Looking for good interesting soup recipes…

No chili please!

If by “bleak” you mean “appropriate”.  This is a long and sorta dense and only marginally interesting read, especially if you’re a finance retard like myself.  But it does seem to have a few notable points.

The Fed now owns the Crossroads Mall, a sprawling shopping complex at the junction of Interstate highways 244 and 35, complete with an oil well pumping crude in the car park—except the Fed does not own the mineral rights.

A federally-owned shopping mall!  What could go wrong?

The remaining billions are tied up in invisible securities spread across hundreds, if not thousands, of properties. It is hard to be precise because the Fed has not published specifics on what it now owns. The only reason that Crossroads Mall has surfaced is that it went into foreclosure in April.

...I mean, apart from that.

MONEY QUOTE:

Noah Diggs, who had just successfully concluded a search for work here as a shop assistant, was surprised and somewhat alarmed to learn the U.S. central bank now owned the property.

“That is a bad thing, right?” he said, surveying the empty parking lot on a rainy morning in early October.

Yup.

Now like I said I’m not a finance guy, but does this strike anyone else as more than a little shady:

Joseph Sholder, the Santa Barbara lawyer acting for GrandStay, was startled to discover that the lender who had tried to take control of the property was the Federal Reserve.

Court papers simply identified GrandStay’s creditor as Maiden Lane Commercial Mortgage Bank Securities Trust-2008.

The Fed created a special vehicle called Maiden Lane to hold the assets on its balance sheet pledged against the Bear loan. Maiden Lane is the name of the lower Manhattan street behind the New York Fed’s building.

The FEDERAL RESERVE BANK is creating false front companies to buy commercial properties?

However, Sholder said that on reflection, he really should not be so surprised by the news of the Fed’s involvement.

“They seem to have their finger in every pie,” he said.

Don’t they just.

In a world exclusive, Oprah Winfrey will interview former Alaska governor Sarah Palin for an episode of The Oprah Winfrey Show to air Monday, November 16, 2009.  Winfrey and Palin will meet for the very first time on the episode, which will mark Palin’s first interview to discuss her upcoming book, Going Rogue: An American Life and her first-ever appearance on the Oprah show. 

Some folks are bigger than others…

I just had a root canal done WITHOUT anesthesia. Not one drop.

Do. Not. Fuck. With. Me. Ever.

(in support of gay marriage legislation)

The government has no place telling people who they can or can not marry.

FOX is baaaaad!

[from email]
All year, FOX has worked 24/7 to block President Obama’s agenda ...

Now, President Obama is fighting back. The White House communications director said FOX is a “wing of the Republican Party...let’s not pretend they’re a news network.”2 To draw attention to its biased coverage, President Obama will not appear on FOX for the rest of this year.3

...Democrats will only find the courage to join Obama if they hear from enough concerned voters. Sign this petition to ask Democratic leaders to stay off FOX. [at MoreOn.org][no linky for U] ...The petition says: “Democrats should support President Obama’s effort to call out FOX. Please stay off FOX for as long as he does.”

“Fighting back”?!?  Has Teh iWon ever been on FOX?  I remember they shied away from FOX doing debates during the campaign [not that much has Changed].

The Obama administration has released new deficit numbers, and they are not pretty.

The deficit for fiscal year 2009, which ended Sept. 30, came in at a record $1.42 trillion, more than triple the record set just last year.

In addition, future deficits are currently projected to total $9.1 trillion in the coming decade.

Jake Tapper: REAL journalist

It’s escaped none of our notice that the White House has decided in the last few weeks to declare one of our sister organizations “not a news organization” and to tell the rest of us not to treat them like a news organization. Can you explain why it’s appropriate for the White House to decide that a news organization is not one …

For years, leading plaintiffs’ lawyers have promised a legal assault on industrial America for contributing to global warming.

So far, the trial bar has had limited success. The hurdles to such suits are pretty obvious: How do you apportion fault and link particular plaintiffs’ injuries to the pollution emitted by a particular group of defendants?

Today, though, plaintiffs’ lawyers may be a gloating a bit, after a favorable ruling Friday from the Fifth Circuit in New Orleans, which is regarded as one of the more conservative circuit courts in the country.  Here’s a link to the ruling.

The suit was brought by landowners in Mississippi, who claim that oil and coal companies emitted greenhouse gasses that contributed to global warming that, in turn, caused a rise in sea levels, adding to Hurricane Katrina’s ferocity…

President Barack Obama has been talking about cleaning up the mess he found after his election for some time.

Now his party is cleaning up some of his own words.

“The mop’’ has gotten the attention of people who say they are tired of Republicans taking the blame for the state of the nation. Time for everyone to pick up a mop, the president says, and clean up the mess the Republicans have made.

The Democrats, however, have cleaned up the president’s own comments—editing the “socialist mop’’ out of remarks that he made at a party fundraiser last week, in a new Website video picking up the presidential mop line and running after the Republicans.

hehhehhehheh he said socialist