Now here’s a victims’ fund we can all get behind: delinquent borrowers being foreclosed upon by wicked bank executives. The WSJ:
‘Fund in works for victims of foreclosure mess,” announced the Washington Post’s front page yesterday. Sorry to report that the Post was not referring to taxpayers who have already spent hundreds of billions of dollars cleaning up this mess.
So who exactly are the victims in this story? The Post describes “homeowners who were wronged,” but the writers are also not referring to the roughly 90% of mortgage borrowers who are paying on time. As for the proposed compensation fund, the Post compares it to those set up for victims of the Gulf oil spill, the shootings at Virginia Tech and the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.
Readers may begin to suspect that one of these funds is not like the others. For starters, we’re not aware of any delinquent borrowers being killed by bank executives. In fact it’s not easy to find any injury at all. The Post doesn’t name anyone who’s been harmed, and neither did Connecticut Senator Christopher Dodd as he opened Tuesday’s Banking Committee hearing on the problems in the mortgage servicing industry. Don’t expect any further clarification at Thursday’s House Financial Services headline hunt.
Readers will recall that the foreclosure mini-scandal began in September with revelations that “robo-signers” at mortgage firms were signing foreclosure documents that they had not personally reviewed. Instead, they had improperly relied on the work of colleagues.
“[I]f a settlement transfers more wealth from investors and taxpayers (who now stand behind most mortgages) to delinquent borrowers, the least the attorneys general could do is stop calling them victims.”
“… In the words of a horrified Israeli aviation security expert, speaking to a Fox News crew: ‘You cannot allow the security personnel to see, and show the entire world, images of naked bodies of women and men!’ Amid ongoing American insanity, this laconic Israeli, Isaac Yeffet, has been making the rounds on CNN, PBS, Fox News—has been doing so for a decade, at least.
Yeffet is a former member of the Israeli Secret Service, and was once in charge of security for El Al. Almost a year has past since Fox News probed him for his opinion about the ‘full body scanners.’ Nearly ten years have gone by since the man testified before an equally idiotic Congress.
No other western country is a bigger target for terrorists than Israel. Yet no other nation runs a better (largely privatized), less invasive, smarter, security system, whose able agents simply talk to travelers. These profilers understand that 99.9 percent of fliers are ‘bona fide’ (Yeffet’s favored bon mot). ‘Shoes aren’t removed, passengers aren’t body scanned, and there are no pat downs,’ confirms the New York Times. A ‘hand search’ is seldom conducted, and only with probable cause.
Fox News wanted tough answers; Yeffet gave them smart ones. In countless news interviews over the years, Yeffet has implied that there is no substitute for intelligence—intelligence as in smarts; as in that dreaded G Factor. (No, Cosmo Magazine readers, that’s not the same as the G Spot.) …”
UPDATE I (Nov. 19): This country follows a mushy-headed maxim whereby to be a victim (of crime, terrorism, one’s own stupidity) is to be automatically conferred with oracular wisdom. This nonsense has been applied to any relative of those murdered on 9/11.
Two such Delphic creatures have praised the TSA home-grown terrorism and quipped that it would be far more productive to go long with the probe and grope routines.
I give you “Mary and Frank Fetchet, whose son, Bradley James Fetchet, was killed on Sept. 11. [They] have also issued a statement in support of the new measures, citing the failed Christmas Day plot last December as a reminder that ‘comprehensive security measures’ are still needed.”
Mary Fetchet appeared on FoxNews this morning, with a member of the (honey) Blond Squad, who herself quipped that news people are featuring a small noisy bunch of travelers which is in a minority.
Another believer is Alice Hoagland. The fact that her son was killed in the Twin Towers gives her the ostensible authority to recommend the inflicted rogering and radiating routines.
UPDATE II: In the footage of the agents feeling up every day Americans the mug of the offender is always concealed. Why? Isn’t it the victim who should remain anon? Even the people broadcasting these assaults on flying America have their head screwed on like Linda Blair’s in the Exorcist.
And it’s so imbecilic. They’re going thorough the motions knowing full-well that they’ll never meet a terrorist; 99.99999% of the individuals they violate are “bona fide.”
UPDATE III (Nov. 20): I call the liberal neocon Judy Miller Mrs. Chalabi. She was one of the “presstitutes” who enabled the invasion of Iraq from her perch at the New York Times. She’s no journalist. She’s a media person. Big difference.
During her tenure at the Gray Lady, promoting Bush’s war, Judy made sure to exclude all analysis (including from highly regarded experts) that didn’t comport with the Bush “thesis” about Iraq. Her preferred sources of information were corrupt parties like Egypt, Jordan, ex-KGB man Vladimir Putin, and Ahmad Chalabi, the man who fed a willing administration phony intel on Iraq so as to fire-up the War Party.
Today, on Fox News Watch, Judy the non-journalist, said that the American media had not covered the Israeli airports security methods.
Nothing mainstream media write is original. We guerrilla journalists and writers are always ahead of the pack, but Ms. Miller, like her colleagues, does not consider that a story/angle has been covered in earnest until she or her colleagues have stumbled upon it.
Imagine: Judith Chalabi being a respected panelist on a program about media bias.
On the same stage, Kirsten Powers, a liberal member of the Fox News Blond Squad, expressed her satisfaction with the porn protocol at the airports, and wept in sympathy for TSA workers. Yeah, “It’s Hard Out Here for a Pimp.”
It’s an analogy that occurs on page 108: “Parrot-brained politicians.”
As you know, the author of the much-reviled columns, “In Defense of Michael Vick,” Parts One and Two, loves parrots and has two (T. Cup and Oscar-Wood). Parrots are enchanting, highly intelligent creatures.
Besides, can any politician problem-solve as this magic macaw does? Tan’s Japanese admirers are enthralled. As well they should be. Watch:
Jokes aside, Derb has a list of “deep technical skills” required to power a modern economy (p. 112). Other than the “structural engineer,” whom you would hope has a considerable facility with theory/math too (if those bridges are to stand), I don’t see how trades such as “TV studio lighting,” or “orthodontistry” (as opposed dentistry), horticulture, aircraft maintenance, crane operating, or bond trading quite qualify as “deep technical skills.”
(Where do electrical engineers and computer scientists fall? These are the people who supply the dumb, difficult and dispensable young—the twittering twits—with the playthings that keep their brainwaves from flatlining.)
(Rep.) Ron Paul does the right thing with characteristic brevity. As WND.COM reports, Paul’s H.R. 6416 “is just two sentences long, stating:
No law of the United States shall be construed to confer any immunity for a federal employee or agency or any individual or entity that receives federal funds, who subjects an individual to any physical contact (including contact with any clothing the individual is wearing), X-rays, or millimeter waves, or aids in the creation of or views a representation of any part of a individual’s body covered by clothing as a condition for such individual to be in an airport or to fly in an aircraft. The preceding sentence shall apply even if the individual or the individual’s parent, guardian, or any other individual gives consent.
“‘We have seen the videos of terrified children being grabbed and probed by airport screeners. We have read the stories of Americans being subjected to humiliating body imaging machines and/or forced to have the most intimate parts of their bodies poked and fondled,’ Paul said.”
“‘This TSA version of our rights looks more like the ‘rights’ granted in the old Soviet Constitutions, where freedoms were granted to Soviet citizens – right up to the moment the state decided to remove those freedoms.'”
UPDATE II (Nov. 18): I agree with Myron that the Paul bill must provide for probable cause searches, as the Israelis do. More in my WND column, tonight. Does Paul exclude those provisions? I would have preferred a reiteration of the Fourth Amendment.
