Blogito, Ergo Sum - 16 May 2009

Minorities Hit Hardest by Foreclosures in New York

By MICHAEL POWELL and JANET ROBERTS

Defaults occur three times as often in predominantly minority areas of the region as in predominantly white ones, a New York Times analysis finds — with the black middle class hit hardest.

The problem was subprime loans, we have been told. This does not mean a loan below the prime lending rate, it means a loan made to borrowers who were subprime when it came to income and credit standards. They were people who would not otherwise have qualified for loans until Fannie and Freddie were told to lower their standards and start influencing other lenders to loan more money to unqualified borrowers who were thus considerably more likely to default if times got tough. These, as you might have expected, most often were minorities with generally lower incomes.

The illusion at the time was that the future was never going to get tough again and home prices would always go up. If that scenario had come true then we wouldn’t be having this crisis.

Now the NYT thinks this is headline news? What’s the Onion headline for all Liberal disaster scenarios? “Women,, minorities, hardest hit.”

CIA Director Leon Panetta yesterday rejected House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's charge that the agency misled her about its use of coercive interrogation methods, escalating a controversy that has dogged the speaker for weeks and intensifying a debate over Bush administration policies that the Obama administration has tried to avoid.

The lie, of course, is that Obama opened the door. Even the authors acknowledge that eventually in referring to:

...the CIA, an agency Obama has defended even as he has described its interrogation methods as torture and released Justice Department memos that drew more focus on those methods.

Obama is so arrogant he thought doors that he opened swung only his way. And he encouraged Pelosi in her attack-dog role of continuing to complain about a now-gone administration...quite as if Pelosi and Reid had not been in control of Congress the past two years. And Pelosi clearly forgot that Leon Panetta was now running the CIA. She apparently thought a Republican was still in charge.

The crime here is clearly hubris. Obama thinks he can get away with anything and Pelosi thought she was above the law or any requirements for responsibility. Like Clinton before her, her first reaction was to lie while using enough weasel-words to hope to get away with it.

One of the things I find interesting as I grow older is how appropriate and effective is much of what we call ‘folk wisdom’. Such as: “People who live in glass houses should not throw stones.”

On the other hand, sometimes Obama does surprise and impress me, I have to admit:

Huntsman, who was national co-chair of John McCain's presidential campaign, said he "never expected" to be receiving an appointment from the Democratic victor in the race. But when the president asks for service, he said, "that to me is the end of the conversation."

Huntsman, who speaks fluent Chinese, said first in Mandarin, then English, a Chinese saying: "Together we work. Together we progress."

I think it is hugely impressive to see Obama pick an envoy based upon ability rather than simply ideology. For far too many years America has acted like ambassadorships were merely political plums handed out to faithful supporters regardless of any actual experience, making the roles essentially ceremonial.

As governor, Huntsman has built an impressive record of economic recovery and growth. He has pushed for an overhaul of the state's health-care system, and he has lobbied for his party to do more on the environment. He has also promoted in Utah, a state where Republicans dominate, the power of bipartisanship.

"Most Americans are fed up with the idea that partisanship has stood in the way of progress," Huntsman said in an interview late last year.

David Plouffe, who managed Obama's presidential campaign, told U.S. News & World Report this month that Huntsman was "the one person in that party who might be a potential presidential candidate." ...

The news almost certainly forecloses the possibility that Huntsman will be a candidate for national office in 2012.

Some call that bipartisanship. It is, because Obama did the same thing to Hillary, too.

And how did he get that experience? As a Mormon missionary? The issue is never mentioned.

Greed is difficult to define, but we know it when we see it. That person is greedy who earns, or wants to earn, more than is seemly. Unseemliness is difficult to define, but we know it when we see it. A seller of something we want to buy is greedy if the price he is asking is not reasonable. Unreasonableness is difficult to define, but we know it when we see it.

When you are charged with the role of oversight, and you fail to perform it, you have PLENTY to do with the policies. Your primary purpose, in fact, is to detect and prevent abuses. The truth, which most know and even a few will now admit, is that at the time the waterboarding was taking place there were few who actually believed it to be torture...even Nancy.

In adopting her phony ‘holier-than-Bush’ role she screwed herself out of what would been an ordinary and acceptable explanation like the one Dianne Feinstein tried to provide for her sister-in-legislative-arms: the decisions have to be set in the light of the times in which they were made.

Too late now for Nancy to retreat that far, however. But since it’s her own fault, done for partisan political reasons which backfired, I have no sympathy for her.