Regarding the Mortgage Meltdown

What we all know - opportunistic lenders were overeager to lend to overeager borrowers because of the "you're throwing your money away on rent" LIE - and now the FBI is investigating...

What do you do when unwise people end up getting a raw deal from other unwise people, who get a raw deal from the first unwise people? It's interesting that most reports are willing to fault the lenders, which is valid... but there's plenty of fault to go the other way, too.

We've had our own little housing crunch in this area, but we had the fortune and foresight to get out of it to accommodate other priorities well before things hit the fan... because we knew what the terms were and when they would change.

Priorities?

Heard on the nightly news: "Next, will race be a factor in this year's elections? But first, your lottery numbers..."

Bigger Than Most "OOPS"es

So this lady thinks her company is replacing her behind her back... and deletes all their data (it was an architectural firm).

Except they weren't replacing her. (Well, until now, that is...)

Thankfully, they were able to recover the data.

No ID, No Vote... No Problem.

So there's an MSNBC article about how hard it is to be a non-ID'd voter in Indiana. Waah. What sob stories do they trot out?

There's the poor, 32-year-old mother of seven who says it would cost her at least $50 to vote in person. There's also the 92-year-old woman who's voted for decades in the same polling place, but now can't vote there because she let her driver's license expire when her eyesight began to fail.

This is really ridiculous. Don't campaigns (or rather, parties) get vans out to "get out the vote?" I'd think the mother of seven - who obviously finds time to manage her house & get her kids to school & soccer practice but somehow can't find time to research what it would take to vote - would be able to manage to give the 92-year-old woman a ride to the nearest licensing office, BECAUSE:

Per Indiana's publicly available website:

Indiana residents of any age may obtain an identification card from any license branch in any county. To obtain a free identification card for voting purposes, you must visit a license branch with sufficient documentation and state that you need a free identification card for voting purposes.

Yes, that sounds completely inhumane...

(And yes, there's more to the two stories mentioned above, but it's still a slew of very fixable problems, if they care to fix them...)

Caveat Emptor

... or in this story, "Caveat Realtor."

(You know, I do NOT like the US grammatical punctuation-quotes rule...the British version makes a lot more sense to me...)

Anyway, though, the article claims that the case:

is likely to be the first of many in which regretful or resentful buyers seek redress from the agents who found them a home and arranged its purchase.

Please, North County Superior Court, dismiss this case! We don't need all the buyers in this likely-bursting market suing their realtors...

Please be the end!

Here's to the end of hearing Mona Lisa theories!

Cheers!

Not Exactly a Gun Culture

Experts think that America's "gun culture" (???) is fading. Here's an excerpt:

[America's falling out of love with guns] runs counter to popular perceptions of the United States as a country where most citizens are armed to the teeth and believe it is every American's inalienable right to buy an AK 47-style assault rifle with the minimum of bureaucratic paperwork.

Let me correct them: "... with no bureaucratic paperwork, thankyouverymuch."

Idiots.

Whose "popular perception" is this, anyway? I mean, who's armed? Who thinks everyone should be? I know very few gun owners, and to the best of my knowledge, no one I know believes that it's everyone's "inalienable right to buy an AK 47-style assault rifle."

The perception I grew up with - not from my parents, who were silent on it, aside from being strongly anti-gun-in-the-house, but from public school, TV, and newspapers - was that gun owners (aside from gansters/-as) were freaks who delighted in murdering Bambi (and his Mommy), who thought violence was always the best solution, and who generally crouched in the back woods of some hilly southern State reading their Bible and arguing over who was more "saved." And let me re-state that they were the freaks - not the general population.

The perception I grew up with was most emphatically NOT "everyone is armed to the teeth and it's everyone's right to wield assault weapons while grocery shopping."

The perception I now have - which I assume to be more accurate, as it's based on a much broader and non-agenda-based experience - is that while most people DO NOT own a firearm, and many in fact recommend against it; most people also believe that responsible citizens should be able to keep and bear arms for their safety... or sport. (Although, eeeeewww...I wouldn't want to shoot any living thing unless my life depended on it!)

We could go on about what "safety" means and what the Founding Fathers were talking about, but that's for another time... this is just one striking example of how the media has twisted American culture and values.

Couple of things today

First, since National Healthcare and expanded welfare programs are coming back into the light, here's a good read:

The US is at risk of losing its top-notch triple-A credit rating within a decade unless it takes radical action to curb soaring healthcare and social security spending, Moody's, the credit rating agency, said yesterday.

So let's go ahead and expand government-run health care - we don't need to participate in this "global economy" anyway, do we? After all, it's not like we import anything from, say, China... If we don't do something to curb government spending (which means getting non-governmental solutions to society's problems), we are going to spend ourselves into the 1930s. And if pro-tax politicians take over, we'll be there even faster, because we'll be taxing ourselves into the 1930s, as well.

And in the "shaking head in disbelief" category, here's the latest from Hillary:

In broken English, one woman told Clinton how she wasn't making money as a broker anymore.

"I have no income at all," she said. "So how will I survive?"

Choking up with emotion, the woman said, "In my neighborhood, there are brand-new homes, but the value is nothing. I'm glad you are here so I can tell you, because you're going to be the president, I know."

A man shouted through an opening in the wall that his wife was illegal.

"No woman is illegal," Clinton said, to cheers.

No woman is illegal?!?! Wow. I assume she's talking about their existence. If they're not legally allowed to be where they are, they are, in fact, breaking a law. That makes them, or more appropriately, their situation, illegal. Now, if we're going to be compassionate, let's talk about making it easier to get back in line and come here legally. You know, through paperwork. Not deserts and rape trees. That would be compassionate.

See?

We don't have to destroy embryos to get stem cells. According to one researcher:

"The stem cells we generated were completely normal and differentiated into all the cell types of the body, including insulin-producing cells, blood cells and even beating heart cells."

You know the saying about a window opening when a door closes? I've seen it happen over and over again in public policy, and here's a GREAT example. Not to mention that I hope these are more successful than the embryo-destroying stem cells - those grow tumors of teeth and hair (eeeeewwww....). Adult stem cells are the ones that have been used successfully, and many times now! Plus, we keep finding them all over the body in places we hadn't thought to look before...

I'm nominating these guys

...for DUMBEST LOW-LIFE OF THE WEEK.

Wheeling your dead roommate around town to cash his Social Security check...sheesh.