remedy and Reation: The Peculiar American Struggle Over Health Care Reform, by Paul Starr.)

It is hard to read Remedy and Reaction, Paul Starr’s remarkable chronicle of the hundred-year effort to legislate universal health insurance in the United States, without recalling Robert Gibbs’s tortured quip that Democrats who’ve denounced the Obama White House for having knuckled under to Republican principles or intimidation “ought to be drug-tested.” Nobody with a sense of history—that is, nobody who reads Starr’s book—could doubt how sensible and brave was the president’s effort to drive the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 through Congress. Nobody with a feel for the present moment should doubt how imminent is the threat to the act, how urgent it is for progressive Democrats to rally around Obama—and without all the condescending qualifications that “independents,” who flock away from allegedly weak or incompetent leaders, interpret as contempt [....]

For comparison, an earlier review:

By Timothy Noah in the New York Times' Sunday Book Review, Nov. 20, 2011:

[....] Paul Starr’s compact but thorough “Remedy and Reaction” is an unofficial companion volume to his Pulitzer Prizewinning 1982 book, “The Social Transformation of American Medicine.” The new book would be livelier if it didn’t confine itself to policy. But Starr is a sociologist, not a historian or journalist (though he moonlights as a co-editor of The American Prospect, a respected liberal monthly). His long, wonky trail begins in the Progressive Era [....]

MJ Lee, Politico, earlier this morning.  Maybe Bill's exceptionally public-spirited--and enlightened on this stuff--father finally wore him down on this?  Grover Norquist crowd takes another hit.  This would make the 2^nd and 3^rd richest people in the world socialist, liberal job-killers, on Grover's count.  

By MJ LEE | 1/26/12 10:13 AM EST

Bill Gates said Thursday that the county’s has got to hike taxes and the wealthy should shoulder a greater burden of the increase, while he rejected any close correlation between job creation and the level of taxes.

“Even as the economy improves and you end the wars, you’re going to have to raise taxes and certainly, whatever form it takes, and I’m not an expert on this — the rich should bear a larger increase than the rest,” the billionaire founder of Microsoft told Fox News Thursday in Switzerland, where he is attending the World Economic Forum.

When asked about the argument that taxing the wealthy would actually hinder job creation by putting pressure on companies to contract and hire less, Gates said he didn’t see that to be the case.

“There is no strong correlation between job creation and what the tax environment has been at any point in time,” gates said. “If something’s a profitable activity, you’re going to engage in it. Yes, there are tax rates that are so high that people may work less. But that’s — you have to get up in the 50, 60 percent range before that’s the case.”

According to Forbes, Gates is the second richest person in the world with a net worth of about $56 billion. Coming in at a close third-place is Warren Buffett with a net worth of about $50 billion. President Barack Obama said in his State of the Union address this week that under the “Buffett Rule,” millionaires should pay a minimum tax rate of at least 30 percent, even for income derived from investments.

... The protest was the first of many similar actions across the country as reformers go on the offensive against Big Oil and its political allies in Congress who have given billions in handouts to fossil fuel companies while slowing down progress on the nation’s transition to 100 percent renewable energy.

"People's chief demand today was that Congress stop giving the fossil fuel industry gifts in the form of billions in useless subsidies just so politicians can cash in the favor for campaign contributions," said 350.org founder Bill McKibben ...

At the rally, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) pledged to introduce legislation to end fossil fuel subsidies. The exact amount of subsidies the coal, oil and gas industries receive each year are difficult to calculate, estimates range from $4 billion to $41 billion annually. [quite a range]

“The most profitable corporations in the world do not need subsidies from the American people,” said Sen. Sanders. “We need to end Big Oil subsidies and tax breaks, and I'm going to introduce legislation to do it.”

By Domenico Montanaro, "First Read" @ NBC News, Jan. 25, 2012, 7:00 pm

Americans are growing more optimistic about the state of the economy and direction of the country, according to a new NBC News-Wall Street Journal poll out Wednesday evening, and President Obama is receiving better grades on his handling of the economy and job as a result [....]

The number of people who said the country is headed in the right direction, 30 percent, remains far lower than the 61 percent of U.S. adults who think it is off on the wrong track.  But the figures represent a change in trajectory; the number of Americans who said the country is on the right track is up eight points from last month, and 13 points from October.

And for the first time in six months, more people approve of the job the president is doing (48 percent) than disapprove (46 percent).

“The psychology about the economic conditions has switched,” Hart said. “The old saying is a rising tide lifts all boats then clearly, this economic optimism has clearly lifted Obama's ratings."

But Congress sees no boost from any emerging sense of optimism [....]

Julian Assange, the founder of the controversial WikiLeaks website, announced on Sunday that he was moving even further into the spotlight as host of a TV talk show. "The World Tomorrow" will feature conversations with "key political players, thinkers and revolutionaries from around the world," he said.

With Assange aspiring to be a mix of Oprah Winfrey and Harvey Levin (with lots more state secrets), the only question seemed to be, what channel would air such a talk show?

The answer: Russian TV. The English-language channel RT, founded by the Kremlin in 2005, will be carrying the new show starting in March.

[Everyone in today's studio audience gets a leaked document!]

[Jennifer Rubin] Newt Gingrich is as clueless as he is presumptuous. Yesterday, he trekked around Florida comparing himself to Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and Mitt Romney to the party-switching milquetoast Charlie Crist. Rubio was having none of it and in a rare moment decide to intervene in the GOP presidential race. He put out a statement: “Mitt Romney is no Charlie Crist. Romney is a conservative. And he was one of the first national Republican leaders to endorse me. He came to Florida, campaigned hard for me, and made a real difference in my race.” Boom.

Ughh

Less than two weeks ago,  Mitt Romney had a 22-point lead in Florida, but that’s ancient history in the race for the Republican presidential nomination. Following his big win in South Carolina on Saturday, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich now is on top in Florida by nine.

The findings of Rasmussen, who tends to skew conservative/Republican on general-election polls, should help quiet the criticisms of the InsiderAdvantage poll we just published. That survey found Gingrich with an 8-point lead. This shows Gingrich up by 9.

Looks like all those early Romney ads did a lot of good.