Obama and the White Sox: This is over a month old, so perhaps I should have blogged about it earlier, but insofar as Reason Mag decided this morning to interupt its usual defense of white, pot-smoking, gun-packing militiamen with a repeat of this canard, I had to respond.



As you can tell from the interview, presented here in its entirety, Obama states that he became a White Sox fan when he moved to the South Side of Chicago (in the early 90's), and is then asked a question by Rob Dibble as to who his favorite White Sox player when he was growing up. He answers the question by stating that his favorite team when he was growing up in Hawaii was the Oakland A's. He doesn't hem, haw, stutter, come up with some bogus answer about how he loved all the Chisox who ever played going back to Dummy Hoy; he plainly says that he wasn't a fan of the Pale Hose back then, implicitly communicating the fact that he didn't have a favorite. And that was the complete interview.

Like the President, I also didn't have a favorite White Sox player growing up, but I was a baseball fan. Since we're contemporaries, I can safely say that the Sox during that period didn't really capture the public imagination. They never made the playoffs, and other than Dick Allen and Wilbur Wood, they didn't have anyone who would have been a household name to a typical baseball fan, much less someone living in Hawaii whose only exposure to baseball was the Saturday and Monday Games of the Week and the post-season. If Obama had told Dibble that his favorite player was Bill Melton or Stan Bahnsen, that would have been clear evidence that he was bs-ing. The answer he gave was the only correct one a true baseball fan could give.

An oldie but a goodie: If my blog will be remembered for anything, it will be for accurately predicting the collapse of the real estate market back in 2005, and the role that the passage of the 2005 Bankruptcy "reform" act (or BARF, as it has come to be known) in exacerbating the crisis. How badly the GOP-enacted law screwed things up, however, can best be seen in a more scholarly paper recently published by UC Davis, and co-written by Wenli Li, Economic Advisor to the Federal Reserve Bank in Philadelphia. The conclusion:

Before 2005 bankruptcy reform, homeowners in financial distress could use bankruptcy to help save their homes. Homeowners could have their unsecured debts discharged in Chapter 7, thus freeing up funds to make their mortgage payments. Homeowners who were in default on their mortgages could stop foreclosure by filing under Chapter 13 and could use Chapter 13 repayment plans to repay their mortgage arrears over several years. Most homeowners who filed for bankruptcy were not obliged to repay anything to their unsecured creditors.

But the 2005 bankruptcy reform made filing for bankruptcy less useful as a save-your-home procedure. Debtors’ cost of filing increased sharply after the reform. Also the homestead exemption in bankruptcy was capped at $125,000, thus making it impossible for homeowners with high home equity to keep their homes in bankruptcy. A new “means test” increased higher-income debtors’ obligation to repay their unsecured debt in bankruptcy.

Because these changes reduced homeowners’ gain from filing for bankruptcy, they reduce default rates on unsecured debt. And because homeowners’ ability-to-pay is fixedin the short-run, these changes are predicted to increase default rates on mortgages. In the paper, we test whether adoption of the 2005 bankruptcy reform led to higher rates of mortgage default. We use a large dataset of prime and subprime mortgages.

Our main result is that bankruptcy reform caused mortgage default rates to rise. Comparing default rates three months before versus after bankruptcy reform, the increase was 36% for prime mortgages and 11% for subprime mortgages. Using a longer period of one year before versus after the reform, the increase was 50% for prime mortgages and 7% for subprime mortgages. Homeowners subject to the cap on the homestead exemption were 50% more likely to default after the reform, regardless of whether their mortgages were prime or subprime. Homeowners with subprime mortgages were 13% more likely to default if they were subject to the new means test, but default rates of those with prime mortgages did not change.

The study uses a lot of complicated mathematics to make its point, but its well worth browsing through if you have the time.

Perhaps a more devastating land mine, however, is something that was hatched by the lending industry, at roughly the same time they created default swaps and high-risk adjustable rate notes. The Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems, or MERS, was invented by Big Banking as a way to cut costs on the production of legal documents, specifically recording deeds. In real property transactions, ownership is usually shown through the public recordation of deeds, which create a chain of title proving that the person who claims to be the owner has a legitimate case, based on a series of orderly transactions dating back to Adam for all to see. At the same time, any party that has a lien on property, whether it be from a mortgage or some other debt, can also record, thereby establishing a priority based on when the lien was recorded.

Of course, recording anything with the county costs money. The almost-entirely unregulated process of lending money to prospective homeowners, the fruits of which we have seen in the insane rise and precipitous fall of the market in the last five years, generated increasingly complicated arrangements by which trusts involving multiple investors financed these high-risk notes, which would then be bought and sold to other investors. A very complicated system, indeed, which was how MERS came to be.

The idea behind MERS was that rather than generating a new document every time a loan was transfered, and thereby having to repeatedly record (and repeatedly pay fees) mortgages, an entity would be created that would take on the role of "holder of the lien" as a "nominee" of the actual note holder. The lender would collect money from the homeowner, but if the borrower ever fell behind, MERS would step in, and initiate the foreclosure process. MERS, however, is never actually the note holder, has no right to collect money on debts, and has no privity of contract whatsover with the parties to the homeloan.

Which is problematic, since MERS does not otherwise have anything resembling a right to participate in foreclosures, and courts are increasingly rejecting their attempts to proceed on the sixty million mortgages to which they "hold title." In Kansas, for example, the state supreme court recently held that MERS had no standing to pursue foreclosures, and courts in that state have effectively given a free pass to homeowners whose loans were originally held in the name of MERS. It's a slip-up that has effectively put the brakes on foreclosures based on loans generated after 2005, since the right by MERS to foreclose can be challenged even after a sale has occurred; even in states where MERS' claim for standing has been upheld, the threat of litigation challenging it's right to foreclose has suddenly made the option of modifying the underlying loan to terms that better suit the borrower more palatable, and certainly better than anything dreamed up by the Obama Administration.

The Best and the Brightest:

During oral argument on a case involving privacy rights and electronic communication devices, some disturbing questions were raised about the street-smarts of the men who run the Supreme Court:

(I)n the case City of Ontario v. Quon, which considers whether police officers had an expectation of privacy in personal (and sexually explicit) text messages sent on pagers issued to them by the city, the justices of the Supreme Court at times seemed to struggle with the technology involved.

The first sign was about midway through the argument, when Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr. - who is known to write out his opinions in long hand with pen and paper instead of a computer - asked what the difference was “between email and a pager?”

Other justices’ questions showed that they probably don’t spend a lot of time texting and tweeting away from their iPhones either.

At one point, Justice Anthony Kennedy asked what would happen if a text message was sent to an officer at the same time he was sending one to someone else.

“Does it say: ‘Your call is important to us, and we will get back to you?’” Kennedy asked.

Justice Antonin Scalia wrangled a bit with the idea of a service provider.

“You mean (the text) doesn’t go right to me?” he asked.

Then he asked whether they can be printed out in hard copy.

“Could Quon print these spicy little conversations and send them to his buddies?” Scalia asked.

And no, this is not from an Onion article.

True Fact: The use of the term "flake" to describe an eccentric individual was originally coined by a star baseball player on the 1950's.

The poet laureate of Great Britain has composed a new verse about her nation's fallen hero:

Achilles (for David Beckham)

Myth's river- where his mother dipped him,
fished him, a slippery golden boyflowed on, his name on its lips. Without him,
it was prophesised,
they would not take Troy.

Women hid him,
concealed him in girls' sarongs; days of sweetmeats, spices, silver songs...
but when Odysseus came,

with an athlete's build, a sword and a
shield, he followed him to the battlefield, the crowd's roar,
and it was
sport, not war,

his charmed foot on the ball...

but then his
heel, his heel, his heel.

Unclear whether "Odysseus" in this instance is John Terry or Rio Ferdinand....

The Cleveland Cicero: When your only accomplishments over the dozen or so years you've spent in Congress is to sponsor bills "to make available to the Ukranian Museum and Archives the USIA television program 'Window on America,'" a bill "to designate the facility of the United States Postal Service located at 14500 Lorain Avenue in Cleveland, Ohio as the 'John P. Gallagher Post Office Building'" and a bill "proclaiming Casimir Pulaski to be an honorary citizen of the United States posthumously," you know you're making a difference.  And soon there may be another notch on Dennis Kucinich's belt: preserving the non-access to health care for 50 million Americans.

It used to be a sports truism that the Winter Olympics was one of the weak links in the American sporting empire, but no more. As Nate Silver points out, if we were to count only those sports that existed in 1988, the last Olympiad in which the Warsaw Pact (incl. East Germany) still competed, the US would still have led the medal count, winning nearly three times the number they won in Calgary. Canada appears to have been the real beneficiary of the "X-Games" expansion; 18 of the 26 medals it won in Vancouver, as well as 11 of the 14 gold medals, were won in events that didn't exist in 1988.

The nations of Eastern and Central Europe, on the other hand, have fallen off the pace rather dramatically. Even when you combine Russia and the other former Soviet Republics, the "Soviet Union" trails dramatically, losing twenty of the twenty-nine medals they won from the 1988 Olympics, and East Germany also takes a hit, although, remarkably, athletes born in the area that used to encompass the DDR continue to outpace their brethren from the former West Germany. And just to show that it doesn't simply represent the collapse of Communism, the decline is also evident in the performance of two perennial winter powers, Switzerland and Finland, both of which lost more than half of their medals from 1988.

Don't think this is over, Canada !!!

Nothing should be more surprising than the fact that the National Enquirer is touting the fact that its reporting on the John Edwards baby-daddy story has been "nominated" for the Pulitzer Prize.  A better question might be whether there has ever been a year when someone from that rag hasn't been "nominated," since quite literally anyone who has had something published can be nominated for the Prize, so long as anybody (including the aspiring prizewinner himself) fills out the necessary application.  It's the lowest-hanging fruit of the awards season.

It is a testament to the life well-lived that the his armed nighttime entry into a bank is only the second craziest thing Rip Torn has ever done:



Who doesn't like a hammer fight at the end of a movie?

Isn't the real outrage here the fact that this tribune of the underclass was cozying up to a woman named "Bunny"? If he had been the Party's nominee, and this information hadn't come out until just before the election....

The one thing that seems to be missing from the discussion of whether the House Dems will vote on the bill already passed by the Senate or will simply agree to kill health care reform for the foreseeable future, is what "health care," as an issue, means to the left in American politics. As an abstract issue, "health care" is an issue that tracks very well in the polls when there is nothing concrete about to be passed by Congress. For Democrats, it is a handy issue for when it is in opposition, something it can use to establish its populist bona fides, since the issues involved (coverage, cost, access, etc.) are concerns that affect the great mass of people. And as a matter of rhetoric, it is something that even a Blue Dog/Dixiecrat can support, at least on the campaign trail.

But when progressives actually attempt to do something to match their rhetoric, they find that it is nearly impossible to pass anything. Public opinion is easily fooled, especially when powerful business lobbies are involved, and on those few occasions when liberals have all their ducks in a row and can actually enact something, they discover that an issue that works pretty well when they are out of power, is more of a cancer when they have to take the reins.

So the fact that progressives in the House are abandoning the bill shouldn't be much of a surprise. As an issue, calls for universal health coverage are to progressives what opposition to abortion rights is to the right: something to advocate, not enact. Because once something like the Senate bill actually becomes law, the issue, and its usefulness as a vote-grabber, disappears. Not getting a bill enacted isn't the big surprise; the big surprise is that progressives went through the motions in the first place.

If there was any doubt that health care reform was, for the umpteenth time in American history, dead as a doornail, following the election of a Republican to the Senate seat held for generations by the Kennedys, it was dispelled when Rep. Barney Frank flatly asserted in the aftermath that further negotiations between the Senate and House would be useless. The real problem, as Frank notes, is the filibuster, the archaic, authoritarian parliamentary tool which has been used in this circumstance in the same way it has been used throughout American history: as a way for a minority to thwart those rare progressive attempts to extend the benefits of liberty and justice beyond the privileged few.

The health care bills passed by Congress were clearly not very popular, but any reform worth its salt that could have been popular would have upset too many special interests, and obtaining an extraconstitutional 3/5 super-majority meant too many compromises needed to be made. It may be politically incorrect to say this, but most great legislation is not accomplished through compromise of disparate coalitions, but through the politics of sheer power. LBJ signed the 1964 Civil Rights Act after he had shoved it down the throats of the Dixiecrats and libertarians that opposed it, not because he made some sort of deal, and Lincoln only ended slavery with the barrel of a gun.

So losing the "supermajority" is probably not the most significant event to have come out of tonight's election. Any coalition that depends on such disparate elements as Joe Lieberman and Ben Nelson is not going to produce much in the way of productive lawmaking, and now having to hope that Olympia Snowe (or the Playgirl model who just got elected) can be wheedled into supporting something useful isn't much to hang one's hat. And in any event, as Mickey Kaus has repeatedly noted, the House of Representatives can, at any time before the next Congress is seated in 2011, vote to ratify what the Senate has already passed (even in a lame-duck session after a November 2010 landslide defeat).

No, tonight's event will be most significant within the Democratic Party. In the year since he took office, Barack Obama has, bloodlessly and without passion, generally supported a very progressive domestic policy, but he has done so through the goo-goo rubric of "good government." It is a style of governing that is contemptuous of public opinion, of the down-and-dirty aspects of democratic politics: vote for me for your own good, no matter how bitter-tasting the medicine. Policymaking without inspiration, wonkery without populism, is a political recipe for disaster, and it will doubtlessly lead to a huge defeat in November.

But in the more immediate term, it also spells the end for Barack Obama. Part of his 2008 campaign's raison d'etre, its motivation, was the fact that he was The Change. No one who voted for him could have any doubt that his election, in and of itself, would change American politics forever, simply because he was who he was: an African-American in a society which had historically treated others like himself as a second-class citizen. His election made manifest that the principles of the Declaration of Independence and Constitution were real, not fatuous statements of idealism fit only for white male property owners.

Now that he's elected, though, we can also see that whatever gifts he has as a policy wonk and a thinker, he is a half-hearted leader. He won't fight. He's a McClellan, not a Grant, and he has no coattails. He has political gifts, but they don't transfer. By rebranding America, he has served his most important purpose, but there is nothing more needed from him in that respect: America has already elected a black President. In the Democratic Party, no one, whether it be the Blue Dog right or the left-of-center base, fears him, and thus there will be nothing to impede anyone from challenging him for the party's nomination in 2012. Short of the GOP nominating Sarah Palin, we are looking at a one-term President.

A Christmas Miracle, more poignant than anything from the imagination of O Henry....

You know, there was a time when Joe Lieberman actually had a reputation for being a person of singular integrity. Thankfully, he's outgrown that stage:

Mr. Lieberman had supported the Medicare buy-in proposal in the past — both as the Democrats’ vice presidential nominee in 2000 and in more recent discussions about the health care system. In an interview this year, he reiterated his support for the concept.

But in the interview, Mr. Lieberman said that he grew apprehensive when a formal proposal began to take shape. He said he worried that the program would lead to financial trouble and contribute to the instability of the existing Medicare program.

And he said he was particularly troubled by the overly enthusiastic reaction to the proposal by some liberals, including Representative Anthony Weiner, Democrat of New York, who champions a fully government-run health care system.

“Congressman Weiner made a comment that Medicare-buy in is better than a public option, it’s the beginning of a road to single-payer,” Mr. Lieberman said. “Jacob Hacker, who’s a Yale professor who is actually the man who created the public option, said, ‘This is a dream. This is better than a public option. This is a giant step.’”

Yes, this is a grown man, an elected member of the most august and exclusive club in the country, who if the people had had their way in 2000 would have spent eight years a heartbeat away from the Presidency, saying that he changed his mind on an important issue, one that will have definite life-and-death consequences in the real world, because a liberal congressman said he agreed with him (incidentally, the quote from "Prof. Hacker" is completely made-up). Is there no bottom to the man?

Look out, Tiger Woods: This is the sort of story that comes out everytime she has a new movie to promote.

You ask me if I have a God complex?: Well, let me tell you something... it's kinda cool being compared favorably with Alec Baldwin in the comments section at this blog. The post itself, written by someone who could be generously described as a poor man's Jonah Goldberg, is a dull, tired piece o' snark rather typical of blogospheric "wit". But the posts that follow, a few of which were not written by my sockpuppets, are classic.

France "1", Eire 1 (O.T.): It figgered this would be the way France would qualify for the World Cup.

One of the more fascinating transitions in public opinion has to be how Barry Goldwater evolved from being a reactionary, anti-Civil Rights political hack who never met a foreign policy problem he didn't want to sic General LeMay on, to a distinguished, honorable sentry of libertarian values. Richard Nixon gets blamed for the Republican dive to the bottom, the "Southern Strategy," but Tricky Dick never was so audacious as to make Alabama and Mississippi his electoral base, and if it had been up to Goldwater, we still would be recognizing Chaing Kai-shek as the true ruler of China, while fighting to the death to hold on to sovereignty over the Panama Canal.

As for his fabled libertarianism, it sets the bar pretty low to associate that term with the former Arizona Senator, at least during the 1950's and 60's. As one of Tail Gunner Joe McCarthy's closest friends and associates in the Senate, he was more than willing to use the power of government to harass political enemies, as he himself tried to do in the late-50's against Walter Ruether (his ideal labor leader of the period was James Hoffa !!) His opposition to Civil Rights legislation, based on what he claimed was its emphasis on encroaching federal power, didn't lead to any denunciations on his part against George Wallace or Ross Barnett. His "libertarianism" was of the Chamber-of-Commerce variety, more a smokescreen to back an agenda that comforts the wealthy than anything that truly strengthens the rights and liberties of man.

So what happened to change the perception of the late Senator? I suspect that when his prodigy, Ronald Reagan, was elected, there was a need to create a counterpoint on the right between the electable pol and the principled ideologue, and Goldwater fit the bill to perfection. Even though Reagan had won by a landslide in 1980, Goldwater barely won reelection that year, so there may have been jealosy on his part as well. The Christian Right, many of whom had been lured into politics by the '64 campaign, also came out strongly against the Supreme Court nomination of fellow-Arizonian Sandra Day O'Connor in 1981, and Goldwater's angry response in defense of his homey brought to the fore issues, like abortion, that hadn't played much of a role in his previous campaigns. By the time he was out of politics in 1986, he had found a niche as a critic of the same conservative activism that he had once led, and the revisionist interpretation of his frightening politics of the '50's and '60's began to take hold.

The best interpretation of the 2009 Election Results: