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The Department of Justice is preparing a lawsuit against Wells Fargo, the nation’s largest home mortgage lender, for allegedly preying upon African American borrowers during the housing bubble and steering them into high-cost subprime loans, according to three people with direct knowledge of the probe.

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With lawmakers still at an impasse over increasing the debt ceiling, a special team of 40 eighth-grade civics teachers was air-dropped into Washington earlier today in a last-ditch effort to teach congressional leaders how the government’s legislative process works. “We started them off with the basics, like the difference between a senator and a representative, and then moved on to more complex concepts, like what a resolution is,” Bozeman, MT social studies teacher Heidi Rossmiller told reporters as all 535 members of Congress copied down the definition of “checks and balances” from a whiteboard in the House chamber. “It’s been a bit of an uphill battle, since most of them seemed to have no real sense of how or why a bill is passed, and Sen. [Harry] Reid [D-NV] had to come up to me during a break and ask, ‘Ms. Rossmiller, what happens if Congress can’t reach a compromise?’ But hopefully it will all start to sink in soon.” At press time, an unruly House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) had noisily stormed out of a lecture on bipartisan cooperation, claiming it was “too hard.”

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With the nation’s attention diverted by the drama over the debt ceiling, Republicans in the House of Representatives are loading up an appropriations bill with 39 ways — and counting — to significantly curtail environmental regulation.

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The unusual breadth of the attack, explained Representative Mike Simpson, a Republican from Idaho, is a measure of his party’s intense frustration over cumbersome environmental rules.

“Many of us think that the overregulation from E.P.A. is at the heart of our stalled economy,” Mr. Simpson said, referring to the Environmental Protection Agency. “I hear it from Democratic members as well.”

Really? So the US economy is in the shitter because you can’t mine the Grand Canyon for uranium? If only we had known that earlier…

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The regulator for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac sued UBS AG to recover more than $900 million of losses after the Swiss bank misled the housing agencies into buying $4.5 billion of risky mortgage debt.

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Filed in the U.S. District Court in Manhattan, the complaint also said UBS failed to do adequate due diligence, and hid or misstated the quality of the underlying loans and underwriting, as well as borrowers’ ability to make payments.

Many of the loans were issued by lenders that later failed or went bankrupt, including American Home Mortgage Investment Corp, IndyMac Bancorp Inc and New Century Financial Corp.

According to the complaint, a review of 966 randomly chosen loans from two “triple-A” rated securitizations in 2006 and 2007 found that 78 percent were not underwritten properly.

By May 2011, the complaint said, these securitizations were rated “CCC” by Standard & Poor’s and “Ca” by Moody’s Investors Service, among the lowest junk grades.

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Tony Hayward has been recently hired by a company called Glencore. Don’t feel bad if you haven’t heard of it. It has been trying for years to be invisible to the naked eye. It was briefly in the news back in the Clinton years when its founder, Marc Rich, violated federal law by trading oil with Iran and went on the FBI’s most wanted list. Things cooled off fairly quickly because President Clinton pardoned Rich as Bill was on the way out of the White House door. Rich was, well, rich. He gave money to the Clinton campaign. I’m not saying. I’m just saying.

So Glencore ends up being one of the biggest, if not the biggest, commodities traders in the world. It handles everything from metals to fuel and has operations all over the globe. It doesn’t have a very nice record in some parts of the world where it has been accused of mistreatment of workers, pollution and very much worse. Now Glencore is putting its money in northern Minnesota. It is has just become the principal investor in a mining operation planned for Hoyt Lakes.

Hardrock sulfide mining

Iron mining and northern Minnesota have gone hand in glove for a century. But the proposed PolyMet mine in Hoyt Lakes is a different animal. It is called hardrock sulfide mining. It will be going after copper and nickel and precious metals. It promises jobs in a job-starved part of our state. But there are two things you should know about hardrock sulfide mining. The first thing is that the Environmental Protection Agency says hardrock mining generates more toxic waste than any other sector of the U.S. economy. The second thing you should know is that the history of this sort of mining shows that when the metals run out, the companies decamp. The real pollution starts after they leave with the winnings, go broke, or sell out.

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This next sentence is not a joke. Tony Hayward has been hired by Glencore as the executive expert in charge of environment and safety.

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Voters are more convinced than ever that most congressmen are crooks.

A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 46% of Likely U.S. Voters now view most members of Congress as corrupt. That’s up seven points from June and the highest finding yet recorded. Just 29% think most members are not corrupt, and another 25% are not sure. (To see survey question wording, click here.)

Similarly, a whopping 85% of voters think most members of Congress are more interested in helping their own careers than in helping other people. That’s a record high for surveys stretching back to early November 2006. Only seven percent (7%) believe most of the legislators are more interested in helping others.

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The Florida-based file-hosting service Hotfile intends to file a lawsuit against Warner Bros. for abusing its anti-piracy tool. Hotfile claims that Warner Bros. deleted files from the file-hosting service to which it didn’t hold the copyrights. In addition, the movie studio allegedly deleted files from Hotfile without verifying the contents.

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So an Ohio trial court judge held last Friday in State v. Stephens. There had been an earlier case on the subject in Ohio, State v. Gilchrist (Ohio Ct. App. 2003), and the Gilchrist trial judge found that applying the law to the defendant did violate the First Amendment, a decision that the state apparently didn’t properly challenge on appeal. But the judge in the most recent case concluded that Gilchrist was limited to situations where the defendant was quite far from the dog. In a case where the defendant was much closer to the dog, the law (here, a city ordinance banning “willfully and maliciously taunt[ing], torment[ing], [or] teas[ing] … any dog used by the Police Department in the performance of the functions or duties of such Department”) could constitutionally be applied to him.

Ouch. That’s ruff. It’s clear the terriers have won.

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I’ve always marveled at how analysts justify the price of a (tech) stock. First, you look at its current price and come up with reasons why it’s around the price that it is but a little over or undervalued. Second, you come up with a model that can sorta generate the company’s earnings per share. Finally, you take whatever your spreadsheet tells you the company can earn and assign a multiplier to it of anywhere from 10 to 60 or even more. That’s the price-to-earnings ratio that you think the stock deserves, based on any number of factors like its management or potential for growth that’s not priced in or whatever else. That gives you a target price for the stock, which then shapes investor sentiment, which helps drive the price.

And thus people can justify Amazon’s 93:1 price-to-earnings ratio versus Google’s 23:1 P/E to IBM’s 15:1 to eBay’s 26:1 to Apple’s 16:1 to Netflix’s 73:1 with hard numbers.

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Then, and this is the important part, make every single person in Congress wear a 24-hour webcam. Forever. So every move. Every meeting. Every bedroom encounter is recorded for the pleasure of the voting public. That should eliminate the bribes and shady, backroom deals. And maybe a few less pervs will run for office — unless your district likes that, of course!

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Bunnatine “Bunny” Greenhouse, the former chief oversight official of contracts at the Army Corps of Engineers, has reached a $970,000 settlement six years after she was demoted for publicly criticizing a multi-billion dollar, no-bid contract to Halliburton — the company formerly headed by then-Vice President Dick Cheney. Greenhouse had accused the Pentagon of unfairly awarding the contract to Halliburton subsidiary, Kellogg Brown & Root. Testifying before Congress in June 2005, she called the contract the worst case of government abuse she had ever witnessed in her 20-year career. Just two months after that testimony, Greenhouse was demoted at the Pentagon, ostensibly for "poor performance." She had overseen government contracts for 20 years and had drawn high praise in her rise to become the senior civilian oversight official at the Army Corps of Engineers. With the help of the National Whistleblowers Center, Greenhouse filed a lawsuit challenging her demotion.

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We recently noted that, over in France, under the HADOPI three strikes regime, they had their first 10 people get their third strike, and each was being reviewed to see if they should lose their connection. Well, it looks like the first guy has lost his connection… and it’s a 54-year old school teacher who insists he has no idea how to download unauthorized content. The story is a little unclear, but it sounds like he had open WiFi, and he didn’t understand what the "first strike," was really about. When he got the "second strike" notice, he tried to figure out how to secure his WiFi, but it either took too long or he was unable to figure it out… and so along came the third strike.

What? To early?

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US government funds earmarked ostensibly to promote business in Afghanistan have landed in Taliban hands under a $2.16 billion transportation contract, The Washington Post has reported.

Citing the results of a year-long military-led investigation, the newspaper said US and Afghan efforts to address the problem have been slow, and all eight of the trucking firms involved remain on US payroll.

Moreover, the Pentagon extended the contract for six months last March, the report said.

The investigation found "documented, credible evidence … of involvement in a criminal enterprise or support for the enemy" by four of the eight prime contractors, the paper noted.

According to The Post, investigators followed a $7.4 million payment to one of the eight companies, which in turn paid a subcontractor, which hired other subcontractors to supply trucks.

The trucking subcontractors then made deposits into an Afghan National Police commander?s account, already swollen with payments from other subcontractors, in exchange for guarantees of safe passage for the convoys, the report said.

Intelligence officials then traced $3.3 million, withdrawn in 27 transactions from the commander?s account, that was transferred to insurgents in the form of weapons, explosives and cash, the paper said.

"This goes beyond our comprehension," The Post quoted Representative John Tierney as saying.

In other news, John Tierney has the comprehension capabilities of a two-year-old.

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Beck, a multimillionaire darling of the Tea Party movement, said on his nationally-syndicated radio show: "There was a shooting at a political camp, which sounds a little like, you know, the Hitler youth. I mean, who does a camp for kids that’s all about politics? Disturbing."

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Wearily approaching the murder scene of Jeannie and Quentin Rose and needing to determine if this was the handiwork of the Scented Strangler–who had a twisted affinity for spraying his victims with his signature raspberry cologne–or that of a copycat, burnt-out insomniac detective Sonny Kirkland was sure of one thing: he’d have to stop and smell the Roses.

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Fantastic hour-long exposé on Nathan Myhrvold’s Intellectual Ventures, which comes out looking like the root of all evil in the U.S. software patent protection racket. Lodsys, of course, is one of their shell company fronts.

Kudos to Chris Sacca for having the stones to go on the record, calling Intellectual Ventures out for what it really is:

A mafia style shakedown, where someone comes in the front door of
your building and says, “It would be a shame if this place
burnt down. I know the neighborhood really well and I can make
sure that doesn’t happen.” And saying, “Pay us up.” Now
here’s, here’s what’s funny. If you talk to … when I’ve
seen Nathan speak publicly about this and when I’ve seen
spokespeople from Intellectual Ventures, they constantly remind
us that they themselves don’t bring lawsuits, that they
themselves are not litigators, that they’re a defensive player.
But the truth is that the threat of their patent arsenal can’t
actually be realized, that it can’t be taken seriously unless
they have that offensive posture, unless they’re willing to
assert those patents. And so it’s this very delicate balancing
act that is quite reminiscent of scenes you see in movies when
the mafia comes to visit your butcher shop and they say to you,
“Hey, it would be a real shame if somebody else came and sued
you. Tell you what, pay us an exorbitant membership fee into our
collective and we’ll keep you protected that way.” A
protection scheme isn’t that credible unless some butcher shops
burn down now and then.

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In the United States, critics have asserted that the intense spotlight on the threat from Islamic militants has unfairly vilified Muslim Americans while dangerously playing down the threat of attacks from other domestic radicals. The author of a 2009 Department of Homeland Security report on right-wing extremism withdrawn by the department after criticism from conservatives repeated on Sunday his claim that the department had tilted too heavily toward the threat from Islamic militants.

The revelations about Mr. Breivik’s American influences exploded on the blogs over the weekend, putting Mr. Spencer and other self-described “counterjihad” activists on the defensive, as their critics suggested that their portrayal of Islam as a threat to the West indirectly fostered the crimes in Norway.

Mr. Spencer wrote on his Web site, jihadwatch.org, that “the blame game” had begun, “as if killing a lot of children aids the defense against the global jihad and Islamic supremacism, or has anything remotely to do with anything we have ever advocated.” He did not mention Mr. Breivik’s voluminous quotations from his writings.

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Mr. Breivik frequently cited another blog, Atlas Shrugs, and recommended the Gates of Vienna among Web sites. Pamela Geller, an outspoken critic of Islam who runs Atlas Shrugs, wrote on her blog Sunday that any assertion that she or other antijihad writers bore any responsibility for Mr. Breivik’s actions was “ridiculous.”

“If anyone incited him to violence, it was Islamic supremacists,” she wrote.

In other news, the Ku Klux Klan were incited to violence by black people.