Monthly Archives: January 2010

(sigh) Here We Go Again…

WASHINGTON — The Jus­tice Depart­ment is begin­ning a major cam­paign against banks and mort­gage bro­kers sus­pected of dis­crim­i­nat­ing against minor­ity appli­cants in lend­ing, open­ing a new front in the Obama administration’s response to the fore­clo­sure crisis.

Say!  How does a bank or mort­gage bro­ker con­vince every­body that it’s not dis­crim­i­nat­ing against minor­ity appli­cants?  Hmm.  That’s a hard one.  Let us pon­der awhile.

I know!  I know!  I know!  We can make lots of mort­gage loans to minor­ity peo­ple.  Whether or not they can qual­ify for them or can afford them or are lying through their teeth on the mort­gage application.

Then we sell all the risky ones to Fan­nie Mae or Fred­die Mac.  They’ll buy them ’cause they just got big blank checks for just this pur­pose.  That we we can show we didn’t dis­crim­i­nate and when a lot of these mort­gages go belly up we won’t be on the hook for them.  The gov­ern­ment will!

It’s nice to have a gov­ern­ment that is up to its ears in debt and fran­ti­cally try­ing to acquire more of it telling the banks how to do busi­ness with the advice and con­sent of Jesse Jackson.

One of these days they’re just going to let the lit­tle boy who cried

unnnhnn mmmnhnnn enh I cah caw aye eee uh eh!

hope he can hold out until the next thaw.

h/t Dar­leen at Pro­tein Wisdom

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This is a com­plex issue, and the longer it was debated, the more skep­ti­cal peo­ple became. I take my share of the blame for not explain­ing it more clearly to the Amer­i­can people.

–Barack Obama, State of the Union.

And he was right.  Through a con­fi­den­tial source at the Rich­mond Times-Dispatch a first draft of the ground­break­ing Health Care Bill for Dum­mies has sur­faced and I must say now that I feel very guilty about com­plain­ing that the pres­i­dent was call­ing us a bunch of dum­mies because, again, he was right.  With this new, sim­pler expla­na­tion now I under­stand it.  For example:

There so many things man with nice voice need to explain gooder. Like, if some peo­ple still need health insur­ance, why not just give them insur­ance voucher, like hous­ing voucher or food stamps? Why put entire U.S. med­ical sys­tem in Cuisi­nart and set on Liquefy?

I won’t detain you any longer because this thing is, to quote a pres­i­dent who was a lit­tle bet­ter at explain­ing things, beyond our poor power to add or detract.  If you’re hold­ing any hot liq­uids put them down because this one’s a laugher.

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If not, com­ing right on the heels of the skul­dug­gery and royal huffi­ness over the health care boon­dog­gle, then there won’t ever be a point at which the pub­lic says That’s far enough.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Obama admin­is­tra­tion is con­sid­er­ing sev­eral steps that would review the legal­ity of the con­tro­ver­sial Bowl Cham­pi­onship Series, the Jus­tice Depart­ment said in a let­ter Fri­day to a sen­a­tor who had asked for an antitrust review.

In the let­ter to Sen. Orrin Hatch, obtained by The Asso­ci­ated Press, Assis­tant Attor­ney Gen­eral Ronald Weich wrote that the Jus­tice Depart­ment is review­ing Hatch’s request and other mate­ri­als to deter­mine whether to open an inves­ti­ga­tion into whether the BCS vio­lates antitrust laws.

Read­ing the arti­cle I felt like Joseph Welch must have when he said to Joseph McCarthy

Sen­a­tor. You’ve done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?

Have these peo­ple not the decency to read the doc­u­ment they have sworn to pro­tect and defend?  OK.  For­get decency.  How about A sin­gle lick of sense? I know that who wins foot­ball games is a big deal for some col­leges because it means really seri­ous money.  That is their prob­lem because that is a trap they have made for them­selves.  Insti­tu­tions of higher learn­ing really don’t have any busi­ness being farm teams for the National Foot­ball League.  But they are. Insti­tu­tions of higher learn­ing really don’t have any busi­ness spend­ing mil­lions research­ing high school foot­ball play­ers, writ­ing elab­o­rate agree­ments with them, and engag­ing in Byzan­tine arrange­ments with other schools to make sure that no school is get­ting an unfair advan­tage in the area of snar­ing likely stars for their foot­ball teams.  But they do.

Dumb?  Yeah.  Silly?  Yeah.  Venal?  Yeah.  Dis­cred­itable?  Yeah.  Big money involved?  Yeah.

But how for the love of Mike does all this have any­thing to do with the fed­eral gov­ern­ment? After all the hoopla has died and all the pom-poms put back and the coaches have flown home in their pri­vate jets (when Nick Sabin was at LSU he had a two-million-dollar salary) this is finally a game between school boys.

Is there any dif­fer­ence between our gov­ern­ment not lik­ing the way they pick bowl con­tes­tants and King George III get­ting mad at they way they ran a fox hunt?  Or Sad­dam, Udai, and Qusai not lik­ing the way a soc­cer match turned out?

Oh, but they will say, We have a stake in this because these schools get fed­eral dol­lars.

Exactly! But they weren’t always fed­eral dol­lars, were they?  They once belonged to real peo­ple who prob­a­bly had bet­ter uses for them than hand­ing them out to col­leges so the gov­ern­ment could force the col­leges to do things its way.

I never heard any­body men­tion the 10^th Amend­ment until last year.  Wasn’t exactly sure what it was and had to look it up.  It’s the one which says that pow­ers that the Con­sti­tu­tion doesn’t explic­itly grant the fed­eral gov­ern­ment are reserved to the states or to the people.

You might think the fact that this amend­ment is get­ting talked about would inform some peo­ple that per­haps it is time to try and act like they’re not com­pletely beyond help.  But they are behav­ing like the mon­key in the mon­key trap, where the mon­key puts his greedy lit­tle paw inside a vase with a nar­row neck to get some good­ies and then can’t get his arm out because he won’t undo his fist and let the good­ies drop.  So he is stuck there until the hunter comes along and takes him back to be the guest of honor at a dinner.

The ele­ments of Amer­i­can life are the good­ies and they want to grab as much as they can and, once hav­ing grabbed, will never let go until they are forced to.

Peo­ple of good sense will prob­a­bly assume that I am mak­ing this up.  I assure them I am not.

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The Geeks Are Sexy crew presents Pee Wee Her­man get­ting all wee weed up over the iPad.  Maybe not the hip venue they need for it. Come to think of it, this prob­a­bly won’t do won­ders for Jobs’ image, either.  But it does have that ol’ Pee Wee Her­man magic.

Much as Pee Wee loves it, though, oth­ers seem a lit­tle under­whelmed.

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