Foreclosures in Massachusetts have tripled in one year. Sensing a full-scale crisis, the governor set up a $250 million rescue fund to try to help families get out of crazy mortgages and into affordable, fixed mortgages. The Globe reports this morning that so far not one single family has qualified for the rescue. Other states with similar funds are also reporting dismal results.

There are many reasons for the failure, but a critical problem centers on the hostage value of the house. Rescue programs limit their payouts to 100% of the value of the property, which makes sense both to protect the fund and not to reward the mortgage lenders by paying them more than they could get for the house if the family gave it back to the lender. But the mortgage lenders want more. If they don't get it, they won't release the mortgage--even though the lenders won't get anything close to 100% of the value of the home if they are forced to foreclose. They hold the home hostage: Pay the amount the mortgage company wants or move out of the house. Some families will find the money to pay, and others will lose their homes.

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Beware Beltway pundits, especially when it comes to speculation about military affairs. For every sensible analysis, there is an ill-considered piece like the recent article in the New York Times by Robert Kagan and Michael O'Hanlon calling for "feasible military options" to deal with the possibility of "nuclear-armed Pakistan" falling into the "abyss." The two options suggested are sending in U.S. Special Forces to help Pakistani security forces protect that country's bombs or sending in a more substantial force to help secure Pakistan's "core" before offering help in "retaking" regions controlled by Islamic fundamentalists and "reclaiming custody of any nuclear weapons."

Haven't we already tried the approach of putting U.S. troops in the middle of a civil war in a Muslim country? Should we expect a better outcome when nuclear weapons are involved?

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Former Presidential spokesliar, oops, I mean spokesman, Scott McClellan, reminded us this week that the fish rots from the head. McClellan drops the truth bombshell that implicates George Bush and Dick Cheney in the sordid outing of CIA operative Valerie Plame Wilson. CNN reports that:

Amid a swelling controversy about the leak of Valerie Wilson’s name, McClellan went to the White House podium in October 2003 and told reporters that Karl Rove, the president’s top political adviser, and Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Cheney’s chief of staff, had not been involved. . .

There was one problem. It was not true,” McClellan writes in his new book, “What Happened,” which is to be released in April. “I had unknowingly passed along false information. And five of the highest ranking officials in the administration were involved in my doing so: Rove, Libby, the vice president, the president’s chief of staff and the president himself.”

We knew about Rove and Libby. But now we can add the names of George Bush, Dick Cheney, and Andy Card to the list of people who helped create the lie, i.e., that no one at the White House was involved in leaking the name of Valerie. We no longer have to wonder if any damage was done. We have the revelations in Valerie’s book, Fair Game, describing in detail her job as the operations chief for the Iraq Task Force and her mission of tracking down and eliminating weapons of mass destruction.

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Although this NY Times article gets a little gushing about Goldman Sachs, it reveals something very interesting: All the write-downs on Wall Street and the possible economic slowdown that might result from historic billions were foreseeable by a firm with intelligent risk management. However only one major investment bank involved in this area (with billions on the line) managed to properly mitigate their risk.

 

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I really did not need the article on the Jets fans’ Girls Gone Wild ritual in this morning’s New York Times (“A Halftime Ritual of Harassment”) to remind me of what an old fart I am. Sometime after I wrote “Get to Work,” to discourage women from leaving their jobs and becoming dependent on their husbands for a living, the lovely Suzanne Goldenberg of the British Guardian suggested that I was too old to be giving advice to younger women, leaving me to hope that, for example, no men are listening to Sanford Weill, or, god forbid, Sumner Redstone.

But I can’t be in such bad shape or I would have had a stroke when I read of the New York Jets’ male fans lined up on the circular ramp at Giants Stadium and, in the words of the Times, subjecting any women who happened to be around to “A Gauntlet of Abuse:”

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If Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said that Hillary Clinton’s campaign told him that they had some dirt on Obama, would Obama’s staff react as they did to the Robert Novak column of November 17? And yes, I am putting Novak in the same category as the crazy Iranian leader. Novak has damaged U.S. national security as much as Ahmadinejad with his exposure of Valerie Plame and the subsequent destruction of her clandestine intelligence network.

Why has Senator Barack Obama kept the Novak story alive through repeated statements for days? Is he just naïve or is he misinformed? Is he really so unfamiliar with the journalistic incest of Washington and Novak’s status as a Republican hit man? Why would Obama focus his campaign on unfounded “smears” circulated by Novak? Why would Obama, the candidate of “hope,” pump up the claims of Novak, “the prince of darkness”?

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(Live today on C-Span Tuesday Morning 10 am EST)

Inside sources tell me that the Annapolis Peace Summit to address Israel/Palestine issues will be officially announced tomorrow, and the date will be November 27.

The selection of Annapolis as the site for the upcoming Israel/Palestine Peace Summit makes some sense if one were serious about creating a new reality in the Middle East.

It was in Annapolis in September 1786 that Alexander Hamilton and James Madison teamed up and convinced the state delegates to exceed their designated authority and to approve a Federal Convention in Philadelphia the following year. Amidst dramatically low expectations and much bungling, the critical seeds were planted that led to the creation of a new federal Constitution and a democratic United States of America.

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Yep, it’s Social Security crisis time again. For those too young to remember, the connection between UFOs and Social Security stems from an urban legend of the 90s. The story went that polls showed young people were more likely to believe that they would see a UFO than that they would get a Social Security check when they retired. It turns out that no one had ever done a serious poll finding this result. Apparently some right-wing crusader had asked people in a bar to raise their hands if they believed in UFOs and then to raise their hand if they thought they would get Social Security when they retired. UFOs supposedly won.

 

[Newsbreak: The UFOs have landed. Ruth Marcus defended the crisis mongers on the Post oped pages today. Note that she makes no effort to compare the projected shortfall to other items, like the cost of the war, or comment on other problems that are comparably distant and happily ignored by the Post. btw, I did not pay her for this column.]

In the latest round in the media’s campaign against Social Security, it looks like the UFOs are still winning.

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Courtney Martin has another great piece on student activism in the Prospect today. This time around, she argues that the "institutionalization" of student activism, in which students look to the University itself for funds and approval, is "domesticating" us and causing us to remain our Organization Kid selves instead of breaking out of the mold and rebelling against a government and a society that has given us so many injustices.

Martin is insightful, as usual, but I think it's important to take the argument a step further.

The solution to institutionalization is not anti-institutionalization. It's institutionalizing opposition. The problem, in other words, is not institutionalization per se, it's that we youngsters let ourselves be co-opted into other people's institutions.

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Laura Rozen, in Mother Jones, reveals the latest doings of Freedom Watch, the neocon front group that is now pushing both "victory" in Iraq and a US and/or Israeli attack on Iran.

The good news is that this time the shenanigans of the neocons are exposed fully before the first shots are fired. The bad news is that this bunch will have unlimited funds to spend on drumming up war and they are still operating pretty much below the radar.

Attention must be paid.

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Versus Attacking

In the last weeks before any election, campaigns always try to stay on the offense. They want to garner headlines, and conflict generates headlines. They want to control events, instead of being driven by them, and going on the offense helps accomplish that. They want to choose how to present the candidate, and initiating topics, instead of responding to others, empowers a campaign to emphasize the aspects of the candidate that the campaign prefers.

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There's a cartoon in today's New York Times Week in Review highlighting all the strikes ongoing around the globe this week. All of a sudden, it appears that workers of the world are uniting, and in some cases, may even be winning. Here, at home the WGA strike is changing the face of union communications as creative workers are ably getting their message out on youtube and blogs galore.

But a strike in Israel has been much less fun--and off the radar of the American public. While news saturation covers that region on the war front, it's not often that there's coverage of domestic life in Israel. Consequently, many of Israel's staunchest supporters have no idea about the reality of life there. The teacher's strike--which began in middle and high schools six weeks ago--shows a side to Israel that should have all those who care about the country and the region concerned. Can you imagine a school strike going on in any state in this country for six weeks? The Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert, has refused to meet with the Teachers' Union chief turning him into a near martyr especially among the poorer sectors in Israel who already feel slighted economically.

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