The Financial Stability Oversight Council met today; they discussed foreclosure fraud and securitization. For less than 15 minutes.

The optics of it — this apparent lack of concern about the way the banks will postpone admitting to their own insolvency by degrading the private property system in this country at the expense of real people — suck. They sure provide zero confidence that the FSOC intends to do its job to prevent this from becoming a systemic crisis.

Ethanol subsidies are up for renewal at the end of the year. And some prominent conservatives have pitched letting them expire, to the chagrin of farm-state Senators and establishment Republicans.

“The dumbest part: they did two pat-down demonstrations – male on male, and female on female,” the House staffer said. And they used a young female TSA volunteer “and in front of a room of 200 people, they touched her breasts and her buttocks. People were averting their eyes. The TSA was trying to demonstrate ‘this is not so bad,’ but it made people so uncomfortable to watch, that people were averting their eyes.”

“They shot themselves in the foot,” the staffer continued.

Ben Nelson, the conservative Democratic Senator who in recent months has had a voting profile not unlike a conservative Republican, announced his opposition to the DREAM Act, leaving Democratic leaders in search of additional Republican votes to make up the difference.

Don’t you miss those oh-so-inspiring, bipartisany days of last January, when Republicans and Democrats came together to solve the health care crisis? Centrist Democratic senators have circumvented party leadership to approach Maine GOP Sens. Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins about reviving healthcare talks. [...] Lieberman predicted Tuesday that White House officials would soon contact Snowe, [...]

So let me get this straight. John Pistole doesn’t want to detail what the patdown procedures are for fear the terrorists will exploit them, as said when he testified before the Science and Transportation Committee (video right). Then he didn’t tell the public that they were implementing the procedures because he didn’t want the terrorists to know.

And now in order to discourage “opt-out” day, they give advanced notice that a handful of people can easily bring every major airport in the country to a grinding halt with very little effort.

Genius.

Frankly, I think expecting 170,000 people a week to have their genitalia groped each week by government workers to be unreasonable. But the numbers may be far, far higher.

Almost a month ago, The Guardian was warning that the Afghanistan “peace talks”, which General David Petraeus was claiming to aid by transporting key Taliban figures, had “less than meets the eye“. However, on Tuesday, the New York Times revealed that the “key” figure who had been meeting with NATO and Afghan officials was not Mullah Akhtar Muhammad Mansour, who is believed to be second in command in the Taliban behind Mullah Omar. In fact, the Washington Post went so far as to point out that the impostor was “a lowly shopkeeper from the Pakistani city of Quetta.” This development is a remarkable setback for Petraeus and NATO, especially because there have been so many claims about the famed “biometric database” that has been developed for rapid identification of insurgents. The equipment used in this endeavor has been given the rather unfortunate acronym “HIDE”, for Handheld Interagency Detection Equipment. Because of HIDE, it will be very difficult for Petraeus to hide from the failure of his intelligence operatives to determine that “Mansour” was an impostor.

Overnight, North Korea fired artillery shells at Yeonpyeong, an inhabited South Korean island, prompting a response from South Korea and the scrambling of fighter jets. At least four soldiers were wounded in the attack, and according to the BBC two marines died.

The key person from Treasury working with the Attorneys General investigation into foreclosure fraud is leaving almost immediately, although he doesn’t appear to have his next teaching gig lined up. Rather interesting timing, yes?