License To Steal

I'll write more once I process a bit, but one thing which Obama said which is a fairly common mantra is that we need to boost spending in the short term while credibly committing to cutting it medium and long term. This is a nice fantasy of a world of responsible politicians where the priorities of today remain the priorities of tomorrow. But for the most part today's Congress cannot tie the hand of tomorrow's Congress (or, hell, next week's vote). I remember when there was a credible plan to cut the deficit long term. It worked! It worked so well fiscal hawk Alan Greenspan decided deficit was better than surplus. And we had a massive tax cut. And then another massive tax cut. And then two lovely endless wars. The only people who actually care about deficits are Democrats, and then they reduce them and then the Republicans laugh because they have more room to do tax cuts for rich people and to lavish money on their favorite industries.

Then And Now

Then:

Wells has not halted foreclosures and says it has discovered no problems in the legal documents used to process them. The company said earlier in the week that it would review pending foreclosures for potential defects.

Now:

Wells Fargo said on Wednesday it will re-file documents on 55,000 foreclosures, drawing immediate fire from one of the state attorneys general most critical of banks in the continuing home foreclosure crisis.

Deadbeats

Even if the big banksters are of pure intent, if you cut corners you open the door to fraud from everywhere.

Ricky Rought paid cash to the Deutsche Bank National Trust Company for a four-room cabin in Michigan with the intention of fixing it up for his daughter. Instead, the bank tried to foreclose on the property and the locks were changed, court records show.

Sonya Robison is facing a foreclosure suit in Colorado after the company handling her mortgage encouraged her to skip a payment, she says, to square up for mistakenly changing the locks on her home, too.

Thomas and Charlotte Sexton, of Kentucky, were successfully foreclosed upon by a mortgage trust that, according to court records, does not exist.

Thursday Is New Jobless Day

434K new lucky duckies.

Still high, but a bit better.

Bets

Q Mine is an easy question. Will you rule out raising the retirement age to 70?

I'm glad they edited out the questions about Obama's favorite Yes record.

On the Rise: Pick which YouTube upstart goes on the homepage

More and more of our YouTube partners are hitting subscriber numbers in the 100,000s and even in the 1,000,000s. We want to help more of you to get to those kind of subscriber numbers, which is why we’re starting a new monthly feature called “On the Rise.”

Here’s how it works: every month, we’ll pull together a list of partner channels whose subscriber rate has quickly accelerated in the last 30 days but who still have less than 100,000 subscribers. We’ll winnow that list down to a handful of channels, and then we’ll ask the community to vote on one channel to be featured on the YouTube homepage and get promoted through our social media channels on Twitter and Facebook.

So, here are the four channels vying for the inaugural spotlight, in alphabetical order:

emilynoel83 is Emily Eddington, a 26-year-old morning news anchor whose channel is devoted to all things beauty, particularly fun ideas for TV news makeup.



golf says it all: this channel consists of golf videos, tips and lessons, aggregated from Tour Links Putting Greens, BunkerShot.com, NationalSchoolForms.com and Show Me the Golf.



kalebnation, a 22-year-old vlogger who says he enjoys “wild rumpuses.”



optibotimus is “just a simple guy” that does toy reviews. “I typically stick to what I grew up loving,” he writes on his channel. “Transformers, mostly.”



You’ve got one week, until the end of the day on November 2, to vote for your favorite in the top right corner of this blog. We plan to showcase the winner on our homepage on November 6. You can also nominate yourself or your friends for next month’s feature in the comments section of this blog post (though please note: comments are moderated due to spam).

Mia Quagliarello, Product Marketing Manager, recently watched “The Giants Win The Pennant!”

Midnight Thread