JOURNEY-Wheel In The Sky

The Teabaggers look like they’re coming apart at the seams. Let’s hope they have neither needle nor thread.

A critically important point are the political and financial relationship of these four subpoenaed Fannie Mae retained attorney firms, the state attorney general and Florida’s Republican Party supporters.

I’m told that MERS is doing briefings on Capitol Hill for Congressional staffers. This is usually kind of the first round of a pushback campaign. Though the issues surrounding MERS are well-known and have been litigated in state courts for a while, today they decided to respond to the many assaults on their business model. The CEO of MERS, R.K. Arnold (is that MERSCORP or MERS Inc., which has no employees?), delivered a statement today, meant to “clarify” questions about its operations. Let’s take a look.

I love New Orleans. I fell in love with the city as a little girl, just by reading stories set there. I watched in agony as Hurricane Katrina approached, prayed with friends that the city would be spared and wept when the levees broke and destroyed so many lives. I was given the opportunity to research and fact-check the city online post-Katrina, followed by two amazing, transcendent trips to NOLA in 2006 and 2007 for the Voodoo Music Fest and then Mardi Gras. I cheered when the Super Bowl was held there with U2 playing at halftime and whooped with ecstatic joy embracing a group of Orleans-loving friends when the Saints won last season. New Orleans is at once languorous and vital, seductive, dangerous, joyous, profound, sacred, nasty, naughty, glorious. She is the Holy of Holies, full of magic and mystery, charm and force; fierce and exuberant.

SCOTUS decided today to take John Ashcroft’s appeal of a 9th Circuit decision finding that he did not have immunity from suit in using the material witness statute to illegally hold someone without probable cause.

This is worrisome, not just because it’s another example of how Elena Kagan’s recusal on all these cases give the court an inherent conservative bias (even assuming Kagan will be better on executive power issues than I think she will be), but because by taking the case SCOTUS seems to suggest the 9th Circuit decision deserves more scrutiny.

So, I had a pretty incredible conversation last night with Christopher Peterson, the law professor and Associate Dean for Academic Affairs at the University of Utah, who wrote two illuminating Law Review articles about MERS, the shell entity that created an electronic database for the trading of mortgages. I’m going to do my best to summarize the findings of the interview, but I want to stress two things that I learned – 1) this is very heady stuff, tied up in contract law and all sorts of associated legal issues, 2) absolutely nobody in this country knows with any certainty how this is going to play out.

With Proposition 19, the initiative to legalize and regulate marijuana, on the California ballot, the big political question is: can the initiative be a driver of voter turnout ? This is not only important for the success or failure of the ballot measure, but could potentially affect both the highly contested California governor and Senate races. There is evidence from past elections that marijuana reform can be what gets voters to the polls.

This Hail Mary attack by Kentucky’s Democratic Senate candidate Jack Conway has certainly pulled Rand Paul off of his script, and shows the Conway campaign willing to use anything in the fight. I could also see it carrying a potential backlash, however.

One of tidbits in a recent deposition given by a foreclosure mill employee that seemed to surprise the lawyers had to do with Stern moving a truck load of documents offsite to another office.