I've seen this happen over and over to wealthy, "perfect" families. I'm sure it happens to less perfect families, too, but not in such a noticeable or attractive way. So here, without peer-reviewed underpinnings of any kind, is my take on the situation.

It's pretty clear that the Sanfords shoveled all the passion out of their marriage over the years in order to float the boat of ambition and deal with the practical concerns of their life. (Think of their statements: "He was told in no uncertain terms not to see her." "I'm trying to fall back in love with my wife." This thing got reduced to a business arrangement, perhaps to the consternation of both partners.)

The sad truth is that creating the illusion of the All-American family is so much work that it tends to suck any real joy away from the project. Over time, the partners close off to each other emotionally in favor of the appearance of love. The result is two people who are barricaded off from each other far more than they are to anyone else. Which is how they get into trouble. There's nothing wrong with Jenny Sanford--she's a beautiful, smart woman with, one presumes, some "magnificent parts" of her own. And even Sanford seems, if not the brightest bulb on the tree, a guy that some woman could love. But these two sure don't seem to love each other now.

The male midlife crisis is one endgame of this dynamic--there's another one in which the last kid leaves for college and the wife files for divorce with little explanation. "Mom moved out and she won't even tell Dad why!"

I guess my point is that it takes years in a failing marriage to get to this stage. Despite a surfeit of programs that are supposed to teach people how to stay happily married, "marriage counseling" is still jokingly referred to as "divorce preparation." Most of us are just not that good at being married, overall, and it's hard to figure out why.

The saddest thing about this whole situation is that I'm pretty sure that the sweeping love affair probably was doomed from the start, if not by circumstance, then by the sheer difficulty of maintaining a loving relationship for any length of time in reality. My take: if Sanford and Chapur thought that their relationship, however passionate, had a chance of surviving the harsh day-to-day challenges of reality, he wouldn't have come back from Argentina at all.

People say torture provides poor intelligence because once you're torturing a guy, he'll say pretty much anything to get you to stop. That looks like a pretty good reason not to do it if you're interested in the truth.

But wait now, if you're the Bush administration, and truth is just one interesting aspect of what you're all about, you can make something of this. Let your guy know what you want him to say, and beat the hell out of him until he says it. Then present it as truth, because it comes from a source "who had a reason to know." No doubt about it, information whispered by a half-dead man into the ear of his interrogator has a certain gravitas, like words spoken by lovers in moments of exultation, or the confession of a dying man to a priest. People think twice before questioning information like that, which is what makes it golden. 

Not actionable? Why son, it's the most actionable intelligence there is, because you can take any action you want based upon it. Refer obliquely to it in a press release, feed it into the legal justification machine, even go all out and invade a whole country (with oil) in a thoroughly nutty search for a terrorist connection that, let's face it, you just made up.

I suspect that as we delve even deeper into the "reasoning," such as it is, for the torture program, we'll discover this aspect lurking in the background: "Yup, we tortured 'em so they'd tell us all kinds of BS that we could pretend was true. And once that information was out there, we used it to justify going further, taking away more liberties, scaring people more. Yessiree, torture works--it works very well indeed. For us."

In a moving ceremony today, John Walker Lindh, the "American Taliban" convicted of treason in the wake of the Sept. 11 disaster and resulting war with Afghanistan, handed off the "enemy combatant" t-shirt he has worn for the past eight years to Jake DeSantis, a former employee of AIG Corporation who has refused to return his negotiated compensation, controversially dubbed a "bonus," to American taxpayers, electing to donate the money instead.

"Man, it's weird," opined Lindh in his remarks prior to the presentation. "One day, you're just a feckless kid from Marin County, or an egghead from MIT in Jake's case, out in the world doing what you more or less believe in. The next day history catches up with you and you're in the bright lights with everybody calling you a traitor. I can't say the last eight years have been great for me or that I don't kind of want to scream 'Your turn, asshole!' to Jake. I mean, guys like him are exactly the guys I was trying to fight against. But wearing this Enemy Combatant t-shirt isn't easy, and on a human level I hope he doesn't end up dead or spending 20 years in prison. I'm pretty sure he has more friends in high places than I did, so it doesn't seem likely."

DeSantis, after accepting the Enemy Combatant t-shirt, said only "I bet all you Liberal freaks are thinking 'Hey, what goes around comes around.' I told you I'm giving the money to charity, just like Jesus would have. Now either crucify me or get off my effing back."

No elected officials have yet commented on the event.

All this talk about reforming banks, creating green jobs and reviving the credit markets gives me a warm feeling about us rolling up our collective American sleeves and doing...something.  

But how will we know it's working? Lately, we've all been checking the Dow Jones Industrial Average, to see whether the people who got us into this mess in the first place approve of the proposed solutions. And that's just weird. But what to do?

I have a hunch that a crucial measurement should be in the arena of housing, where all this began. And it shouldn't be in housing sales, because unless the number of foreclosures drops, sales will just represent a downward spiral of forced bargain-basement selling. (A cellar of sellers, so to speak.) In fact, maybe the measurement should be of number of homeowners saved from foreclosure or numbers of upside-down loans stabilized--numbers which are shockingly low even after months of discussing the issue.

I was struck by the lukewarm response to Bertha Lewis' post on ACORN's activities to stop foreclosures.  As CEO of ACORN, Ms Lewis is surely the Warren Buffet of poor people.

I'm a little uncomfortable with direct action tactics myself, and I could take issue with ACORN's representation of the foreclosed as hapless victims of the man--which I think has unintentionally contributed to the misunderstanding that the foreclosed are either inept or malicious. But who's going to quibble about whether the person who issued the hurricane warning ought to have worn a red suit or a blue one: ACORN saw this problem coming a mile away and has consistently been on the homeowners' side with a view toward fixing it.

I'm glad to see ACORN and others seemingly scrap the "workout options" presented by the banks, which are proving ineffective, in favor of a more radical approach. It would be interesting to hear more from Ms. Lewis about whether that's what ACORN is doing, and to know whether it's possible to build a consensus around that more radical approach. Testing here at TPM would be useful.

In any case, a critical measurement for how we are doing will be how many homeowners (and perhaps even how many rental property owners!) are made whole and able to provide stable housing for ordinary people once again.

I'm pretty sure it's a number that none of the big players have dared to look at yet. It's up to all of us to demand that they do so, because our future depends on it. 

In all the discussion about how to save the country from this terrible recession, I haven't seen a single actual idea surface for direct help to ordinary people (i.e. the recessed) as a means of stimulating demand or creating a trickle-up effect which would eventually restore the health of the financial markets. I do hear "Save the Credit Markets!" "Rejigger the Banks!" "Green Jobs!" "Lower CEO Pay!" "Rebuild Our Infrastructure" "Get the Dow to Rise Again!" It gives me a warm feeling about us rolling up our collective sleeves and doing...something.  

Why is this? It's all supposed to be about restoring public confidence, but has anyone asked the public what would make them feel more confident? When I talk with members of the public that I know, I hear: fear about housing values, pretty much everyone's only real source of security; fear about jobs, the other source of security; and as a distant third, Wall Street and the banks.

And yet, what's the first thing we all do when the puffs of smoke rise from Washington indicating that an idea has surfaced? We check the Dow Jones Industrial Average, to see whether the people who got us into this mess in the first place approve of the proposed solutions. Weird. Why do we do that?

Let's pretend for a moment that our representatives were elected by voters and not by corporations. What are the measuring tools we should use to determine whether the solutions are working for us? We can be patient--I mean, what choice do we have?--but it seems to me that we ought to be talking about how we the people will know when it's time to be more confident.

I have a hunch that one crucial measurement should be in the arena of housing, where all this began. And it shouldn't be in housing sales but in number of foreclosures, because unless the number of foreclosures drops, sales will just represent a downward spiral of forced bargain-basement selling. (A cellar of sellers, so to speak.) In fact, maybe the measurement should be of number of homeowners saved from foreclosure or numbers of upside-down loans stabilized--numbers which I suspect are shockingly low even after months of discussing the issue.

I was struck by the lukewarm response to Bertha Lewis' post on ACORN's activities to stop foreclosures.

As CEO of ACORN, Ms Lewis is surely the Warren Buffet of poor people. I'm a little uncomfortable with direct action tactics myself, and I could take issue with ACORN's representation of the foreclosed as hapless victims of the man--which I think has unintentionally contributed to the misunderstanding that the foreclosed are either inept or malicious. But at this point, that would sort of be like quibbling over whether the person who issued the hurricane warning ought to have worn a red suit or a blue one. ACORN is the only organization I know of that saw this problem coming a mile away and has consistently been on homeowners' side with a view toward fixing it.

I would like to see ACORN and others scrap the "workout options" presented by the banks, which have been revealed as ineffective, in favor of a more radical approach. It would be interesting to hear more from Ms. Lewis about whether that's what ACORN is doing, and to know whether it's possible to build a consensus around that more radical approach. Testing that here at TPM would be useful.

In any case, a critical measurement for how we are doing will be how many homeowners (and perhaps even how many rental property owners!) are made whole and able to provide stable housing for ordinary people once again.

I'm pretty sure it's a number that none of the big players have dared to look at yet. It's up to all of us to demand that they do so, because our future depends on it. 

Hello America.

As you know, things are pretty tough and getting tougher. I've been working on getting some things going to help you out, but it's not going well. Now that the Republicans in Congress are off the hook for actually getting anything done, they feel even freer than before to talk up their stupid ideas as if they made sense. And unfortunately, many of my Democratic friends seem incapable of running Congress like they own the place. I could go on and on.

But never mind all that; here's my proposal.

Forget the "giant stimulus," with its creepy-sounding idea that if we just spend enough we can mysteriously jumpstart demand for stuff. You all know deep down that you can't pay for any more stuff anyway.

Forget bailing out the banks. They want you to wait for prosperity to trickle down to you after they're all taken care of, and if that means that your house is foreclosed on and you go bankrupt in the meantime, tough luck.

Let's do it the other way round. The banks can dammned well wait until you're stable enough to start making your house payments again and prosperity trickles up. Keeping you and your neighbors in your homes, humble though they may be, is the first step.

Forget this giant omnibus bill stuff. If the Republicans are going to pick the thing to death, let's give 'em something to pick at. From now on, we are going to propose single-issue bills based on doing the right thing for ordinary Americans. I will veto any bill that comes to my desk with an add-on of any kind, as well as any bill that smacks of having been written by industry lobbyists. We'll get this fight out in the open for your approval. Republicans will threaten to fillibuster, and I say let 'em go ahead. It will be fun to watch them try to explain, hour after hour, why a bill plainly in the interest of ordinary Americans is actually an insult to Democracy itself.

Gradually, things will start to get done, because all of you will be calling your elected representatives to say "Hey, that's a good bill--get it passed," or "For crying out loud, stop blocking the bill for energy-saving light bulbs in schools."  It's a hard way to do it, but it will work.

It's hard to say where we will be at the end of all this. Given that much of what passed for prosperity over the last eight years was fabricated, some of us may not be as rich as we thought we were. But if we, as a government made up of human beings, act in the interests of most of us, we will end the next few years as a better, more stable, kinder nation. 

Please--I can't do this alone. Your patience and your advocacy are required here; you need to keep making calls and knocking on doors if you want change, more now than ever. Just keep asking me, Congress, and your State and local officials to focus on doing what's right.

Thank you. 

Ok, so this is not the best reason to do something about the foreclosure crisis, but it's an example of one more unexpected effect of leaving many thousands of empty homes just sitting around. Abandoned swimming pools breed mosquitoes, which carry West Nile virus. Some cities are stocking the pools with minnows to eat the mosquito larvae.

At first I thought this must be a hoax, but it seems to be true. (Excerpt from an article about the Phoenix area posted below.)

Gives one pause.

: 13-Jun-08
Country: US
Author: Tim Gaynor

Public health workers in Maricopa County, which includes the cities of the Phoenix valley, are breeding thousands of so-called mosquitofish to gobble up larvae that thrive in the green pools of abandoned homes across the county.

West Nile virus, which came to the United States from Africa in the late 1990s, is now endemic in the county. Severe cases can produce high fever, stupor, tremors and paralysis, and can prove fatal.

Following up on pseudocyant's post which was pretty specific to Guantanamo and vengeance, I'm going to suggest that however we resolve our significant national problems moving forward, we should do it in ways that proudly repudiate pretty much everything Dick Cheney ever said or did.

Go ahead. Cast off your Cheneys.

Cross "screw the other guy before he screws you" off your to-do list. Replace it with "work toward an economy that rewards fairness and compassion at least as much as it rewards vicious, winner-take-all competition." Ignore the sound of Cheney muttering and gnashing his teeth. Shut up, Dick.

It will take some practice to cast off the Cheneys that have held us fast for so long. A couple of nights ago I was at dinner with a wealthy, successful guy who said he really believed that votes ought to be portioned out according to the amount of taxes people pay. Even though it's rude to contradict the guy buying dinner, this un-American and ridiculous idea should have earned a stern response from me. But my Cheney clamped my jaw shut, and I settled for a wan remark about being pretty committed to the one-person-one-vote system. I guess maybe I've been Cheneyed--or Dicked, if you prefer, to the point where I just can't find the words, or the thoughts, exactly, to respond to people who believe success means never having to live with the consequences of what they say. It's like having to watch A Christmas Carol with no ghosts and Cheney playing Scrooge. 

But as this holiday season rolls inexorably forward toward what promises to be one of the most timid Christmases in our collective memory, there's a story I can't get out of my mind. It's the story of the poor bastard who took the temporary job at Wal-Mart and got trampled to death for his troubles. OK, technically he died of a heart attack, but if you need to get technical about it, I might suggest you are being a Dick. Cheney, that is.

There is so much in this story that demonstrates how low our Cheneys have cast us. Temporary. Employee. Wal-Mart. Black Friday. Human chain formed (apparently with a stunning level of incompetence and lack of regard for human life) to hold back a populace anxious, angry, frightened and confused to such a level of obnoxiousness that it went berzerk--so crazy in fact that when shoppers were asked to leave the store after Wal-Mart guy's tragic death, they refused to go without their doorbuster deals in hand. Behold, my friends, Dickvegas, a place that Cheney happily helped create but would make sure he was rich enough never to have to patronize.

One of the profound things about the story of Jesus is that human beings embody the traits of both Jesus and the people who murdered him. In this sense, we are all Wal-Mart guy now, or could be, and even if only out of--Cheney-approved--self-preservation, we should take a serious look at Dickvegas. (I don't shop at Wal-Mart myself, and probably neither do you, but please work with me here.) By extension, we are also the Cheney-ized rabble who bravely stepped forward to shop where few shoppers have shopped before--next to the body of a dead man.

My new year's resolution is going to be that the America I live in after New Year's Day doesn't have to be Disneyland, but it's sure as heck not going to be Dickvegas. This won't be easy--Dickishness, it seems, is everywhere, even in ourselves. But it seems worth trying to cast away the meanness of the Cheney "reality" in favor of one that invites the participation of our better selves. And anyway, now that we can't afford the distraction of shopping, what else do we have to do but look inside and outside ourselves, and get to work?

People talk a lot about not wanting to reward people who made bad decisions about buying houses. But who exactly are the bad decisionmakers?

On the heels of Dr. Warren's New York Times assertion that any fix to the economy needs to be a fix for households, (Thank you!) I would just like to clarify one point for the TPM readership who may not be following this issue closely.

When Paulson and his colleagues talk about issuing mortgage loan guarantees, they aren't talking about anything calculated to prevent homeowners from losing their homes. They are talking about ways for mortgage companies and investors to get paid even if (or more precisely, when) homeowners default on their loans and are foreclosed upon.

This is one reason banks aren't making significant loan modifications for homeowners, and why the much-touted "Hope for Homeowners" plan has only 42 applications to date. If you were a bank, would you make significant loan modifications for homeowners when you can foreclose on them and then get the entire amount of their loan plus interest from the government?

Unless we come up with a useful plan for keeping people in their houses, nearly every loan undertaken from 1998 forward will soon be underwater because of the huge amount of unsellable real estate on the market. (Since the number of people who now qualify for a mortgage is less than the number of people who qualified in previous years, those foreclosed-on houses aren't going to fill back up anytime soon.) 

If you think this is crazy, please call your elected representatives and demand a plan that will keep people in their homes and neighborhoods.

A gal can dream, can't she? In any case, I hope a few people will call their reps and ask for this speech.

So the new theory is that a massive government spending program--or "infrastructure investment program" will get us out of the mess we're in.

I'm very ambivalent about the "we have to spend a ton of money" theme. It will sound frivolous to overspent, maxed out, financially exhausted Americans, and will really grind the tails of those who have patiently invested over the years only to have their savings deteriorate almost overnight.

Strangely enough, what I think the government needs to do is stop staring at the mechanics of the economy and just talk with "the real America," if you will. Here's the speech I dream of George Bush delivering before Thanksgiving (or Obama after Jan 20 if it takes that long):

"We have a real housing mess here, and I know that's upsetting for Americans because we all treasure the land, the homes and neighborhoods that support our lives. We in your government value your willingness to invest in your homes and take out debt to pay for them, but in the regulatory environment over the past few years, we lost sight of that. We are partially responsible for what has happened here--we set it up so that some in the finance community could play fast and loose with your debt by handing out trick mortgages and others could make money betting against your ability to pay them. We are sorry for the trouble we have caused.

We are going to repair this, and restore the relationship between you, your government, and the financial community. We're not going to tell you to go shopping--we tried that, and we all ended up with a lot of stuff but not much security. So we are going to take a more careful approach.

As of today, foreclosures are suspended for all occupied homes properly maintained by their owner. The loophole that allowed some to make money by betting against your ability to make your mortgage payments is closed. We have embarked on a program to find a way that every person, rich or poor, who wants to stay in their home can do so, with dignity and at fair rates that take into account the current value of your home, not necessarily the price you paid during the bubble market of the past few years. We will begin this program with bubble mortgages in the hardest-hit neighborhoods and work our way up the line until housing stabilizes and more importantly, your confidence is restored.

We also promise to undertake reasonable steps to invest in infrastructure that all Americans can use, enjoy, and profit from. We won't overspend, because unfortunately, your government has some big debt to pay as well, but you can be assured of some careful attention being paid to education, "green" industry, and ...etc.

Moving forward, your input will be appreciated. We will do our best to clear the lobbyists out of our hallways so that we can better represent ordinary people who need to be heard. Please be patient with us during this process, and stay in it with us. Government of the people, by the people and for all of the people, not just some of the people, is not easy to achieve. But this election has shown us that participation in the political process has a bright future. We look forward to embracing that future with all 300 million of you who make America what it is.

Thank you, happy holidays, and God Bless America."

Hello everyone,

I am finally starting a blog to talk about the foreclosure crisis, which I believe is the financial and psychological heart of our current financial crisis. I will also be blogging at

www.ForeclosureArk.com

Ark not as in Arkansas, but as in "get on the Ark before we're all swept away by the flood."

I'll be talking about the situation and outlining various plans that could help. I hope that many of you, especially those with financial experience, will help with participation, advice and critique.

Thank you,

erica