There is an ongoing Justice Department investigation into these wrongful military foreclosures, and JPMorgan is implicated in that probe, along with Saxon Mortgage, a division of Morgan Stanley. There are criminal penalties attached to violations of the Servicemembers Civil Relief Act, and legislation from Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) would double those fines.

All of this underlines the extreme measures JPMorgan is taking to rectify the situation with wrongful foreclosures of active duty military. And it also underlines the fact that next to nothing is being done with all the wrongful foreclosures on everyone BUT active duty military.

A Congressional hearing last week detailed how JPMorgan Chase illegally foreclosed on service members while they served on active duty overseas, in violation of the Servicemembers Civil Relief Act. They also charged mortgage interest rates above the cap for active-duty military personnel.

The big bank went out of their way to fix the problem yesterday, knowing that abusing service members could get you in big trouble in this country, and lead to further scrutiny of their abusive practices.

It certainly looks like the South Dakota Highway Patrol is interfering with the state’s medical marijuana ballot initiative, which is in a tight race ahead of November 2.

The campaign for Measure 13, South Dakota’s medical marijuana initiative, called out the state Highway Patrol for a big media push last week around two separate marijuana busts from August that the Patrol tied to out-of-state medical marijuana patients.

Are you a stop-loss veteran? Do you know someone who is? If so, go to http://www.defense.gov/home/features/2010/0710_stoploss/ RIGHT NOW so you or your friends or relatives who are stop-loss vets can apply to get the money that’s due you. But don’t wait — submit your claim by October 21 or you’ll miss out!

The Washington Post thinks the Democrats would be better off running for re-election with a higher unemployment rate.

Dana Milbank comes up with some compelling logic to indemnify Alan Simpson for his comments about Social Security: he’s been biased against the program for 20 years, so what’s the problem?

It’s a fact of American life that veterans are seen as inviolate, and criticisms of veterans approaching treason. It’s one thing for Alan Simpson to call Social Security recipients greedy bastards, even though a chunk of them, a substantial chunk (almost half), includes military veterans. It’s quite another thing for him to go after veterans directly, as he did in denouncing disabled vets for luckily sucking up health care resources after exposure to Agent Orange.

The Obama White House signaled Alan Simpson today that he can say whatever damn-fool thing he wants, and since he’s the GOP co-chair of Obama’s Catfood Commission, it’s to be expected that Simpson will say some things Obama will disagree with.

It’s not only old women who are living too long and expecting too much from the federal government in their Social Security check every month. According to Obama’s Catfood Commission Chair Alan Simpson, veterans who expect their country to stand by them after poisoning them in-country during The American Troubles in Indochine are “not helping us to save the country in this fiscal mess.”

Based on 11/19/09 New York Times article on fraud in a program for Disabled Veterans. . . I. Am. Pissed.