Burning Down the House of S. & P.

Published February 8, 2013 | By Iowadawg

Have to put this on top for sure!

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One of the most surprising aspects of the Justice Department’s five-billion-dollar lawsuit against Standard & Poor’s, which the D.O.J. accuses of defrauding investors by issuing ratings on subprime mortgage securities that it knew to be misleading, is that the settlement talks broke down. According to a story in the Times, McGraw-Hill, S. & P.’s parent company, decided to take its chances in court rather than accept a billion dollar fine and admit wrongdoing, which could have made it vulnerable to more lawsuits from investors.

McGraw-Hill did this fully aware that, in handing over some twenty million pages of e-mails to government prosecutors, it presented them with some pretty damaging stuff, including a number of messages in which S. & P. employees criticize the firm’s rating process and seemingly acknowledge that it issued generous ratings to please its customers—the Wall Street banks that issued subprime bonds—and avoid losing market share to rivals Moody’s and Fitch. In one instant message, turned over by the company and included in the government’s complaint, an S. & P. analyst says the firm would have given a good rating to a deal put together by cows.

If the case does go before a judge—the two sides could still settle before trial—S. & P. will have the opportunity to place the offending communications in context, and to counterbalance them with more exculpatory materials. But the firm also faces the risk that some of its employees, and former employees, will say incriminating things on the witness stand, and that the prosecutors could be holding even more embarrassing exhibits in reserve. The ones contained in the one-hundred-and-nineteen-page complaint are bad enough, although they don’t necessarily ensure a government victory in the case.

Continue reading at the New Yorker.

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Damsel, Arise: A Westboro Scion Leaves Her Church

Just after 11 last Sunday morning at Old First Reformed Church in Brooklyn, the Rev. Dr. Daniel Meeter is starting the Sunday service as he always does. He runs through the opening salutation and the collect for the day, and then he welcomes everyone to church as he always does, introducing Old First “as a community of Jesus in Park Slope where we welcome people of every race, ethnicity and orientation to love God and love our neighbors as ourselves.”

The congregation—some eighty strong on this sunny but cold February morning—is the usual mix of Park Slope churchgoing types: a smattering of journalists, a few artists, a handful of old ladies, some rambunctious children. But in the back row of the tin-ceilinged, wood-floored hall, there’s a visitor. It is Megan Phelps-Roper’s first time not only at Old First but also at any church not called Westboro Baptist. Yes, that Westboro Baptist, the Topeka, Kansas, congregation that has become famous (or infamous, depending on your viewpoint) for its strident views on sin (and the abundance of it in modern America), salvation (and the prospective lack of it), and sexuality (we’re bad, in far more colorful terms).

For nearly all of her twenty-seven years, Megan believed it: believed what her grandfather Fred Phelps preached from the pulpit; believed what her dad Brent and her mom Shirley taught during the family’s daily Bible studies; believed (mostly) what it said on those signs that have made Westboro disproportionately influential in American life—“God hates fags”; “God hates your idols”; “God hates America.”

Read it all at Medium.com.

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Read on at Hope n’ Change.

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Gene Silencing Spurs Fountain of Youth in Mouse Brain

Feb. 7, 2013 — Cognitive decline in old age is linked to decreasing production of new neurons. Scientists from the German Cancer Research Center have discovered in mice that significantly more neurons are generated in the brains of older animals if a signaling molecule called Dickkopf-1 is turned off. In tests for spatial orientation and memory, mice in advanced adult age whose Dickkopf gene had been silenced reached an equal mental performance as young animals.

Continue reading this HERE.

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The Obamas Have To Sit and Take It – Benjamin Carson Delivers a Great Conservative Speech

YOU MUST WATCH THIS – PERIOD. OBAMA GETS BEAT ABOUT HIS HEAD AND NECK AT EVERY TURN. THIS, MY FRIENDS, IS THE PATH THAT NEEDS TO BE TAKEN. IT TRUMPETS CONSERVATISM AS AN IDEOLOGY THAT HAS NO LOGICAL OPPOSITION.

White House Dossier has the speech

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Guns, Culture and Crime in the US | Watch Free Documentary Online

VIDEO.

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World’s most beautiful shipwreck: Haunting hull of Sweepstakes lies just TWENTY FEET below clear blue water of Ontario lake where it sank in 1885 |w/video

The world’s ocean floor is littered with around 3 million shipwrecks according to the United Nations. But one of the most captivating is in a pool of water much smaller – the bottom of an Ontario lake.Shimmering in the clear blue water just twenty feet below the surface lies the Sweepstakes, a 19th century boat.

MORE.

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New York City expanding nation’s biggest transit hub 16-stories beneath Grand Central Terminal

Buried 16 stories beneath Grand Central Terminal a new commuter rail is being blasted and tunneled out of solid bedrock as part of an audacious $15billion development that will span 14 miles throughout the city.The grand concourse, seen at a massive eight stories high surrounded by dripping stone walls and lapping puddles, will provide more floor space than New Orleans’ Superdome stadium when finished.It is just one of three monumental projects underway beneath New York City’s streets to expand what’s already the nation’s biggest mass transit system transporting 5 million riders a day.But even with blasting and machinery grinding through the rock day and night, most New Yorkers are blithely unaware of the construction or the eerie underworld that includes a 160-foot cavern, miles of tunnels and watery, gravel-filled pits.

GALLERY.

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the woman sniper of Syria

The Woman Sniper Of Syria: Rebel Fighter Nicknamed ‘Guevara’ Takes Revenge On Assad’s Troops After Her children Were Killed In Airstrike * Former English teacher turned sniper is known as Guevara The 36-year-old is a sniper on the front line in Aleppo, Syria. Her two children, 7 and 10 were killed in an airstrike last year… Guevara has opposed the al-Assad regime since university days