Tentative Deal Hands JPMorgan Chase a Record Penalty

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Photo Credit: Leslye Davis/The New York TimesJPMorgan Chase and the Justice Department have reached a tentative $13 billion settlement over the bank’s questionable mortgage practices leading up to the financial crisis, people briefed on the talks said on Saturday. It would be a record penalty that would cap weeks of heated negotiating and underscore the extent of the bank’s legal woes.

The deal, which the Justice Department took the lead in negotiating and which came together after a Friday night call involving Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. and JPMorgan’s chief executive, Jamie Dimon, would resolve an array of state and federal investigations into the bank’s sale of troubled mortgage investments. That type of investment, securities typically backed by subprime home loans, was at the heart of the financial crisis.

While the deal would put those civil cases to rest, it would not save JPMorgan from a parallel criminal inquiry from federal prosecutors in California, the people briefed on the talks said. Under the terms of the preliminary deal, the people said, the bank would also have to assist prosecutors with an investigation into former employees who helped create the mortgage investments.

The $13 billion deal, which could still fall apart over issues like how much wrongdoing the bank is willing to acknowledge, would represent something of a reckoning for Wall Street, whose outsize risk taking in the mortgage business nearly toppled the economy in 2008. It might also provide a measure of catharsis to the investing public, which suffered billions of dollars in losses from buying bad mortgage securities.

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ObamaCare Site Glitches Run Risk of Turning Off Millenials

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Photo Credit: Fox News The prolonged glitches with the ObamaCare website are frustrating many of the president’s most high-valued customers — the young, tech-savvy generation that helped him win two terms and whose participation is critical to the success of the health care exchanges.

“You see this situation especially with college students,” Michael Cipriano, a student at American University told FoxNews.com on Friday. “They get frustrated, which creates a disincentive to sign up.”

President Obama is depending on young people being the backbone of his signature, 2010 health care law. Typically among the mostly healthy Americans, their premiums were supposed to help finance coverage for the elderly, poor and others with long-term illnesses and more frequent emergency-care visits.

However, the glitches and other problems that have plagued the exchanges since they went online Oct. 1 could put the plan in jeopardy. The administration runs healthcare.gov for the 36 states that chose not to have their own sites. The 14 other states and the District of Columbia run their own site but are still part of ObamaCare.

“Based on what I’ve seen, people were really excited at first, then turned away,” said Cipriano, who tried successfully to navigate the site and is a junior who writes for the conservative-leaning, online college publication The College Fix.

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Dick Cheney Feared Assassination by Shock to Implanted Heart Defibrillator

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Photo Credit: David J Phillip/APThe former United States vice-president Dick Cheney was so fearful of assassination by terrorists sending an electronic shock to his implanted heart defibrillator that he ordered doctors to fit a new device without a wi-fi capability.

The extraordinary admission comes in the 72-year-old’s new book Heart: An American Medical Odyssey, in which he also reveals that two months after his 2001 inauguration he prepared a letter of resignation to President George W Bush that he carried with him almost constantly, which he could hand over if he felt his health deteriorating.

Cheney, a fiercely loyal deputy during both terms of Bush’s administration, has suffered five heart attacks since the age of 37 and had a heart transplant last year. In an interview to support his book on the CBS show 60 Minutes, due to air on Sunday night, he describes his current health as “a miracle”.

But it is Cheney’s fear of assassination that will provide a major talking point from the interview and book, which was written in conjunction with his longtime cardiologist, Dr Jonathan Reiner.

A fictional vice-president in the hit US television drama Homeland was murdered by terrorists sending an electronic signal to his pacemaker, in an episode several years after Cheney had his device fitted, in June 2001. It was an alarming plotline, he said.

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De Blasio Will Continue Bloomberg’s Soda Cup Fight

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Photo Credit: Politicker After his mayoral campaign sent vague signals yesterday about whether he would maintain Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s legal effort to restrict soda cup sizes at restaurants, Bill de Blasio vowed to do precisely that this afternoon.

“I think the mayor is right and I would continue the legal process. We have to, of course, look at the specifics with our own lawyers to handle the mechanics, but there’s no question I want to see this rule go through,” the front-running candidate told reporters at a rally with Chinese-American supporters.

Yesterday, Mr. de Blasio’s spokesman, Dan Levitan, told The New York Times the candidate would “review the status of the city’s litigation” if elected.

Mr. Bloomberg’s proposed ban on sugary drinks larger than 16 ounces was struck down by a lower court earlier this year, following an intense lobbying effort from the soda industry, small business owners and some elected officials. The Bloomberg administration, however, appealed the decision to the state’s highest court, which agreed to hear the appeal yesterday.

Mr. de Blasio concurred with the mayor that the ban would help combat childhood obesity in particular.

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The Case for GOP Optimism

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Photo Credit: National Review The shutdown is over, and the Democrats have won. Now, we will be told incessantly about the damage that was done to the Republican party, about the insurrectionist “fever” that the president masterfully succeeded in “breaking,” and about the free hand that the White House has to implement Obamacare, its central achievement.

All of this is to be expected, but it is not necessarily to be taken seriously. Given the romantic and unrealistic goals that it established at the outset — and the calamitous absence of anything approaching a strategy throughout — the Republican party can certainly have been said to have “lost” the shutdown. And yet this was a loss that was marked not by any serious policy concessions but by the maintenance of the status quo. The president succeeded in ensuring that his side did not lose anything it wanted, yes. But as Dan Meyer, Newt Gingrich’s former chief of staff, observes, he also “didn’t get more revenue. He didn’t get the sequester caps lifted. All those decisions were punted.”

Punted to less promising ground for the Democratic party, too.

Whether or not the national media will elect to focus on the Obamacare rollout mess now that it cannot claim to be distracted by the shutdown will, in truth, be largely irrelevant going forward. Up and down the country, local newspapers are telling brutal stories of breathtaking technical incompetence and of genuine sticker shock. The national papers can continue to append to objective criticisms the usual “Republicans say . . . ” but it is pretty clear to all but the truest of believers that the administration’s promises are in tatters and that its critics are starting to look happily prescient. The media are corrupt; but they’re not corrupt enough to hide the debacle.

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Kentucky-Bribed Statesman: Mitch McConnell Unmasked

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Anthony Weiner recently lamented that “if the internet didn’t exist,” he’d be the mayor of New York.  In other words, if John Q. Public weren’t so privy to the facts, and so readily able to investigate those facts and exchange opinions about them online, politicians could more easily manipulate their political images and determine the outcome of elections.

Likewise, Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell is now feeling the stinging disapproval of an informed public that he may not have felt twenty years ago.  Like the grand reveal at the end a Scooby-Doo episode, McConnell the “fiscally conservative” Senate leader has been unmasked in the last month’s proceedings and identified as what he really is — a career politician who’d sell his constituents and American taxpayers down the river for a buck (or in this case, a couple billion bucks).  And he would have gotten away with it, too, if it weren’t for meddling Matt Drudge and the like.

In late September, Mitch McConnell used his lofty position in the Republican minority to stand against Senate conservatives like Ted Cruz and fellow Kentucky Senator Rand Paul.  He made and underhanded effort to block a House bill which would fund the government and raise the debt ceiling in exchange for defunding ObamaCare.  Knowing that the Senate would not have the 60 votes necessary to amend the House bill to fund ObamaCare, he and fellow collaborators voted in favor of a cloture vote which would allow Harry Reid and Senate Democrats to amend the bill with an easily attainable straight majority vote.  Then, having cleared the Senate Democrats’ path to funding ObamaCare, he cast a show vote against the amended spending bill, which included the funding of ObamaCare, hoping it would absolve him of any blame.

We noticed it.  In fact, it was insulting and infuriating that McConnell took such care to conceal the betrayal of his stated conviction to oppose ObamaCare.  Now, his efforts to fund ObamaCare have culminated in what’s being described as the “Kentucky Kickback” by the Senate Conservatives Fund.  “In exchange for funding ObamaCare and raising the debt limit,” the group says, “Mitch McConnell has secured a $2 billion earmark” to a pet project in his home state of Kentucky.

Of course, in a further insult to our intelligence, McConnell is again trying to shirk any responsibility for billions in new taxpayer liability which will uniquely benefit his state.  The language, his office reminds reporters, was introduced by Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), and the provision will raise the spending limit of Kentucky’s Olmsted Lock and Dam project from $775 million to $2.9 billion. 

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U.S. Debt Jumps a Record $328 Billion — Tops $17 Trillion for First Time

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Photo Credit: Jacquelyn MartinU.S. debt jumped a record $328 billion on Thursday, the first day the federal government was able to borrow money under the deal President Obama and Congress sealed this week.

The debt now equals $17.075 trillion, according to figures the Treasury Department posted online on Friday.

The $328 billion increase shattered the previous high of $238 billion set two years ago.

The giant jump comes because the government was replenishing its stock of “extraordinary measures” — the federal funds it borrowed from over the last five months as it tried to avoid bumping into the debt ceiling.

Under the law, that replenishing happens as soon as there is new debt space.

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Business Groups Preparing to Fight Conservatives Over Immigration

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Photo Credit: Reuters Business groups that want Republicans to compromise more with Democrats and Washington’s permanent political class on comprehensive immigration reform may declare war on Tea Party candidates by putting money behind moderate and centrist candidates in Republican primaries.

According to the Wall Street Journal, groups like the Chamber of Commerce and the Business Roundtable are thinking about “backing challengers to tea-party conservatives in GOP primaries, increasing political engagement with centrist Republicans.” The Chamber of Commerce is reportedly “researching” what races they can influence in GOP primaries “in hopes of replacing tea-party conservatives with more business-friendly pragmatists” who would include support for comprehensive immigration reform.

Even before the government shutdown and the fight over defunding Obamacare, business groups “pressing for an immigration overhaul were venting frustration that the full House has been unwilling to consider any immigration legislation.” Reportedly, “several business executives said they were counting on establishment GOP leaders, including House Speaker John Boehner of Ohio and House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, to move immigration and future fiscal legislation.”

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Rand Paul: Another Shutdown Stickup

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Photo Credit: Jose Luis MaganaDuring the shutdown, 85 percent of government stayed open despite the hoopla reported in the media. Government is now 100 percent open. Debt-ceiling deadlines have been averted, but the real problem remains: a $17 trillion debt and a president who continues to pile on new debt at a rate of $1 million a minute.

The government shutdown occurred because Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid allows the Senate to lurch from deadline to deadline without passing a single appropriations bill. Had he done his job and passed each of the 12 appropriations bills, the government could have stayed open.

Opening government has not resolved the big picture — a debt problem so large that it dwarfs all deadlines and threatens the very fabric of the nation. What remains is an unsustainable debt, precisely the problem that motivated me to run for office.

There was never any reason to shut down government. If both sides were willing to compromise, we could have found amicable solutions to these severe problems. But let the record state clearly, no significant spending restraint was accomplished because President Obama steadfastly refused to negotiate. Let us also remember his promise that he will negotiate as long as the compromises are outside of any budgetary deadlines.

We’ve heard this before, and I, for one, am skeptical.

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Drone Strikes by US May Violate International Law, Says UN

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Photo Credit: Massoud HossainiAFP/GettyA United Nations investigation has so far identified 33 drone strikes around the world that have resulted in civilian casualties and may have violated international humanitarian law.

The report by the UN’s special rapporteur on human rights and counter-terrorism, Ben Emmerson QC, calls on the US to declassify information about operations co-ordinated by the CIA and clarify its positon on the legality of unmanned aerial attacks.

Published ahead of a debate on the use of remotely piloted aircraft, at the UN general assembly in New York next Friday, the 22-page document examines incidents in Afghanistan, Yemen, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Pakistan and Gaza.

It has been published to coincide with a related report released earlier on Thursday by Professor Christof Heyns, the UN’s special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, which warned that the technology was being misused as a form of “global policing”.

Emmerson, who travelled to Islamabad for his investigation, said the Pakistan ministry of foreign affairs has records of as many as 330 drone strikes in the country’s north-western tribal areas since 2004. Up to 2,200 people have been killed – of whom at least 400 were civilians – according to the Pakistan government.

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