Ah, just in case you forgot that there was still an asswipe in the Oval Office, George has been busy readying the stage for his final exit, which will commence with the dropping of Russian bombs on Poland:

Bush and Polish PM hail progress on missile shield deal | Politics | Reuters

President George W. Bush said on Monday he had agreed the United States would help modernize the Polish military as part of a U.S. plan to base components of a global missile defense shield in Poland.

Just to bring you up to speed if you’ve not been paying attention, George Bush decided that the best place to have a Star Wars missile defense system was in Poland, Russia’s old turf.  The Bush Administration has insisted that the defense shield is meant to protect us from rogue states such as North Korea.  I’m no military expert - much less ballistics, physics or even higher geometry - but could someone please explain to me how a shield in Poland protects the United States from missiles launched from North Korea?

As you might have expected, Russia is a bit put-out by the idea of their chief nuclear rival putting up a missile defense system in their back yard.   It is unmistakably provocative.  And while it’s true that Vladimir Putin probably needs to do a bit of sabre rattling to maintain his tough-guy image at home, I think we should all probably be standing up and taking notice when they threaten to bomb any missile shield parked in their neighborhood.

But even more importantly, don’t miss the code wording in the above article: “Modernizing” Poland’s military is neat language for arming Poland with newer and more powerful weapons.  Get that: arming Russia’s recently-liberated satellite nation - the one they’ve fought over with Germany since time out of mind - with new and more powerful weapons.

What new and more powerful weapons?  Well, golly, that’s a great question that the media aught perhaps to ask him, eh?

Bloomberg reports on the continuing spiral of the ARM (Adjustable Rate Mortgages) market, as the much-maligned Subprime market reaches it’s apex of disaster and the problem begins to roll further up the line to prime borrowers who’ve also gotten ARM mortgages:

U.S. Mortgage Foreclosures Rise as Owners `Give Up’ || Bloomberg.com: Worldwide

Twenty percent of adjustable-rate subprime loans had late payments in the fourth quarter, a number that excludes the one of every eight mortgages already in foreclosure, the bankers group said in their report.The share of late payments for adjustable prime loans was 5.51 percent, from 3.39 percent a year earlier, and the foreclosure inventory rose to 2.59 percent, almost tripling from a year earlier.

What this all means is that there are more and more people getting behind on their mortgages in the prime market, indicating that in addition to all the current foreclosures, more may be on the way.  It is curious, then, that Bloomberg insists on throwing this factually questionable line out there:

Bloomberg.com: Worldwide

Forty-two percent of new foreclosures in the fourth quarter were people with adjustable-rate subprime mortgages, given to borrowers with limited or tainted credit records, according to the report. Those types of loans accounted for about 7 percent of all mortgages, the report said.

It would be more correct to say that ARM mortgages are available to everyone, but that riskier ventures (such as people with poor credit buying homes or people buying homes above their normal credit limit) have often recently been pushed into the ARM market.  The above statement does not make it at all clear whether they mean 42% of foreclosures were specifically subprime borrowers, or whether 4% of all mortgages are ARM mortgages.  Those are not two of a kind.  They can’t both be true, because clearly, we can see that it is not only subprime borrowers that have taken advantage of the ARM market.

As is typical of the type of reporting we’ve seen from the new sources of “the investor class,” there is an air about this article which says that the problem is greedy borrowers.  I know I bang on this drum a lot, but it bears mentioning that most of these mortgages went to lower and middle class, working class folks.  They went to people making, at most, $100,000 combined income, which really isn’t a lot, and they went to homes under $150,000, which is about $50,000 off the national average home price.  These people weren’t buying Monticello.

For folks in this income range, small increases in personal wealth have immediate impact on the welfare of their families.  In an era where our Republican president has been pushing the “Ownership Society” canard about as far as it will go; in a country where interest rates have been remarkably low for years; in an economy where the housing market is the only one growing, I think its fair to say that these people can be forgiven a bit for having tried to live up to the opportunity they were told they had.  I think they are owed a bit of respect.

But instead, George Bush, the Republicans, the “Investor Class,” the banks and the media all wipe their hands of the situation and say, “well, you lived outside your means.”  Huh!  I thought that in the vaunted Ownership Society, you were supposed to invest to increase your means?

Seven freakin’ years of this is quite enough.  Yesterday, the EU spanked Microsoft for it’s anti-competitive practicing of over-charging developers for rights to ASP.NET projects.  And they spanked them hard: 1.3 billion dollars in penalties.  Ouch.

But when the same company that makes it nearly impossible for other companies to compete in the same market - the same company which threatens to sue any company with even appearance of violating one of their dubiously-held patents - violates the patent of another company and gets pinched for it in the U.S., what do you suppose happens?

Why, the penalty established in a lower court gets bounced back once it gets to a high enough court, close enough to the Justice Department.  But of course.  Practically from the inauguration of this ill-gotten president, this White House has done everything it can to keep Micro$oft out of whatever trouble it might have gotten itself into.

These are not the kind of numbers you like to see.  Fortunately, George Bush doesn’t govern by polls, so he won’t see them.

Truer words were never spoken, though in this case, out of the wrong side of the horse.

George Bush fails to nominate members to the Congressionally-empowered Privacy and Civil Liberties Commission, just at the same time as Congress is working to approve even more powers of eavesdropping for the president.

OK, so I know impeachment would take longer than they have left in office, but what say we just stop making the situation worse?  Or is that too much to ask?

And George Bush is on board with it. Holy shit, people, George Bush thinks its a good time to start doing stuff about our economy. . . . you know we’re in trouble. Hoard gold, people.

I’ve been saying for a long time that Middle East peace is the feel-good whore of every American president at the end of his term. Clinton got close to peace, but imagine what he might have done had he only tried a few years earlier? Now, at the end of what every candidate for president concedes was a failed presidency, into Israel swoops the two-wars president George Bush to try his hand at peace. Malcolm Ray at the Veracifier Blog sums up the shame and the pathos of this moment quite well:

Bush in Israel: Yea, I almost forgot about him too | Veracifier

Having mocked the efforts of President Clinton in trying to negotiate a settlement during his second term in office, Bush’s attempt to do so in his last year seems laughable. Stepping out on to the tarmac off of Air Force One, President Bush started off his comments by stating his disbelief that when he first came to Israel over a decade ago as a Texas governor, he never imagined he’d return “as President of the United States.”Seven years in and George W. Bush still cant believe he’s President.

There are some who believe that Iran’s Noo-Q-Lar program is a problem:

I like Keith Olbermann, but I confess I find his “Special Comments” to be insufferably self-righteous and overly floral most of the time. And this comes from a guy who admittedly is guilty of all of the above. This Special Comment is really no different in that regard. But what makes it good is that it walks us through Bush’s obvious change of language on Iran that proves he or someone in the speech writing pool knew he was full of shit. Dan Froomkin actually did this reporting, but its cool to see it laid out like this.