White House to bailout underwater mortgages?

You know, sometimes Paul doesn’t want to be paid, if it means robbing Peter.

Today’s hot rumor comes from James Pethokoukis: essentially, the White House (which is becoming increasingly frantic about the way that their Super Magical Unicorn Genius economic plans  aren’t working) is scheming to partially bail out people with underwater mortgages.  I know, I know: the government was not supposed to acquire Fannie/Freddie just to completely rewrite their balance sheets, but the existing scheme to let the mortgage industry gradually repair itself was apparently… a Super Magical Unicorn Genius economic plan.  This new plan won’t do a thing for F/F’s value as companies, but then this wouldn’t be an economic strategy.  It’s pretty blatantly a political one.

The mortgage Hail Mary would be a last-gasp effort to prevent this from happening and to save the Obama agenda. The political calculation is that the number of grateful Americans would be greater than those offended that they — and their children and their grandchildren — would be paying for someone else’s mortgage woes.

You know, I happen to have an underwater mortgage: we bought our house at exactly the wrong moment in time. Do you know what we’re doing about it? WE’RE MAKING OUR MORTGAGE PAYMENTS, that’s what we’re doing about it. Because we sat down and worked out how much we could afford to spend beforehand, then we stuck to that number like glue.  In other words, I don’t need a handout to pay my bills, and I really don’t need to spend another insanely large sum of money (Hot Air thinks that it could reach 100 billion, which is a large sum of money, even today) that my kids are just going to have to repay later, after the President retires to the global cocktail circuit.  And I know that people are going to argue that the majority of Americans can be short-termed bribed in this fashion, but you know something?  I don’t think it’ll work.  Particularly when it comes to people who have kids.   Continue reading White House to bailout underwater mortgages?

#rsrh QotD, Ace of AoSHQ edition.

Heh: I said pretty much the same thing as the below, during Fausta’s BlogTalkRadio program this morning.

Know this: When a Republican takes office in 2013, he will be compared unfavorably to Bush, who will be held out as a “conservative who at least had some heart and some sense of compassion” and the current Republican President will be, as each Republican President is called in turn, the worst President in all of history.

No, Ace didn’t rip me off.  He’s simply just as aware as I am that the activist Left has the collective imagination and creativity of a three-toed sloth in the middle of a five-day heroin jag*.

Moe Lane

*Note that I make no comments about their hygiene.

The [epithet] and the redistricting knives.

If you do political blogging or reporting for a while, you end up hearing this question a lot: Why should I bother to come out and vote for the [insert epithet here meaning ‘not as ideologically sound as I am’]? This would be normally responded to with a polite “That’s a good question” and a variable-length stream of blather before the question is actually answered, but let’s cut to the chase.  You bother to go out and vote for the [epithet] because:

  • Voting for the [epithet] in the House helps get you a Speaker with control over the Rules Committee, and somebody friendlier as Chair of Oversight and Government Reform.  Look them both up.
  • Voting for the [epithet] in the Senate helps get you an atmosphere where half the judiciary/executive branch appointments that you would object to strenuously quietly die stillborn.

That’s the way it works* – but you’re thinking to yourself, Well, at least I don’t have to vote for an [epithet] for governor. – but alas, no.  You do.  In some ways that’s the most critical place where you would have to if necessary, in roughly half the races out there this cycle.  Why?

Redistricting. Continue reading The [epithet] and the redistricting knives.

#rsrh FDL concedes the House.

I normally more or less ignore whatever shenanigans that specific members of the Online Left get up to – you run your plays against the rival team, not their cheerleaders – but this news from Chris Good is too entertaining to pass up.

Jane Hamsher, the online progressive maven who heads the influential blog Firedoglake and its accompanying activist/political arm, Firedoglake (FDL) Action, is entering new territory today: she’s getting into the marijuana legalization game.

[snip]

[Hs launching a $500,000 (according to her estimate) coordinated campaign to support marijuana legalization on the whole and to influence a handful of propositions on ballots this November–California’s Prop. 19, which would allow counties to legalize and tax marijuana within certain guidelines plus medical marijuana initiatives in Colorado, Arizona, and South Dakota.

Continue reading #rsrh FDL concedes the House.