In all the coverage of the subprime mortgage mess, there has been a key element missing: the sales pitch.

This is where the rubber meets the road, where the actual swindle goes down, where the trap snaps shut and the sucker is held fast till he can be skinned alive. It is the Glengarry Glen Ross moment.

We must understand these moments when we listen to the head hogs — Countrywide, Merrill Lynch, Citicorp, AIG and the other giant loan sharks — as they whine that the whole disaster is all the fault of deadbeat borrowers who should have known better.

And these moments are all committed to paper somewhere, except I don’t know how to get my hands on it. So I’m asking for help. Does anybody out there know somebody who was or is involved with a subprime mortgage outfit?

These moneylenders don’t just send their high-pressure sales force into battle unprepared. Like any other high-pressure sales outfit, mortgage brokers must use work sheets, talking points, training manuals and even scripts. These are to be followed, sometimes word for word. That’s what it means when the voice on the phone says, “This conversation may be recorded for training purposes?”

Every reasonable objection the prospect may raise has been anticipated, and a suitably deceptive answer prepared. Every evasion and obfuscation and misdirection has been scripted. And I’d like to put this stuff on the internet where it belongs — not to expose or embarrass any individual, but to expose the shabby trickery of the foundation upon which the huge banking firms are built.

The most likely source for such documentation, it seems to me, would be a remorseful or disgruntled former employee of a mortage broker who hasn’t bothered to throw out the old scripts and manuals.

Do you know any such person? I would offer him or her, and you, complete anonymity of course. Written backwards, my phone number is 0075793068. In the same way, I can be reached on line here: moc.liamg@elttilood.emorej

Ken Silverstein finds ways to understand.

That said, there are a few things that make me like Hillary. First, she’s a bloodthirsty monster who’ll stop at nothing in her quest for power. That is refreshing, given that the Democrats’ default presidential-campaign strategy is to whine about how rough the Republicans play and to get trounced. Another thing that warms me to Clinton is that the media (in general) hates her and loves Obama, which makes me sympathetic toward her and suspicious toward him.

Two very good points. I don’t know that either of them would affect the likelihood of my voting for Hillary, but you do have to admire, in a certain way, someone who refuses to give up. Her political acumen and her fierce, dogged refusal to admit defeat would be great assets in a Vice President. Problem is, look who you’d get for Second Gentleman.

Want to know what’s really wrong with America? MBAs, that’s what. Actually maybe Sam Smith (excerpted below, hat tip to Xymphora) is onto something. After all, Bush is our first MBA president, although neither he nor Harvard talks about it much these days.)

At the time of the Enron collapse, I noted, “The last two administrations have been characterized by the invasive influence of an arrogant, autistic, and amoral class of late 20th century MBAs and similar members of the technocratic elite. This class has junked sixty years of social democracy, helped wreck the Russian economy, made every American worker a temp-in-waiting, carpet bombed the English language, trashed every moral concept in their way, and twisted reality so effectively they even convinced many that they were sex objects.

“And they are everywhere. You will find them running schools and universities and managing once great museums. They talk mush, think mush, market mush, report mush, and defend mush. They attempt to make up in certitude what they lack in wisdom; they can’t tell the difference between a phrase and a product; and they create infantile and self-serving distortions of economic principles that they declare to be the only principles in life worth observing. They are, in the end, just so many more televangelists, but with themselves as God. Perhaps worst of all, they are without the capacity for shame. Like other sociopaths, they are remorseless.”

Pollster John Zogby thinks it’s all over but the face-saving:

The Illinois senator showed himself to be resilient in the wake of three weeks or so of crisis and, much more importantly, he got back on the winning track. This is the evidence that some super-delegates have been waiting for.

Many of them — most of them — had clearly made up their minds that they would not support Mrs. Clinton, and so this had become a case of whether or not Mr. Obama could close the deal. That is what appears to have happened last night.

Where do we go from here? My understanding is that probably today, but certainly within 48 hours, about 30 super-delegates will endorse Mr. Obama. That should give him further momentum.

Mathematically, this will widen the gap between him and Mrs. Clinton. He has a bigger share of the popular vote, more pledged delegates, and will now overtake her in terms of super-delegates too.

I honestly believe that she will find a way to get out of the race before the next primaries — so as to not hurt her future and to not be blamed for hurting Mr. Obama and his chances in the general election.

Here are the reasons:

* There really is no mathematical chance for her to win

* Her campaign is virtually out of money - and it will be difficult for her to raise significant amounts of money after last night

* Not enough happened last night to give her any hope, so continuing would only give the appearance of wanting to damage Mr. Obama

Confused by all the blabber last night from Tim and Keith and Chris and Pat? Want to find out what actually happened in Indiana and North Carolina? Go here for your reality pill from Jay Cost, Doctor of Politics. Excerpt:

As you can see, North Carolina performed roughly as we might expect, falling in between Virginia and Tennessee. Nevertheless, it is surprising that the results were closer to the Virginia end (i.e. Obama +29) than the Tennessee end (i.e. Clinton +13). What might explain the difference?

Unlike Indiana, it doesn’t come from Clinton’s core voting group. She did extremely well among white voters in North Carolina. Obviously, she didn’t do as well with them as she did in Tennessee. However, she still trounced Obama among white men and white women, regardless of their religious affiliation.

Clinton’s problem was with the African American vote, which came in at about 33%. Her trouble in North Carolina, as well as the South in general, is that white voters are more likely to be Republican than in decades past. This has given Obama a demographic edge in the region — one that has actually grown in the past few months. Note that African Americans in North Carolina went for Obama more strongly than they did in either Tennessee or Virginia. In fact, we can see a general trend in the African American vote toward Obama — not just in these states, but nationwide. It has not been much commented upon — most likely because African Americans have been supporting Obama more strongly than any other group. Nevertheless, as time has gone on, the African American vote has clustered around Obama much more tightly.

The Bad Attitudes Bad Taste Award of the week is hereby awarded to Allen Greenspan and Andrea Mitchell for their oh so generous donation to the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Auction, now open for bid at AuctionBuzz.com. Robert is rolling over in his grave as we speak.

Thanks to The Mess That Greenspan Made blog for the link.

As usual, the Rude Pundit comes right out and says it about Obama’s chances today in Indiana:

Ah, fond memories of living in a town northeast of Indianapolis, of car rides past homes that that flew the Confederate flag on poles on their front lawns (and this was in a medium-sized city, not a small burg), of towns with black populations so disenfranchised and isolated that they are practically invisible, of migrant workers regularly abused by employers when violence wasn’t being committed against them by townspeople. And that’s not even to get into how flat and gray and ugly most of the state is for most of the year, after harvest and before planting season.

When a large swath of a state is populated by people from the Appalachian region who migrated northward for factory jobs decades ago and then those factory jobs dry the heck up for the most part, what you are left with is a bunch of resentful crackers looking to play “where’s the scapegoat?”

By all means go and read the whole screed, but bear in mind that I had to look hard to find an obscenity-free passage as long as the one above. And even then I had to make a substitution, since the word “heck” has never made it out of the Rude Pundit’s computer. What he really wrote, I am sorry to report, was “*uc*”.

Amazing stuff from Arianna Huffington about John McCain, whose habit of serial lying would have long since sunk any Democratic candidate:

At a dinner party in Los Angeles not long after the 2000 election, I was talking to a man and his wife, both prominent Republicans. The conversation soon turned to the new president. “I didn’t vote for George Bush” the man confessed. “I didn’t either,” his wife added. Their names: John and Cindy McCain (Cindy told me she had cast a write-in vote for her husband).

The fact that this man was so angry at what George Bush had done to him, and at what Bush represented for their party, that he did not even vote for him in 2000 shows just how far he has fallen since then in his hunger for the presidency. By abandoning his core principles and embracing Bush — both literally and metaphorically — he has morphed into an older and crankier version of the man he couldn’t stomach voting for in 2000.

Dana Milbank of the Washington Post files “Dispatches from the Twilight of a Presidency” —

7:58 a.m.: By e-mail, the White House Communications Office sends out its “Morning Update.” It lists two events on Bush’s schedule for the entire day: a “Social Dinner in Honor of Cinco de Mayo” and, an hour later, post-dinner entertainment. To react to the main news of the day — thousands of deaths from the cyclone in Burma — Bush sends his wife out to make a statement. She criticizes the Burmese government for its failure “to issue a timely warning to citizens in the storm’s path” and “to meet its people’s basic needs.” Reporters, too tactful to draw parallels to New Orleans, quiz her instead about daughter Jenna’s wedding, and the names of future grandchildren. “George and Georgia, Georgina, Georgette,” the first lady says…

The White House regarded the briefing with an equal level of ennui. The press secretary, Dana Perino, was away, having given the commencement address on Saturday at her alma mater, Colorado State University at Pueblo. White House aides left vacant three of the five seats designated for their use. Behind the lectern, Perino deputy Scott Stanzel took 20 minutes to exhaust all questions from the diminished field of questioners.

Stanzel began with the news that the United States had provided a whopping $250,000 to relief efforts in Burma -- a figure one reporter termed “a drop in the bucket.”

“The most exciting woman on earth,” Orson Welles once called Eartha Kitt. Unfortunately for us, she made antiwar statements during a visit to the Johnson White House and was essentially blackballed in America for years. Our loss was Europe’s gain.

Here she is, at the age of 81 and looking a good 30 years younger. Astonishing. See for yourself:

As the Pigmy President and his warhogs continue to beat the drums for an attack on Iran, the need for Americans to step outside our media’s echo chamber becomes more and more desperate.

Brazilian journalist Pepe Escobar gives us a chance to do so, in this analysis from TomDispatch, via The Smirking Chimp. Samples:

Ahmadinejad is relentlessly depicted as an angry, totally irrational, Jew-hating, Holocaust-denying Islamo-fascist who wants to “wipe Israel off the map.” That infamous quote, repeated ad nauseam but out of context, comes from an October 2005 speech at an obscure anti-Zionist student conference. What Ahmadinejad really said, in a literal translation from Farsi, was that “the regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the pages of time.” He was actually quoting the leader of the 1979 Islamic Revolution, Ayatollah Khomeini, who said it first in the early 1980s. Khomeini hoped that a regime so unjust toward the Palestinians would be replaced by another more equitable one. He was not, however, threatening to nuke Israel…

Speculation is rampant in Tehran that Ahmadinejad, the leadership of the Quds Force, an elite division of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), plus the hardcore volunteer militia, the Basij (informally known in Iran as “the army of twenty million”) are betting on a U.S. attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities to strengthen the country’s theocratic regime and their faction of it…

Rafsanjani is, and will always remain, a supporter of the Supreme Leader. As the regime’s de facto number two, his quest is not only to “save” the Islamic Revolution, but also to consolidate Iran’s regional power and reconcile the country with the West. His reasoning is clear: He knows that an anti-Islamic tempest is already brewing among the young in Iran’s major cities, who dream of integrating with the nomad elites of liquid global modernity.

If the Bush administration had any real desire to let its aircraft carriers float out of the Gulf and establish an entente cordiale with Tehran, Rafsanjani would be the man to talk to …

Assuming it doesn’t destroy itself at the convention, what will the Democratic party look like in December?

It’s often said that the bitterness generated by fierce campaign attacks fades after the election if common interest sets in. But it’s also clear that antipathies have developed, and ill will has been borne, over long periods by those whose feelings were hurt. Will the Clinton attacks on Obama leave such wounds on the party?

Everyone’s starting from the premise nowadays that Clinton has no realistic path to the nomination. I think that locution is chosen to allow for the possibility that the Clinton machine, having already ineffectively employed the kitchen-sink attack, will proceed to pull out the plumbing behind the sink and throw it, then reach into the pipes and throw whatever it finds there. Whether they’d go to the point of tearing out the walls to have something to throw is uncertain at this point.

Given that the only path to victory for Hillary involves shenanigans at least, more likely outright cheating, and that everyone knows this and is looking for signs of an incipient con, it would seem a task beyond anyone. But that famous Clinton sense of entitlement kicks in; the mental lists of wrongs suffered and disappointments swallowed are rehearsed; and the determination to fight to the end arises. One can admire the discipline and persistence, yet fail to fathom the idea that the individual’s needs override the community’s.

What purpose is served, for example, by the Clinton campaign’s circulation of standard right-wing attacks on Obama to a pro-Clinton email list?

Almost every day over the past six months, I have been the recipient of an email that attacks Obama’s character, political views, electability, and real or manufactured associations. The original source of many of these hit pieces are virulent and sometimes extreme right-wing websites, bloggers, and publications. But they aren’t being emailed out from some fringe right-wing group that somehow managed to get my email address. Instead, it is Sidney Blumenthal who, on a regular basis, methodically dispatches these email mudballs to an influential list of opinion shapers — including journalists, former Clinton administration officials, academics, policy entrepreneurs, and think tankers — in what is an obvious attempt to create an echo chamber that reverberates among talk shows, columnists, and Democratic Party funders and activists.

Mayday is the international distress signal. We should have known what was coming, on that Mayday five years ago when the Pigmy President promised us Mission Accomplished. But instead we mostly slobbered and drooled and wagged our tails like ecstatic puppies — the fierce watchdogs of the media very much included.

Only a few habitual whiners failed to join in the general joy, and a search of the archives shows, to my relief, that I was one of them:

I just watched George W. Bush on the seven o’clock news, landing on an aircraft carrier to kick off his reelection campaign.

Here are a few paragraphs from CNN’s account of this photo op:

“ABOARD USS ABRAHAM LINCOLN — President Bush made a historic landing aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln Thursday, arriving in the co-pilot’s seat of a Navy S-3B Viking after making two fly-bys of the carrier…

“The exterior of the four-seat Navy S-3B Viking was marked with ‘Navy 1’ in the back and ‘George W. Bush Commander-in-Chief’ just below the cockpit window…”

I tried to imagine other wartime presidents landing on an aircraft carrier, wearing a flight suit for the cameras and saluting every sailor in sight. Roosevelt? Don’t be silly. Truman? Eisenhower? JFK or LBJ? Nixon or George Herbert Walker Bush?

Of them all only Johnson, who habitually wore an unearned Silver Star ribbon in his lapel, would have been capable of a trick so cheap, so tasteless, so tacky.

And two days later, on May 3, I was writing this:

During his campaign kickoff speech Thursday aboard the USS Photo Op, President Bush used the curious phrase, “a target of American justice.”

Of course he didn’t write the words himself, but somebody did and many other somebodies reviewed and approved them. What does the oddly awkward phrase say about all these somebodies and about the president who employs them?

The full sentence is, “Any person involved in committing or planning terrorist attacks against the American people becomes an enemy of this country, and a target of American justice.”

A person can be the target of terrorists or extortionists or the police, but justice does not “target” and indeed in theory cannot. Justice is blind. That is, or once was, the whole idea of the thing.

That this is no longer so in Bush’s America may explain why nobody at the White House seems to have found the language of the speech peculiar. Targeting, after all, is integral to this administration’s concept of justice. Do profiling and preventive detention amount to anything more than targetting? Mr. Ashcroft may aim badly or indiscriminately, but he aims. He is not blind.

Mr. Bush’s doctrine of preemptive war is not blind, either. Here again the target is chosen and the punishment carried out in advance of a trial. There is no longer any real need for a trial — no need, that is to say, for what Americans have long thought of as justice.

But what this president thinks of as justice is actually vengeance. They are very different things, as Abraham Lincoln well knew and George W. Bush does not.

And after four more days, this:

Senator Byrd was getting at my objections when he talked about exploiting the trappings of war and assuming the garb of a warrior. In this Mr. Bush did worse than violate some mere law of the state. The president put himself in contempt of what Albert Jay Nock once called “that court from which there is no appeal.” He violated the canons of good taste.

For which, see below:

This from the BBC:

Out of 33 keyboards swabbed, four were regarded as a potential health hazard and one harboured five times more germs than one of the office’s toilet seats.

Microbiologist Dr Peter Wilson said a keyboard was often “a reflection of what is in your nose and in your gut”.

During tests in January this year, a microbiologist deemed one of the office’s keyboards to be so dirty he ordered it to be removed, quarantined and cleaned.

It had 150 times the recommended limit for bacteria — five times as filthy as a lavatory seat tested at the same time, the research found.

One of the many things we believe about ourselves that just ain’t so is that Americans, God love us, are absolutely crazy about children. Dote on them. Pamper them. Protect them from all perils, foreign and domestic. Wouldn’t harm a hair on their adorable little heads.

This is absurdity on the order of believing that we are a peace-loving nation, except for those unfortunately numerous occasions when charity obliges us to inflict democracy on less blessèd countries.

The truth is that, taken by and large, we hate, fear and lust after children unless they happen to be our own— and sometimes even then. We refuse them decent educations, sexualize them endlessly in our media, jail and even execute them, deny them medical care, plunge them into lifelong debt as soon as they have enough money to be worth stealing, and send them off to endless wars whose only apparent purpose is to act as psychic Viagra for aging Bushes, Cheneys, Rumsfelds and similar swine in the loyal opposition.

Do I exaggerate? Let’s look at some numbers. Here’s UNICEF’s report on “Child Well-Being in Rich Countries.” It starts out by saying:

The true measure of a nation’s standing is how well it attends to its children — their health and safety, their material security, their education and socialization, and their sense of being loved, valued, and included in the families and societies into which they are born.

Of the twenty nations studied, the United States is nineteenth. Only the United Kingdom is more neglectful and cruel towards its children than are we.

During the Vietnam war a bootleg tape called “What the Captain Meant to Say” circulated among the press corps. It purported to be the recording of a press interview in which an Air Force pilot repeated puts his foot in it and a Public Affairs Officer repeatedly breaks in to clear up the mess. A sample from memory:

Pilot: We were trying to hit the Dim Sum Bridge, but we must have missed the son of a bitch by a good half mile at least.

P.R.O: What the captain meant to say was that his squadron cratered the approaches to the Dim Sum Bridge.

Along the same lines, here’s what our Pigmy President said five years ago tomorrow on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln:

“Major combat operations in Iraq have ended,” Bush said at the time … The “Mission Accomplished” banner was prominently displayed above him — a move the White House came to regret as the display was mocked and became a source of controversy …

“The banner should have been much more specific and said Mission Accomplished for These Sailors Who are on This Ship on Their Mission,” White House press secretary Dana Perino said Wednesday.

All right, let’s see you resist clicking on these two links, both of which are perfectly legitimate:

Number one: Thirty-five-year-old man holds breath underwater for 17 minutes, four seconds.

Number two: Sixty-nine-year-old man grows new finger, as shown on video.

New math from the Secretary of Defense:

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) — The U.S. Navy has temporarily added a second aircraft carrier in the Gulf as a “reminder” to Iran, but this was not an escalation of American forces in the region, U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates said on Tuesday …

“This deployment has been planned for a long time,” Gates said. “I don’t think we’ll have two carriers there for a protracted period of time. So I don’t see it as an escalation. I think it could be seen, though, as a reminder.”

It’s amazing how people who make a living, and an excellent one, doing something complicated and involved can at times seem utterly clueless about it. Take, for instance, several members of the Phoenix Suns at this for them unfortunate stage of their season.

The Suns, you’ll no doubt recall, are the run-and-gun team featuring Steve Nash, the sometimes floppy-haired anti-war Canadian point guard whose sensational passes as he pinballs around the court, plus his deadly three-point aim, have brought him fame, awards, and fans from many nations, but so far no championship. He seems a likable sort, if not particularly deep. The Wikipedia entry on him, for example, records his reluctance to do a lot of endorsements, and his wish to work with socially responsible companies, both quite admirable, as well as his longstanding relationship with Nike.

Last year, the playoff series between Nash’s Suns and their rivals the San Antonio Spurs, who’d already knocked them out of the playoffs twice in prior years, was a knock-down drag-out affair, not settling for mere arguments and posturing, but extending to hard fouls and rule violations resulting in suspensions.

In the end the Suns lost, and one Sun was so begrudging of his opponents’ victory that he’s sometimes satirized by the substition of “whiner” for “mire” at the end of his name. This year the networks seemed to play up that image in the broadcasts I saw, using as his stock photo a shot of him with arms out, palms up, and a look of disbelief on his face. The stock Spurs photos that shared the screen showed players making layups or snatching rebounds.

Despite his lack of the big ego common to basketball players (particularly West Coast point guards, not to mention anyone’s name, or call him by the name of the felony he committed), Nash’s skill as the quarterback of his team is beyond question. Late in last year’s series the Suns lost an extremely closely contested game. At one point late in that game occurred one of the hard fouls the teams exchanged; this one left Nash’s nose bleeding on the sidelines. Until they could staunch the bleeding and get some bandage to cover it, by rule he had to be off the court. During that period the Suns fell apart on offense, exhibiting a tenderfoot’s sense of stability and direction; and by the time Nash returned it was too late. To top it all off, his children’s godfather, Dirk Nowitzki, beat him for the individual trophy.

The Associated Press looks on the bright side:

WASHINGTON — Soldiers who need special waivers to get into the Army because of bad behavior go AWOL more often and face more courts-martial. But they also get promoted faster and re-enlist at a higher rate, according to an internal military study obtained by The Associated Press.

The Army study late last year concluded that taking a chance on a well-screened applicant with a criminal, bad driving or drug record usually pays off. And both the Army and the Marines have been bringing in more recruits with blemished records.

This will come as no surprise to those who have studied Percival Christopher Wren’s seminal works on the subject of criminal recruitment. The novice may profitably begin with Beau Geste, Soldiers of Misfortune, and Flawed Blades: Tales from the Foreign Legion.

What less can you expect from a court once headed by a GOP hack who got his start by intimidating black and Hispanic voters in Arizona? Rehnquist would be proud of today’s ruling.

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court ruled Monday that states can require voters to produce photo identification without violating their constitutional rights, validating Republican-inspired voter ID laws.

In a splintered 6-3 ruling, the court upheld Indiana's strict photo ID requirement, which Democrats and civil rights groups said would deter poor, older and minority voters from casting ballots. Its backers said it was needed to prevent fraud…

The case concerned a state law, passed in 2005, that was backed by Republicans as a way to deter voter fraud. Democrats and civil rights groups opposed the law as unconstitutional and called it a thinly veiled effort to discourage elderly, poor and minority voters — those most likely to lack proper ID and who tend to vote for Democrats.

Maybe everybody else knew this already, but I’m damned if I did. More good news on energy, brought to you by the agribusiness lobby and the quadrennial bad joke known as the Iowa caucuses:

Conventional gas delivers more energy than a gallon that contains ethanol. If it’s a gallon of E-10, which is a blend of 10 percent ethanol and conventional gas now widely available in the Kansas City area, there’s an energy difference of about 3.4 percent.

Now that may not seem like much when you’re topping off the tank this week. But over the course of a year of normal driving, it would take an additional 40 gallons of E-10 to go the same distance as conventional gas. If they were both priced the same, it would mean an extra $120.

If it’s E-85, a blend containing 85 percent ethanol that can be used in specially equipped vehicles, the energy loss soars and more than offsets its lower cost, even though E-85 is about 60 cents per gallon less at retail than conventional gas.

Mileage can suffer by about 25 percent with E-85, according to AAA. Over the course of a year, that amounts to an extra 300 gallons of E-85 to go the same distance as when using conventional gas. That means an average household, when the total cost of conventional gas and E-85 are compared, would spend nearly $100 more per year for E-85…