THE DAILY BLADE: Sub-Par Solution For Sub-Prime Loans
The Washington Post reports that, "Sensing an opportunity to connect with voters on an issue important to their economic futures, presidential candidates have rushed out a variety of prescriptions for [the mortgage credit crunch], with Democrats proposing the most aggressive solutions."
There is a general consensus among all the candidates that terms and disclosures need to be more transparent and understandable, and that fraudulent and predatory lending practices should be discouraged by enforcing existing laws and regulations, and prosecuting violators and assessing penalties.
None of the leading Republican candidates have gone beyond these common-sense fixes to propose a bailout or other government intervention for homeowners in over their heads – though McCain is willing to consider providing assistance only to borrowers who were taken advantage of by unscrupulous lenders.
Most of the Democrat candidates favor making more low-cost Federal Housing Administration (FHA) loans available to home buyers, as well as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to buy more mortgages. As chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, Christopher J. Dodd is arguably the most knowledgeable candidate on the housing markets and the mortgage industry, and suggests two sensible long-term the current crisis: more FHA loan insurance available to home buyers and doing away with penalties for early payment of sub-prime mortgages.
So far, so good. But then, the three leading Democrat candidates give in to their reflexive urge to be magnanimous, using taxpayer money to finance their largesse. Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John Edwards want to create a government fund to help homeowners refinance mortgages to avoid foreclosure (Edwards already has a name for his expansive new government program – "Home Rescue Fund.").
Elsewhere in the WaPo, it’s left to Howard Kurtz – media watchdog turned political pundit turned economist – to be the voice of reason:
Memo to the media: Everyone who is defaulting on a home mortgage is not necessarily a victim.
I feel sorry for anyone in that situation. Losing a home is an awful thing. Some were undoubtedly pressured into buying by unscrupulous lenders. …
But let's face it: Most of the people who took out home mortgages for no money down knew that this was a roll of the dice. Who gets to buy a house without a down payment? And most of those who took out adjustable-rate mortgages knew that their rate would balloon in a couple of years, and could do so at a level that would be hard to afford.
They took the risk anyway. No one forced these folks to take on big mortgages they could barely handle. …
But when the mortgage meltdown pieces are written or broadcast, the lead is inevitably someone who is about to lose his or her house, with not so much as a nod toward the notion that these people might have overreached or bears any responsibility at all for their financial plight.
Perhaps inevitably, Hillary Clinton has now proposed a $1-billion fund to help struggling families catch up on their mortgage payments, and John Edwards also wants to give money to those who can't make their payments. So the taxpayers should bail out folks who took out these loans with their eyes wide open?
Michael Vick Is Like Richard Nixon, But Leona Helmsley Is No George Bush
In this interesting analysis, Legal Times senior editor Douglas McCollam explains that Atlanta Falcons QB Michael Vick got caught in the legal version of an illegal shift – an act that is technically illegal, but rarely enforced, unexpectedly becomes the focus of a media feeding frenzy that inflames public opinion and compels aggressive prosecutorial action for a hitherto low-priority infraction hammer and tong.
Those in the midst of this perfect storm of public opprobrium and prosecutorial zeal often "feel unjustly persecuted," writes McCollam, adding that "their plight draws sympathetic clucking from supporters about how ‘too big a deal’ is being made of their offense."
McCollam then details how the illegal shift has also ensnared baseball players "juiced up on steroids," Wall Street tycoons who were sharing "inside information like they were trading recipes over the back fence," as well as K Street lobbyists and politicians with a penchant for peccadilloes:
For years well-heeled lobbyists like Jack Abramoff conducted their influence peddling more or less out in the open, or at least at prominent tables in high-end eateries. Then the shift hit, and suddenly the line dividing the plainly illegal from the merely sleazy oozed over a couple of spots, helping land Abramoff and several of his associates in jail and sending other lobbyists running for cover, at least for a while.
A similar sort of shift caught President Bill Clinton by surprise. Before the Paula Jones case, no one really imagined a sitting president could be hauled into court on a civil suit and quizzed about his sexual escapades. Clinton protested on national TV that he had been forced to answer questions that "no American citizen would ever want to answer." … The line had shifted, just as it had for presidential candidate Gary Hart in 1987 when previously accommodating reporters defied convention and splashed his extramarital dalliances across the front page.
But perhaps the greatest self-proclaimed victim of the shift was President Richard Nixon, who long after he was driven from office by the Watergate scandal continued to claim that his predecessors had engaged in far worse political shenanigans than he ever had. Nixon clearly saw himself as the victim of an illegal shift about which kind of dirty tricks were allowed a politician and which were not. Like so many others, he failed to notice not so much that he had crossed the line, but that the line had crossed under him. "I am not a crook," Nixon famously declared near the bitter end of his struggle. Funny, that's pretty much what Michael Vick’s been saying.
Gee, The Stiletto thought Vick was saying, "I did not stage dog fights with that pit bull, my pet." Oh well, her mistake.
One could argue that Leona Helmsley also got caught in an illegal shift. Before she went to jail on charges of tax evasion and other financial improprieties, no one really lost sleep over owners of a profitable business treating the AP department like a petty cash fund. In a retrospective of Leona’s life and times New York Times columnist Gail Collins describes her as "an unusual combination of ’80s excess and a Depression-era pathological cheapness," adding:
She rubbed some people the wrong way — including, it appeared, almost all her relatives and virtually every person she had ever employed or done business with. They talked to the newspapers, then the prosecutors, and eventually the Helmsleys were charged with 235 counts of tax evasion and other financial misdeeds by the state attorney general and U.S. Attorney Rudolph Giuliani. …
Given the tsunami of rancor before, during and after the trial, you’d have thought that Leona had bankrupted the steel mill, thrown the whole town out of work and run off with the church poor box. Ed Hayes, who was representing one of her former employees, called the prosecutor’s office to try to delay producing his client for questioning as a potential witness. He heard hysterical laughter on the other end of the line. "I can’t get through the room full of people I got," the prosecutor told Hayes. Men and women no one had ever heard of were walking in off the street, volunteering to testify against Leona. The office looked like Yankee Stadium on the day World Series tickets go on sale.
And here’s the kicker: "You’ve got to say this for Leona Helmsley: She had nothing to do with global warming and she never got us into a war."
In case you didn’t get it, Collins is obliquely suggesting that President Bush is solely responsible for global warming (all those farting cows have nothing to do with it), and he single-handedly got us into the Iraq war (Saddam flouting U.N. resolutions for more than a decade had nothing to do with it).
The $3,000 Taxi Ride
Betty Matas, 75, and her husband, Bob, 72, wanted to trade the cold winters of Queens for the more temperate clime of Sedona, AZ. Neither of the life-long New Yorkers had learned to drive, and they were loathe to subject their cats (and themselves) to the rigors of a transcontinental flight - so they hailed a cab. Six days, 10 states, 2,500 miles and $3,000 later, they reached their destination. "When the Matases arrived in Sedona, they were met by a throng of reporters and the town's mayor, who had read about their trip," reports the New York Daily News. Sadly, after just four months enjoying the spectacular red rocks of Sedona, Betty Matas passed away. "We thought we would have a few years here," said her grieving husband. She will be laid to rest in Sedona.
Regarding global warming, I assume you know that NASA changed it's data and the warmest years on record are now in the 1930s. Seems the scientists were using the wrong AlGor(e)ithm. And ain't that the inconvenient truth. :D
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AlGore(e)ithm - love it!
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Wasn't Time Magazine breathlessly forecasting global cooling 30 years ago?
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