Bribery I

I would be an utter fool to say that I had just been offered a bribe to shut up about a good government reform I've been pursuing in Lake County, Indiana. I'd be a lot dumber than I actually am to not notice, nor to not know what the end of the line is.

Just for the record, the data is already dispersed. The only control anybody else has at this point is whether it goes out in a controlled or uncontrolled fashion.

Foreclosure Cooties

I had an interesting conversation regarding the US housing market. One of the current problems that does not get the attention it deserves is the difficulty that many banks are having foreclosing on delinquent loans. The local banks that originated the loans and sold them into Real Estate Mortgage Investment Conduits (REMICs) can't do it. The REMICs are also having trouble. They sold the mortgages to investors. Investors, however, do not seem to want to foreclose themselves.

Up until now, this reluctance has been a mystery to me but no longer. It turns out that the investors are suing the REMICs on the basis that they were defrauded. Given that prospectuses include promises that the REMICs had the underlying notes and they could be inspected at any time and this was a lie, it seems like they have a pretty good case. So long as the investors don't touch the foreclosure process, they are not responsible for any paperwork defects in the underlying mortgages. But if they start cooperating with the REMICs in the foreclosure process, they would instantly gain the headaches of the huge paperwork mess that so many mortgages have.

So the banks are being assaulted left and right for their foul ups. It makes you wonder why they ever bothered.

Fixing the Obamacare CBO Fraud

When Obamacare was passed under the previous Democrat Congress, it provided for 10 years of increased taxation (starting now) and 6 years of benefits that, on net, will reduce the deficit by $100B over those ten years according to the House budget estimators, the CBO. The GOP rightly called foul but the Democrats and their helpers in the media focus like a laser beam on the CBO estimate.

The GOP chairmen who have jurisdiction really need to ask the CBO to rerun their 10 year estimate this year. This will reduce the subsidy years from 4 to 3 and will have the advantage of at least one year of real-world data to better project tax revenue from. The inevitable headline will be one of Obamacare not being as good a financial deal as advertised. This will be especially important for all those pro-Obamacare Senators up for election in 2012.

The fraud was always going to unravel but by re-running the CBO estimates (every year until the thing is repealed if necessary) the GOP can simply, reasonably, go along with the Democrats and watch as the Democrats are hoist by their own CBO petard.

Misquoting Adams

I just looked over a clip of Bill Maher insulting the tea party movement. In it he has a direct quote from Adams saying

This would be the best of all possible worlds if there were no religion in it.

This is pretty damning and a home run for the "Founders were deists" school of thought. Unfortunately for Maher it's a misquotation (misleading really). The full, in context quote provides the opposite meaning

Twenty times, in the course of my late reading, have I been on the point of breaking out, 'this would be the best of all possible worlds, if there were no religion in it!!!!' But in this exclamation, I should have been as fanatical as Bryant or Cleverly. Without religion, this world would be something not fit to be mentioned in public company—I mean hell.

Commie Porn

Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin has been restored and is being re-released. Go ahead and look for the commentary talking about the evils of communism. It's not there. Can you imagine DW Griffith's Birth of a Nation or Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will having revivals without at least a passing condemnation of racism and naziism respectively?

Disgusting.

I'm too Big

Well, too big for a liver donation for a young child anyway. It was a strange process and they let me down gently but apparently one can only cut down a liver so much for an infant donation.

Enlightened Greed

PenGun had an interesting comment earlier.

Disappointing but not surprising given the greed driven agenda, I mean where would you get enlightened self interest from in that salivating morass of acquisition ... greed.

He seems to think that enlightened self-interest is different from greed in some way. It is not. Enlightened self-interest is smart greed. It is greed that sees other utility besides money, besides power. It is greed that sees that the universe does not have to be a zero sum game. It seems like the right sees unenlightened greed and wants to enlighten it, harness it, and make it a positive while the left just wants to eliminate greed itself, which like most core aspects of human nature, is simply impossible.