Wowsers.

A pretty shocking video from a question/answer during a David Horowitz presentation in a UC school, via The Corner.

I was trying to figure out if there's any way that her last answer might have come off differently than she meant it. But I can't find any other way to take it.

Scary Thought of the Day

The U.S. Treasury released new data on the health of the government's Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP). The HAMP program seeks to provide homeowners who are delinquent on their mortgages a chance to modify the terms of their loans in an effort to stave off foreclosure. (Full disclosure: I help run the numbers to determine the cost of the HAMP program to the government.)

The data look really bad. Here's how Calculated Risk sums it up:

If we look at the HAMP program stats (see page 5), the median front end DTI [debt to income ratio, which includes just mortgage debt] before modification was 44.9% - up slightly from 44.8% last month. And the back end DTI [debt to income ratio that includes both mortgage and all other additional debt, like car loans, credit card debt, taxes, etc.,] was an astounding 80.2% .

Think about that for a second: over 80% of the borrower's income went to servicing debt. And it is over 64% after the modification. Do they have a life?

Just imagine the characteristics of the borrowers who can't be converted.

The data say that the median homeowner applying to the HAMP program has 80 cents of every dollar she makes going toward paying debt.

How is that possible?

Where We Go From Here

Ross Dohout, the conservative op-ed columnist for the NYT, has found his voice:

Taken case by case, many of these policy choices are perfectly defensible. Taken as a whole, they suggest a system that only knows how to move in one direction. If consolidation creates a crisis, the answer is further consolidation. If economic centralization has unintended consequences, then you need political centralization to clean up the mess. If a government conspicuously fails to prevent a terrorist attack or a real estate bubble, then obviously it needs to be given more powers to prevent the next one, or the one after that.

The C.I.A. and F.B.I. didn't stop 9/11, so now we have the Department of Homeland Security. Decades of government subsidies for homebuyers helped create the housing crash, so now the government is subsidizing the auto industry, the green-energy industry, the health care sector ...

The pattern applies to personnel as well as policy. If Robert Rubin's mistakes helped create an out-of-control financial sector, then naturally you need Timothy Geithner and Lawrence Summers — Rubin's protégés — to set things right. After all, who else are you going to trust with all that consolidated power? Ron Paul? Dennis Kucinich? Sarah Palin?

MSNBC...

So we, the public, clearly don't have much information thus far on the Faisal Shazhad, the man arrested for the attempted Times Square bombing the other day.

Without presupposing anything, but given that Shazhad travelled to the FATA region of Pakistan recently and that the Pakistani intelligence agencies announced arrests of people suspected of having a connection to the bomb plot, doesn't MSNBC's headline seem to have a bit of a bizarre focus? It reads:

BOMB SUSPECT LOST HOME TO FORECLOSURE.

I don't think I'm reading too much into the article in feeling like they're suggesting that his losing his home was the reason for him trying to blow up people in Times Square. Could it be true that the foreclosure caused him to snap and go crazy? Yes, I suppose so. But given all the other information out there, it doesn't seem to me that that would be the most pertinant information to highlight as essential for readers to know about this guy. (For one, a terrorist might "buy" a house to help him blend in. He would, however, have little to no incentive to actually make mortgage payments, particularly once he's on the course to commit a terrorist act.)

If I was cynical, I'd wonder if MSNBC's headline has something to do with the seeming need of some folks to never suspect that a guy's motivations have anything to do with a perversion of a religion. That or it's a reflection of ideological view about the meaning of the housing crisis.

Whether either those is true, all in all the focus on mortgage default it's just a weird editorial decision to me.