Jan 28
This is what Kansas Day is all about! Via Facebook.
Happy Kansas Day Eve! Sleep tight and just maybe if you have been a good Kansan, Amelia Earhart will bring you Russell-Stover chocolates. And if you have been a bad Missourian, John Brown will shoot you and your family while you slumber.Tommy Bobo
Raconteur
Kansas Day is January 29th. This will be the 149th anniversary of Kansas’ statehood.
My pride as a Kansan, though generally strong, is a hot and cold affair. For the first day of autumn, things are running hot!
In Landmark National Bank v. Kesler (full ruling), 2009 Kan. LEXIS 834, the Kansas Supreme Court held that a nominee company called MERS has no right or standing to bring an action for foreclosure. MERS is an acronym for Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems, a private company that registers mortgages electronically and tracks changes in ownership. The significance of the holding is that if MERS has no standing to foreclose, then nobody has standing to foreclose – on 60 million mortgages.Ellen Brown
Author, Attorney
As attorney and homeowner advocate Neil Garfield said, the implications cannot be overstated here. What I love about this ruling is that it takes a seemingly indecipherable morass like the mortgage market of the last twentyish years and boils it down to the simplest of contract law principles. Garfield explains, “the splitting of the note and mortgage creates an immediate and fatal flaw in title.”
“The splitting of the note and mortgage creates an immediate & fatal flaw in title.”
Bam. Done. Case Closed. Thank you, Kansas Justice! Or as Matt Taibbi puts it, “It seems that a court has ruled that about half of the mortgage market has been run as a criminal enterprise for years, which would invalidate any potential foreclosure proceedings for about, oh, 60 million mortgages.”
Now, for those of you that want a bit more of the mucky-muck, I’ve got more detail from Ellen Brown after the jump and it is still quite digestible. Also, what does this mean for actual human beings, you ask?
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Just in case you don’t follow along in the comments here at FF, make sure you take a look here to see what Johnson County Election Commissioner Brian D. Newby had to say about JOCO elections violating Federal standards. You can also see my response to Brian here. It looks like the election this past Tuesday went off without a hitch, at least insofar as anyone can tell. Thanks again to Brian for communicating with his concerned citizenry. Now if he will just fix the electoral system under his purview, he’ll be aces in my book!
This is an update to yesterday’s post on Diebold’s handy one-touch deletion of e-voting machine logs. As I posted in the comments of yesterday’s piece, I spoke with Johnson County Election Commissioner Brian D. Newby. He assured me that he was aware of the issues with Diebold systems and that Johnson County uses an updated version of the GEMS software, version 1.18.24.
Unfortunately, it turns out that the problems mentioned are not confined to the older versions of the vote tabulation software. In reality, every Diebold/Premier Election Systems machine that is being used to vote in the United States (optical “scantron” and touch-screen), not just here in Johnson County, KS, does not log critical information such as when files are intentionally deleted from the system or unintentionally erased. In plain English, the Diebold/Premier system doesn’t keep track of the paper trail of your vote and has a one-touch delete button for anyone to destroy any record of them not keeping that paper trail.
This all came to light in a hearing earlier this week in California. You can view the video of that hearing after the jump including this choice snippet, the only question about the logs, 45 minutes into the video (yes, you can jump ahead):
“The failure to log certain system events,” [California Deputy Secretary of State Chris] Reynolds said, “I think you mentioned that in subsequent versions of this, these things have been corrected?”
“Uh no, not . . . not yet,” said Justin Bales, western regional manager for Premier/Diebold.Wired.com
Basically, if you vote in Johnson County, KS (or any of the more than 30 other states that use Diebold/Premier systems), you should have ZERO confidence that your vote is being counted. There is no transparency in your elections and you should demand that your election officials implement a plan to fix your electoral system before anyone “votes” again.
For those of you in JOCO, I can tell you that Commissioner Newby is very personable and called me back within a couple hours to answer my questions about the system. He is an award-winning election official, so let’s hope he holds up to that past standard and responds to the concerns of his citizenry. After all, transparent, fair elections are the cornerstone of a (d)emocratic society. That’s what we want to pretend to be, right?
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Jan 29
Kansas’ own Creekstone Farms Premium Beef found a serious problem in our “free market” here in the good ‘ol USA. Creekstone wanted to test 100% of their animals for Mad Cow disease (bovine spongiform encephalopathy). This horrifying disease causes the equally-horrifying Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans. Sounds like a good idea, right? This is a company that WANTS to test its product for dangerous pathogens. Well, evidently, this quest for cleanliness makes those pesky Kansans downright un-american. From BoingBoing:
…the Bush administration took Creekstone to court, and a US federal appeals court ruled that the USDA has the authority to stop meatpackers from testing more than 1% of its cattle. Mark Frauenfelder
From the AP story:
Larger meat packers opposed such testing. If Creekstone Farms Premium Beef began advertising that its cows have all been tested, other companies fear they too will have to conduct the expensive tests.Matt Apuzzo
Associated Press
If the last eight years haven’t convinced you that we are governed by sociopaths, this is, unequivocally, sociopathic behavior on the part of the Federal Government.
On behalf of my fellow Kansans and the rest of the American people, I would like to say thank you to the good citizens that work for Creekstone Farms. You all made a valiant effort to protect public safety and you deserve praise. Please keep fighting the good fight!
Read the full opinion of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia (PDF)
The Onion has a classic dig on Kansas. Be sure to check it out.
For the record, this fair state of mine is not flat. If you want flat, go to Texas. My favorite line from the piece:
“Acquaintances of Corcoran say they warned him that once he entered the Rectangle, he would never make it back out, but he did not listen, and was drawn there to investigate tales of cheap tuition.”
According to my sources on the east coast (also from Kansas), there have been a lot of questions about the woman from Ness City, Kan. that spent two years on her boyfriend’s toilet. These include that old Kansas favorite, “Do you know her?” Well, I’ll save you the six degrees of separation calculations: I don’t know her and no one I know knows her. But in a strange way, all Kansans owe her a debt of gratitude.
You see, until this story, the last big national buzz we Kansans received (outside the sports arena) was for some infamous educational policies. Now, the “toilet seat woman” has brought the spotlight back, thankfully distracting the befuddled masses with a different reason to wonder about Kansas. But in that same moment, she has also vanquished the foibles of our past indiscretions.
Maybe this is flawed logic, or hopeful science, but doesn’t a woman with a toilet seat growing into her ass personify evolution? Perhaps not in a way reminiscent of the noble majesty of Galapagos tortoises. No, this is more real. This is visceral. We can all imagine what it would be like to have a toilet seat grow out of our collective asses. This is the power of the Mainstream Media. This, finally, will end the great evolution battle that still rages in dark corners of this great state. Thank you, Pam Babcock! Ad astra per aspera, indeed!
Well, while we are waiting for the final word on the SPJ awards, allow me to announce the 2007 Kansas Association of Broadcasters student awards garnered by the students of KUJH-TV and myself. Is this an acceptance speech? Not quite. But I do want to give credit to the unseen contributor, Katie Lohrenz, for her consulting services on the tv.ku.edu Web site.
The site won first place as “Best Station Web site”! Very exciting! The rest of the KU-centric results are:
Undergraduate Radio:
Sports Play by Play
Honorable Mention: Bryan Cisler, Rustin Dodd
Entertainment Program
First Place: “The Sporting Life” – Rustin Dodd, Blake Cripps, Ryan Elder
Second Place: “The Panel Episode (11.9.06)” – Annie Harrigan, Ian Hrabe, Joe Noh
Undergraduate Television:
Complete Newscast
Second Place: KUJH-TV News (9.18.06) – Kristen Luehrs, Steve Zawilinski, Tami Dreitz, Tracy Perlman, Frank Waugh, Mary Johnson
Hard News Package
Second Place: “Jury Selection” – Darica Nisly
Enterprise News Package
Honorable Mention: “Elections” – Colin Swartz
Honorable Mention: “Family Farms” – Audrey Esther
Complete Sports Feature
Second Place: “Little League” – Rahul Sharma
Entertainment Program
First Place: “KU Q&A” – Scott Winer, Rahul Sharma
Station Website
First Place: “tv.ku.edu”
Graduate Television
Hard News Package
Honorable Mention: “Alternative Transportation” – Heather Brummitt
Enterprise News Package
First Place: “Toy Safety” – Heather Brummitt
Complete News Feature
First Place: “Seniors Dance” – Heather Brummitt
Clearly this isn’t the domination we have grown accustomed to, but things could have been worse. It gives us incentive to improve and reminds us that K-state, Pitt State, Fort Hays State and Wichita State are capable of putting out a good product. I would link to their work so you could check it out, but you can’t see any of their work online. Maybe next year!
I am an Assistant Professor of Interactive Media at Johnson County Community College and an independent multimedia communications consultant. Politically, I defy labels. Philosophically, I believe that Ella Wheeler Wilcox was correct when she said, "To sin by silence, when they should protest, makes cowards of men."
We owe no allegiance to any government. They owe abject allegiance to us.
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