Look all,

I will concede that the housing tax credit is silly. But this is not a crisis in the housing market, it is a crisis in the idea of housing.

The reason home ownership exists is so that ordinary people can believe they've got a measure of stability and prosperity in a high-risk world. Let's admit this up front: the housing=stability meme is what Ibsen would have called a life-lie, but it's a pretty decent one as these things go, and in general we all support the housing=stability life-lie with things like the mortgage interest tax credit, neighborhood events, gardening competitions and the like. It's nice. It's good. It makes families feel more stable.

(To people who are big rental fans I say go out and get your own delusions of stability and leave the rest of us to ours.)

When the Financerati decided to play fast and loose with the housing-is-stability delusion, they opened a can of worms. Never mind whose "fault" it was, the buyers or the banks, the real estate crisis has pointed out to every homeowner in America that THERE IS NO FLOOR TO THE HOUSING MARKET. And there's nothing like looking down to get people nervous about being on the high wire. (To those who maintain that housing prices need to "come down"--is zero, with almost nobody qualified to buy anyway, what you had in mind?) A social contract is being busted up here, and it needs to be repaired.

Sure, people who are buying houses are happy to take the tax credit, which is intended to shore up the social contract and make people believe that housing is "safe" again. (In desperate times, of course people will take money.) But people aren't dumb. Everybody knows that as long as the foreclosure machine is running, there's a real possibility that the only direction for ordinary people is down.

I have been saying this since 2006: the only way to end the housing crisis, and the economic crisis that sprang from it, is through principal reduction. Anybody with a yearly income of less than, say, $300k per year who purchased a home (or perhaps even an income property) during the bubble years should be handed a no-questions-asked, no-credit-hit, refinance of their home at its CURRENT VALUE, at a low, fixed rate. End of crisis.

It's too bad we didn't do this a couple of years ago when all the cheap neighborhoods tanked. It would have been a lot less expensive.

The fact that banks have not requested this fix and the government has not offered it, tells you everything you need to know about who is running the country and how concerned they are about the middle class. When the banks own enough housing, they will just figure out a way to "rent" it to people, hold a lot of it off the market in the guise of careful underwriting, and drive prices back up that way.

For those of you about to throw a fit about principal reduction and the "greedy" homeowners who bought homes they couldn't afford, please read any book about how human beings will gang up and persecute each other about stupid, meaningless things (Lord of the Flies, The Scarlet Letter, The Human Stain, etc.) and get over it. This is not about the guy who bought the investment property, or the guy who got the house with three bathrooms. It's about where the nation's money ends up--and I'd like to see a little more of it in the hands of people like you and me, thanks very much.

So Dean, please, less about the tax credit, and more about restoring public confidence in housing, even if you are one of the "smart guys" who knows that housing isn't the safety net we like to believe it is.

Sorry about the rant, but this is as plain as the noses on our faces. The subprime foreclosures are almost over, and the veil will be lifted as the extravaganza gets really ramped up in "ordinary" neighborhoods all over the country. I just hope the realization won't come too late.

It is quite possible that in the not-too-distant future, huge banks, including FNMA, will control a large portion of America's housing as rental property, courtesy of you and me and the foreclosure crisis which the banks refuse to end and may in fact be fanning. And unless you own your home outright and plan never to move, you may end up as one of the renters, even if you'd like to own your own home.

I've criticized banks for letting houses drop into foreclosure instead of doing what it takes to keep them in the hands of their owners. (Deep down, we know the banks own the houses anyway, but there's at least a patina of ownership in the current system. Work with me here.) Unfortunately my new expertise arises out of necessity; I have been trying to short sell my duplex for nearly a year. Ask any real estate agent how his or her short sales are going to get a sense of how much the banks are stalling these things and how difficult it is.

The buyer is offering more than other comparable properties in the neighborhood have sold for but apparently not as much as Fannie Mae believes the property is worth. I have been concerned that if FNMA (the investor) does not accept the buyer's offer, then the property will drop into vacancy and be vandalized, which would be bad for the neighborhood and for the taxpayers who will ultimately be on the hook for the mess.

Today I encountered a new and chilling wrinkle. A person on the phone at Fannie Mae arily informed me that if the potential buyer for my property doesn't offer enough to meet Fannie Mae's requirements, Fannie Mae would probably foreclose on it, then hold it "for five years or so" and rent it out in the meantime.

I checked out the FNMA website, and sure enough Fannie Mae is setting up to be a giant rental company. And I mean giant. I don't remember the exact statistic but I think Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac hold 85% of all the mortgages out there (sorry if I am wrong on that number.)

http://www.fanniemae.com/newsreleases/2009/4581.jhtml

According to one newspaper article I read, "Many are hoping that other banks will follow Fannie Mae's lead." Now, on the surface this might seem like a fine thing. The program is described as a way to allow renters living in foreclosed properties to stay and sign a lease--20% of foreclosures have a renter living in them when they are vacated, and those people have to go somewhere. 

And that would be cool, if FNMA were doing it as a last resort, after going through all the other possibilites including short sales to willing buyers and independent investors at prices that the market will bear. (I'm not a huge fan of this "race to the bottom" mentality myself but lots of people are and if we're going to establish a bottom we'd best get going.)

But for FNMA and other banks to turn up their noses at reasonable offers and embark on a giant plan to effectively hoard housing until the "market comes back?"  Practiced extensively by the small number of enormous banks who still own mortgages, (bailed out but not "invested in" by taxpayers), this thing holds the possibility of price-fixing on a grand scale.

Imagine what will happen when everyone in America who is going to lose their first home or investment property loses it. (Sadly, they may not qualify for any of the half-hearted modification schemes that have so far saved some 85,000 folks from foreclosure in a sea of millions of vulnerable or defunct homeowners.) With huge numbers of homes held as REO Rentals, if you want to buy a home your choices may be to purchase it at Fannie's price--or be satisfied with renting--at Fannie's rate, on Fannie's terms, and from one of Fannie's property management companies. What will happen to neighborhoods--and to America's famed "pride of ownership" society? Something, for sure. 

I hope I'm wrong about this--but if it is indeed the banks' plan to just forget about doing much other than letting houses drop into foreclosure, be turned into rentals and "marketed for sale" at the banks' price, then paranoia is justified. 

What is going on?

Hi all,

Some buddies of mine have developed an indexing tool for long documents. One of them thought it might be a good way to keep track of what's in the health care bill.

Please check it out at http://healthcarebillindex.com/

I'd appreciate it if you'd provide feedback in the form of comments and recommends. We're trying to figure out if the tool is useful, diagnose any issues with loading and viewing, etc. But most important, we're wondering if the tool itself is useful and how it might be improved.

Please also feel free to forward the site to others. Right now it's still in development, but the eventual plan is to build a full-on site and use the tool for other applications as well.

Thanks,

erica

The Homebuyers' Tax Credit may be working--but if it is, it's accomplishing precisely the wrong thing. Paying people to move when we need them to stay in their houses is completely wrongheaded. We should be paying people to stay. Housing is a lot more than the housing market, and until we factor that reality in to whatever attempts we make to fix this mess, nothing we do will really work.

Imagine you needed people to stay on a ship to stabilize it during a storm. Would you hand them $8,000 bucks each to jump into lifeboats and row away? No you wouldn't. Because pretty soon everybody would be off the boat, $8,000 bucks or not. The instability would get worse, and soon those who didn't bail on their own would be thrown off or sink with the ship.

Instead, you would pay people $8,000 bucks apiece to stay, provide assurances that we're all in this together, that the ship is worth saving. You'd offer them a cruise when all this is over, just to prove that you believe the ship has a future.

People--single home buyers and investors alike--bought houses during the bubble because they believed (incorrectly) that it was a good investment, but not just based on the numbers alone. Sure, there was a desire to make money, but more than that, home ownership has historically functioned on a meta level as a source of security and prestige, a bulwark against the increasing riskiness of society, and as the only way for most ordinary people to acquire something that passes for wealth. I'd submit that even the greediest scammers had this American Dream kind of thinking, which really seems quaint by comparison with some of the other thinking out there.
 
Of course, it's time to talk about bankers and traders, the people who set up the bubble, cheered prices upwards, and are now, with the help of high-level bailouts that pay out to banks and leave individuals to swing in the wind, cheering prices on down again. (By the way, I'd suggest that those who think this crisis is all about the price of houses are flat-out wrong.)

For a glimpse at what is happening, please see this blog and the links. As far as I can tell, it's written by real-estate agents who are trying to do short sales and are discovering that the way the bailout has been structured actually encourages banks to let properties fall all the way into foreclosure.

http://activerain.com/blogsview/1243528/is-the-fdic-killing-short-sales-

For the bankers and traders, housing itself is an abstraction and the housing market is the only thing that's real, which is precisely backwards. Many of them simply cannot understand that the prime reason people are walking away from their houses is that they have realized that their homes are now viewed as a commodity and a falling one at that. Those bankers and traders who do grasp this concept are so divorced from reality that they figure that any fool who would view housing as anything other than a tradable asset deserves to lose his or her home and whatever else isn't nailed down.
 
This is why buying out bad mortgages at the bank level and paying banks to clean up the mess without doing much on the level of individual home mortgages or individual homeowners is a disaster.

All the banks can do is facilitate more churn and get paid to do it--and make no mistake, the bailout pays them to do it, handsomely. The "New" Indymac gets paid more for a foreclosure than a short sale, but for either of these transactions they get paid far more than the amount for which they bought the loan. So where's the motivation to give some poor sucker a loan modification? Nowhere. (Which is why I'm so glad that Amelie was able to get hers.) The enormous destabilizing effects of the housing crisis aren't their problem--they pay lip service to it and move on to collect their checks.

Banks and traders make piles of money by squeezing a relatively small amount of cash out of as many transactions as they can gin up. They're not going to support anything that means fewer transactions. They've got their own version of the American Dream: it's called the Uber-American Dream, and it sure as hell doesn't include doing what's right for neighborhoods or individuals beyond the travesty of "customer service" that goes along with presiding over a fleecing of one type or another. (It does, of course, include justifiably large bonuses for the Uber-Fleecers.)

Way back when all this started, I maintained that the right thing to do would be for the government to go into the hardest-hit neighborhoods and pay people to stay in their houses. Pay half a mortgage payment for five years, do short refinances, partner with homeowners, write down principals, whatever it took.

For my trouble, I got derision and catcalls. I was shocked to learn that people would rather hand billions of dollars to strangers than help out the guy down the street and a few blocks over who bought a house with an ARM and then couldn't sell it before the interest rates skyrocketed. Even if it meant that that guy's disaster impacted the whole neighborhood. 

So the bailout for ordinary people didn't happen, we got the bank bailout instead, and a whole raft of people is now living elsewhere, wherever elsewhere is.

Please note: It Is Not Over. And it's coming to a neighborhood near you.

Having pulled the floor out of housing prices and further destabilized the least stable among us, the crisis is now moving into the more stable neighborhoods, where joblessness and stock market losses are accomplishing what ARMS and No-Doc loans did in the first wave--making it impossible for people to meet their obligations. Another bottom to fall out, more foreclosures, and more transactions for the banks as people from the next neighborhood up the line desperately try to downsize ahead of the wave. And so on.

Please people, insist that our leaders provide us with TARRP--Troubled Asset Relief for Regular People. Continuing to trust the banks with this is just more paying the fox to foreclose on the henhouses.

Hi all, I need some help--I was reading Quinn's Buffalo Jump post and then I came to a part where a picture or video did not display--just one of those little symbols that means a picture won't display and then nothing.This has happened before and I've always been too lazy to try to fix it, but is there something I need to change on my computer so that I can finish the story?

Any help the cafe can offer would be much appreciated.

Todd Gitlin wonders if there's a rationale for the behavior in the Republican party right now, and (correctly, I think) surmises that stalling any kind of effective government or economic progress until the next election provides them with the best possible opportunity to increase their numbers in Congress. But it's more than that.

It's important to bear in mind that for the Lucrascenti (my name for the moneyed interests who really run the country,) chaos is not at all a bad outcome--and in fact offers its own opportunities for agenda advancement. For one thing, it's easier to steal money when you're not responsible for accounting for it.

Freed from the need to make sense, the establishment strategists can facilitate chaos and embrace every opportunity to point out that it's happening on Obama's watch. Obama ran on the idea that he would create positive change and clean up the mess left by the Republicans. As long as the Republican loyal following can't tell whether Obama is succeeding or failing, the establishment can count on a return to power once Obama's had his "turn."

Considered from this point of view, Republican shenanigans do more to discredit Obama than they do to discredit the Republicans, BECAUSE THE REPUBLICANS AREN'T IN POWER.

Joe Wilson disses the Prez? Prez can't control his congress. Economy still in trouble? What a failure Obama is. Afghanistan faltering? Soft on defense. Dissent in the Democratic ranks about how to do healthcare? Prez can't control his own guys. Golly, don't look at to us Republicans, we're having problems of our own right now.

It's all a sham, brought to you by the people who realized that stopping the production of oil in Iraq was even better for business than having it continue.

And in a couple of years it'll be time to shake off the cobwebs and advance the "mandate" again.

The crucial thing to remember is that this particular establishment strategy (I don't like to call it a Republican strategy because I think the establishment happens to use the Republican party as a convenience.) Anyway, to start that sentence again, the crucial thing to remember is that this establishment strategy isn't just aimed at discrediting Democrats, it's aimed at discrediting the idea that good/effective government, economic stability for ordinary people, fair taxation, etc. are possible at all.

Think in terms of lowering the price of the average person's vote by lowering the average person's expectations. 

SNL: Tina Fey (playing Sarah Palin) needs to explain health care reform as Al Franken's  Democratic Fairy Godmother.

Maybe I am smoking crack here, but I think turning Tina Fey's Sarah Palin into a Democrat and having her explain health care would be a great way to simplify the message.

Throw in a little Garrison Keillor and Marge from Fargo and you've got it done.

Trust me, this sketch will work   :^)  

Franken did a great job explaining Pre-existing Conditions, Equal Premiums, and no recission at the State Fair. He did it by patiently laying out the points in order and waiting until he got uh huhs from the crowd before moving on to the next ask. It was beautiful, clear and respectful. But, as always happens when people try to get through the Public Option stuff, he got lost in the weeds a little.

So Al needs to go to sleep wondering how he can help Barack Obama write a simplified speech and Sarah Palin, Democrat, needs to come to him in a dream as his Fairy Godmother and lay it out for him.

The key to the Public Option is to point out that the Government, meaning Taxpayers, (wink wink) already pick up 46% of the tab for Health Care. Most of it goes to Medicare, the VA, Schip, etc., which are Government programs and God knows they've got their flaws, but still, "Medicare's a heckuva lot better than kickin' Grandma in the ass with the frozen boot that sometimes I'd like to use on her."

"But here's the thing. Some of that money goes to hospitals to pay for uninsured people who use the emergency room for healthcare, then don't pay the bill. Yup, we the taxpayers are forking out the money to cover their care. Since we already pay it in the form of hospital subsidies n' stuff anyway, shouldn't we be able to hand those folks a health plan and say "Fer CryYieYie, get yourself a doctor and go to a clinic like the rest of us. I mean, we'd be doing ourselves a favor." (This is the old Minnesota "you'd be doing me a favor by takin' the rest of that hot dish" joke. It's also an outreach to the American sense of fair play which is a strong trait.)

"We can save a lot of money by makin' sure everybody's got a health plan--there might even be enough of that 46% left over for a little botox for those of us who have to look good for our jobs. Ok, I lied about the botox, that probably won't be covered."

There are a lot of ways to go with this, but the beautiful thing about having Tina Fey deliver the message as Sarah Palin, Democrat Fairy Godmother is that she can be engaging, make it simple and clear without having to be all pars-ey the way any Politician, including Franken, would have to be.

Anyone know how to get this idea to Franken & Fey on the Labor Day weekend before the presidential speech? Tall order, but what do we have to lose?

I didn't believe this at first when someone said it on a comments thread, but it is true.

http://www.bachmanncounseling.com/index.html

Make sure to take the time to go to the list of counselors and browse down. They must have found every Bible College mental health professional in Minnesota. Who knew there would even BE that many?

http://www.bachmanncounseling.com/counselors.html#LakeElmo

They accept most insurance plans, including, one assumes, payment from those dreadful government-run ones.

Ah, there's nothing like doing the Lord's work ministering to the populace for Caesar's good green money...much better than doing it for free like Jesus suggested.

***

This is really horrifying. It's one thing to think of the Bachmanns as rubes who don't understand health care, but these people have specific, high-level experience with the very issues they're bamboozling about.

They know perfectly well that a living will isn't the same as encouragement to commit suicide. They understand end-of-life and grief issues and in fact will counsel your kid about them (possibly throwing in a bit of religious opinion at the same time) for a fee.

Most of all, they understand, because they take insurance, how hard it is to get insurance companies to cover for mental health, and how poor people are just out in the cold if they try to get anyone to see them. (I learned this when I tried to help an adult with depression, ADHD and alcohol abuse issues get an appointment with a doctor. It seemed like it would be so easy but it was impossible.) They know this, but in order to protect their friends, their asses and their pocketbooks, they fight reform anyway. 

It's even more disgusting that they use religion as a cover for this blatant, insular commercialism.

I bet Christ is SO pissed.

Should we buy Afghanistan's opium crop in exchange for health care and other relatively simple things the Afghan people need? Then use the opium to manufacture legal drugs and sell them? If not, why not?

MiguelitoH2O's "Tough Guy" post gave rise to a complex and interesting discussion about Afghanistan. Hardnosed. Facty. I was glad to see Dan K back in action and in his element. Hardly an attaboy or co-sign in sight, just the occasional gruff compliment or "I'll concede the point" in the event of a serious rhetorical goring. (I enjoy my TPM Cafe in all its flavors, from blonde and creamy smooth to hot, dark and spiked with bathtub gin, so please don't think I'm recommending any particular mode here.)

But like I say, it was a good discussion, and I hope that some of it will be diced up and re-posted in future so those who missed it can partake. One point that kept coming up (and I hope I can adequately explain this) is that the situation on the ground is way more complicated than we think. Pakistan has nukes. People are poor. The religious aspect is complicated. AQ is not the Taliban, and vice versa. The opium crop is a huge factor. The country is gigantic and mountainous. They don't even speak English there. Etc.

What it comes down to is that it's tough for a US military effort to be anything other than asymetric and ultimately ineffective, especially when it comes to cultivating hearts and minds.

Then Saladin made a suggestion about the opium:

"Look this ain't rocket science. There is a simple solution- we make it legal and then buy it all up for medicine. We did it in the 70's in Turkey.

Check out this paper.

http://www.poppyformedicine.net/documents/Political_History_Poppy_Licensing_Turkey_May_2006

Bonus: Everybody loves painkillers."

This got me thinking, maybe every military base should include a children's clinic/hospital, and people could pay for their children's care with opium poppies. The kids would have to be brought in by their mother or some other female caregiver. There could also be stores, same form of payment. The object would be to create simple ways of working with what's actually there on the ground and with the people (MacGyver-ing) rather than trying to do more complicated military operations which fail.

Back at the beginning of the Afghanistan war, I remember reading that everywhere Osama bin Laden went, he brought a goat for dinner, which is one of the ways he cultivated loyalty. It seems like if we're going to stay in Afghanistan at all, we ought to be looking for what ordinary people want and figure out how to get it to them while cutting those other guys we don't like out of the deal. The Bush Administration chose to see enemies--maybe we need a more customer-service approach.

I know this will come off as gee-whiz, and I don't care. Those of you who are experts in this area can take it from here. I'm just saying that when it comes to protecting an area rife with nukes and enemies, it might be smart to figure out how to corner the market on good will, and if it takes spending a billion bucks on poppies, it could be the best billion we ever spent.

More bonuses: Poppies are pretty, and their seeds make for delicious bagels and strudels. 

I propose that the Canadians open up their health care system to any American who lives within 10 miles of the border.

The Americans would be charged whatever it is that Canadians spend per capita on health care (as a total percentage of their taxes, not the premiums which are tiny) plus some sort of monthly service charge for the privilege. Then, they'd have the same access to the system (including access to prescription medications) that Americans do, except for ambulance rides, because ambulances might have trouble at the border.

It would be interesting to see what would happen. My guess is that Americans might purchase this coverage for basic medical care, but maintain an extremely high-deductible policy in the event that they come down with some totally rare disease and need access to the world's smartest doctor.

Another guess: Americans would find that if they lived near a big Canadian city, their wait times for procedures or appointments wouldn't be as long as they thought. If they lived near a little town, basic care would be pretty easy to get but wait times for fancy stuff would be longer. (I've long maintained that part of the "wait time" story has more to do with living in the boonies than with the system itself.)

I know that Canada's current Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, would be unlikely to support this idea because a "run for the border" would embarrass his conservative political buddies down south. But maybe it could be tried in the more liberal provinces?

Very curious to know what the health care economists in the crowd would think of this idea as a single-payer trial balloon.

Here's one more angle on the mortgage foreclosure/short sale crisis.

This time it's about short sales, where an owner avoids foreclosure by selling a property for less than is owed on the mortgage. Investor digging in/refusal to accept reasonable short sale offers has the system totally stalled.  

This isn't good for taxpayers, because getting properties through the short sale process is one way of making sure that "the open market" (whatever that is anymore) takes responsibility for properties rather than various branches of govt. being stuck with managing vacant, vandalized properties in troubled neighborhoods.  

If you can make one more call to your congresscritters: they may not want to get involved because in theory these are private contracts, but since the taxpayers are the ultimate bagholders, they may be open to the idea.  

1. Consolidation in the mortgage industry has rolled most bad loans back to FNMA as the investor.  

2. FNMA has guidelines for accepting/rejecting short sale offers. They have an obligation to their investors (and to their ultimate investor, the fed gov) to get the best value for the mortgages. In troubled neighborhoods, where properties that go vacant have a high likelihood of being vandalized and rendered almost worthless ($0-$20k, almost a 100% loss from their original mortgage "values" ), it seems to me that FNMA ought to be encouraged to accept any remotely reasonable offer which will keep a property occupied and not vandalized. This will capture more value for shareholders in the long run as well as saving money for state, county and local governments who get stuck dealing with vacant properties.  

In other words, no more lockouts in vandalism-prone areas if there's any possibility of preventing them. Perhaps FNMA negotiators could be provided with maps of these areas to help them make their decisions. You may even be able to encourage FNMA to provide the loan servicers with these maps so that loan servicers will understand that if preserving values in these areas, vacancies are to be avoided at all costs.....  

Seems to me it's worth a try--if taxpayers are ultimately going to be holding the bag for the foreclosure crisis, which looks likely, getting private investors (the short buyers) to take up as much slack as possible would at least save taxpayers the cost of managing vacant properties!  

At at GOP town hall meeting in Redding, CA, attendee Bert Stead declared himself a "proud right wing terrorist" to a round of applause and the assurance of Congressman Herger that he's a "Great American." Earlier in his remarks, Stead mentioned that he could trace his ancestry back to the Mayflower, and that those people sure "didn't arrive with their hand out."

In this meeting, Stead and his Congressman demonstrated that 1. They don't know what a right-wing terrorist is, and 2. They are surprisingly unfamiliar with the story of the first American Thanksgiving, in which Native Americans saved a group of pilgrims by offering them enough food and supplies to get them through the winter. Funny. I thought it was a better-known story than that, what with all the talk about it in, like, kindergarten and stuff.

Newspaper article link is below. If anyone can secure the video, it would no doubt be very useful in the War on Brainlessness.

http://www.mtshastanews.com/news/x769902147/Congressman-Herger-calls-Obama-plan-threat-to-democracy

Look, I celebrate your right to freedom of speech, your right to share your opinion on health care, and indeed, your right to call your fellow Americans whatever the hell you please. But here are a few things to consider.

One: People who look like domestic terrorists scare away customers. You are standing in front of a business, and there's a strong likelihood that the capitalist who operates it would like you to go away.

Two: Shit happens. It's only a matter of time before some responsible gun owner comes home from one of these anti-universal Health Care events and leaves a firearm unattended, whereupon his kid will pick up the gun and shoot his baby sister in the face. Now: when that little girl shows up at one of the many trauma centers that those of us who aren't blinded by ideology are struggling to figure out how to pay for, what is your group going to do to help cover her bills? Pass the fucking hat?

Three: As I mentioned before, you guys are using the rhetoric, philosophy and activities of domestic terrorism. It's all just fun and war games until one of your compadres blows up a federal building and with it, a daycare center full of kids. I remember Timothy McVeigh. I remember the day. I remember the faces of the victims, their parents, their children.  I remember one of the dads who lost his wonderful daughter and dedicated his life to trying to forgive that son of a bitch. I remember Tim McVeigh's own dad, a decent enough guy, struggling to understand how his son could have shrugged off the death of children.

Where I'm going with this is that freedom brings with it a responsibility to look out for the common good, and that's what all us so-called "socialists" are trying to do here, figure out some way to provide health care for everybody at a price that won't break the bank. I don't see how standing there like a tool, impeding legitimate commerce, scaring your fellow Americans and putting people in danger is contributing to that goal.

To sum it up, you're free to work for the common good, or you can use your freedom to be a total asshole. Your decision--but if you decide to apply yourself to creating a solution along with the majority instead of pimping out your minority position with firearms, we'll be happy to see you at the solution table.

Now, get out of my way please. I'd like to go in and drink my goddamned coffee in peace. 

I'm still interested in finding a name for the Democrats who hang out on the left side of the party, swimming in the waters between Blue and Green, as it were. "Progressive" seems inappropriate because it's the name of an insurance company, and besides it's not that catchy.

Submit your suggestions as comments. Thanks!

Yellow Dogs, Blue Dogs...I have been trying to think of a new name for Progressive Reps, Senators and constituents, because Progressive is the name of an insurance company and somewhat undercuts our cause, I think.

What about Green Panthers? I think the cat reference gets at the idea that progressives vote Democratic because they find it convenient and could go Green if the Democratic party fails to suit.

I also like it that the inherent similarity to the Black Panther name will bug the crap out of the right. Let's let them fill the blogosphere with wild speculation about us rather than the other way round.

Catchy enough? What do you think?