The Fed just finished selling all of them, and their return on investment isn’t too shabby. The sales of the $19.5 billion portfolio turned a $2.8 billion profit for taxpayers.

“The completion of the sale of the Maiden Lane II portfolio has resulted in significant gains for the public and marks an important milestone in the wind-down of the extraordinary interventions necessitated by the financial crisis,” William Dudley, president of the New York Fed, said in a statement.

The article goes on to mention this wasn’t the really toxic asset pool, and we’ll likely take a bath on that…but reading the comments on that article…I really think less than 1% of the country could explain what the Fed does or how it works.  The RON PAUL idiocy and confidence brigade is in full effect on any Fed story…and none of them even deign to read the stories themselves…they just read the word ‘Fed’ and start ranting.

Fed turns $2.8 billion profit on AIG bonds – Feb. 28, 2012
http://money.cnn.com/2012/02/28/news/economy/fed_maiden_lane_aig/?npt=NP1

“I think my dad had a job, like, being the grand master or whatever of the 50th celebration of the automobile in Detroit,” Romney said at a Tea Party rally in Milford. “They painted Woodward Avenue with gold paint. My memory’s a little foggy here, so, uh, but – yeah I was probably four or something like that. But they had the cars go down Woodward Avenue.”

His memory was a little foggy, however, because he wasn’t born.

The Golden Jubilee, as the event was called, occurred nine months before Romney’s birth.

…

“Mitt doesn’t say he was there, in fact, he says his memory was foggy,” the aide said. “He was simply telling the story about his dad.

…

In 2007, Romney had to acknowledge that he had not watched his father march with Martin Luther King Jr., as he had asserted in a nationally televised debate. Romney said at the time that his father had told him that he had marched with King and that he was using the word “saw” in a “figurative sense.”

“I did not see it with my own eyes, but I saw him in the sense of being aware of his participation in that great effort,” Romney said then.

One thing that’s nice about being a “Master of the Universe”?  No one questions your bullshit name dropping (to your face).  Things are slightly different outside the world of leveraged buyouts and corporate “creative destruction”, Mitt.   Not everyone out here is going to kiss your ass when you lie, like they did at Bain.
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Mitt Romney remembers Detroit celebration from before he was born – Political Intelligence – A national political and campaign blog from The Boston Globe – Boston.com
http://www.boston.com/Boston/politicalintelligence/2012/02/mitt-romney-remembers-detroit-celebration-from-before-was-born/PZ6Q7wnVOWMoIfB9iv0x1K/index.html

If less of the ocean is ice-covered in autumn, it releases more heat, warming the atmosphere.

This reduces the air temperature difference between the Arctic and latitudes further south, over the Atlantic Ocean.

In turn, this reduces the strength of the northern jet stream, which usually brings milder, wetter weather to Europe from the west.

It is these “blocking” conditions that keep the UK and the other affected regions supplied with cold air.

The researchers also found that the extra evaporation from the Arctic Ocean makes the air more humid, with some of the additional water content falling out as snow.

“I agree with the study – I have no beef with the case that declining Arctic sea ice can drive easterly winds and produce colder winters over Europe,” commented Adam Scaife, head of monthly to decadal prediction at the UK Met Office.

Research in other institutions, including the Met Office, confirmed the argument, he said.

Sadly, the “it’s snowing therefore science is a lie” argument finds lots of takers and this explanation is longer than a commercial, so despite the fact that it explains *and* predicts the observed data, it will be widely dismissed by idiots.
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BBC News – Melting Arctic link to cold, snowy UK winters
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-17143269

94: Percentage of parents who think their child will go to college, according to a Pew poll.

75: Percentage of Americans calling a college education “very important,” according to a Gallup poll.

21: Percentage of Americans calling a college education “fairly important.”

4: Percentage of Americans calling a college education “not important.”

4.2: Unemployment rate for workers with at least a bachelor’s degree.

7.2: Unemployment rate for workers with some college.

8.4: Unemployment rate for workers with only a high school degree.

13.1: Unemployment rate for workers with no high school degree.

WHAT THEY SAID

— “President Obama has said he wants everybody in America to go to college. What a snob. … There are good, decent men and women who go out and work hard every day, and put their skills to test, who aren’t taught by some liberal college professor (who) tries to indoctrinate them. I understand why he wants you to go to college. He wants to remake you in his image. I want to create jobs so people can remake their children into their image, not his.” — Santorum.

— “When I speak about higher education we’re not just talking about a four-year degree. We’re talking about somebody going to a community college and getting trained for that manufacturing job that now is requiring somebody walking through the door, handling a million-dollar piece of equipment. And they can’t go in there unless they’ve got some basic training beyond what they received in high school.” — Obama

He’s even bad at picking topics to distort Obama’s record.
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The Associated Press: A political tip sheet for the rest of us
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5jWL3204WP-rilhkHqPjjOyXofA4Q?docId=8d919717b45d4d3991a8938781b90754

President Obama wants everybody in America to go to college. What a snob,” Santorum said as the crowd howled with laughter and applause. “There are good, decent men and women who work hard every day and put their skills to the test that aren’t taught by some liberal college professor.”

Santorum said he knows the real reason Obama wants more Americans on college campuses.

“That’s why he wants you to go to college. He wants to remake you in his image,” Santorum said to more applause. “I want to create jobs so people can remake their children into their image, not his.”

I’ll yell you this, Ricky Froth is not afraid blow that dog whistle long and hard.   The sheriff sure is near, ain’t he, old white voters in rural Michigan.
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Santorum: Obama ‘A Snob’ For Wanting Everyone To Go To College | TPM Livewire
http://livewire.talkingpointsmemo.com/entries/rick-santorum-obama-wants-to-send-your-kids

47 minutes. Romney pivots away from contraception to religious freedom, and condemns Obama for “most recently requiring the Catholic Church to provide for its employees and its various enterprises health care insurance that would include birth control, sterilization and the morning-after pill. Unbelievable.” This is a good line, as long as you don’t go back to Dec. 8, 2005, when Romney himself was quoted saying, ““My own view is that every hospital should provide to rape victims information about emergency contraception, or emergency contraception itself.” Unbelievable, you say? Believe it.

49 minutes. Santorum returns to contraception, which he has previously said he would speak out against as President. By definition, contraception prevents pregnancy, but Santorum suggests it does the opposite, by encouraging teen sexuality. “What we’re seeing is a problem in our culture with respect to children being raised by children, children being raised out of wedlock, and the impact on society economically,” he says. So vote Santorum, and prevent pregnancy with less contraception. Or something like that.

Note: standard logic doesn’t apply in nutshells. 
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Swampland
http://swampland.time.com/2012/02/23/what-you-missed-while-not-watching-the-last-gop-debate-before-super-tuesday/

“Rick Santorum is an arch conservative. The most conservative of all candidates in the Republican primaries. He loathes abortion and euthanasia. So now he loathes the Netherlands. Because in the Netherlands we kill the elderly like there’s no tomorrow,” reads the story, according to a translation provided by BuzzFeed’s Low Country correspondent,and author of a Dutch blog on American politics, Bertine Moenaff. The story quotes Santorum, before concluding: “This man is really imaginative. It would be a laughing matter, if he weren’t in the race for the Republican nomination to take on Barack Obama in the race for the presidency of the most powerful country in the world.”

Santorum said in an interview with social conservative leader James Dobson earlier this month that euthanasia makes up “ten percent of all deaths, and half of those people are euthanized involuntarily, because they are old or sick. And so elderly people in the Netherlands don’t go into a hospital. They go to other country.”

Even funnier is when they blast Europe for what is happening in Greece…and neglect to mention that Greece is being bailed out by Germany….who, I guess because of their economic strength, isn’t *really* a part of Europe for rhetorical reasons.
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Dutch Outraged Over Santorum’s Euthanasia Claim – BuzzFeed Mobile
http://www.buzzfeed.com/buzzfeedpolitics/dutch-outraged-over-santorums-euthanasia-clai?s=mobile