WARNING: The videos below contain a lot of profanity. It seems the Baracka Flocka Flames controversy has heated up since the October 26 publication of Prez N the Hood: A Hip-Hop Parody Stirs Up Issues in the New York Times (video below; article requires log-in). America’s foremost old cranky black man, Stanley Crouch, had nothing [...]
[31 Oct 2010]
But the Great Recession was different: It was triggered by a financial meltdown brought on by excessive lending, reckless risk taking, the implosion of an unregulated shadow banking system that assumed that short-term money would always be available — and ignorant and careless borrowing by people and institutions. The key paragraph from Who can magically [...]
[15 Oct 2010]
Washington is absolutely committed to the proposition that 9/11 came out of the blue. There’s no historical context. Because if you insist that there ought to be some historical explanation for 9/11 — which is different from saying that there is a justification for 9/11; there cannot be a justification — and you look for [...]
[2 Oct 2010]
Contrary to the popular narrative, most foreclosures were not on sprawling “McMansions” but rather on modest properties that were typically valued significantly below area median values at origination. One of the key findings from Dreams Deferred: Impacts and Characteristics of the California Foreclosure Crisis, a report by the Center for Responsible Lending. You can also [...]
[21 Sep 2010]
Say you bought a house for $350,000 in July 2006 — those were the days of 100% financing, so you borrowed $350,000 on a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage at 6.8%. The house is now worth $280,000, but your mortgage balance is $334,000. The current rate for a 30-year fixed-rate loan, if you could get one, is [...]
[16 Sep 2010]
The delinquency rate on investment homes where the original mortgage was more than $1 million is now 23 percent. For cheaper investment homes, it is about 10 percent. That’s from yesterday’s New York Times piece, Biggest Defaulters on Mortgages Are the Rich. Makes sense, actually. Rich people can avoid the fallout of foreclosure more easily [...]
[10 Jul 2010]
The open standards won because any kid could download the rules of the game, understand how they work, and make a contribution. — It taught us that we can make government heel. That’s a quote from Carl Malamud, of Public.Resource.org in Washington’s I.T. Guy in The American Prospect. Nancy Scola does a wonderful job of [...]
[8 Jul 2010]
If the people who turn up voluntarily at the polls reinforce our worst political instincts toward conflict and obstruction, we could dilute their influence by roping absolutely everyone into the process. That’s how Miller-McCune sums up William Galston’s cure for extreme partisanship. Galston is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. Galston’s idea to mandate [...]
[8 Jul 2010]
[T]he kind of people who choose to immigrate are really people who look a lot like the American ideals. They’re ambitious. They’re fairly self-confident. They’re risk-takers. They’re kind of strong, hearty people. They’re usually driven because they want to protect their families, which are on the borderline of really falling apart because there’s actually no [...]
[23 May 2010]
Historically, Mexican-Americans have generally been considered “white” in Texas; they served in white units of the segregated military, including the National Guard, and were allowed, during the Jim Crow years, to marry white (but not black) partners. In the early ’40s, the Texas Legislature even passed a “Caucasian Race Resolution,” which affirmed their status as [...]
[7 May 2010]