The World of Mortgages and Financial Services

I still am looking at the “return of FM Watch’ and trying to figure out something more than the obvious.

The Mortgage Insurers, which always had a prominent role in the anti-GSE campaign, must worry that a reinvigorated Fannie and Freddie would figure out a way to do business without them or to dramatically lessen their role. Freddie came within a hair’s breadth of doing that some years ago and I doubt if many consumer group would mourn the industry’s diminution.

Ditto the appraisers. Having nothing to do with Andrew Cuomo’s deal with the GSEs, which could get undone my Congress, when you have access to as many mortgage loans as the former GSEs have, you can do a pretty good job of estimating property values and finding a way to charge a helluva lot less than $400 to $500 appraisers do currently. And that doesn’t include the games lenders play with some of their “captive appraisers” and multiple and duplicative consumer charges.

So, this must all about the future and keeping markets inefficient and consumer costs high?

I am sure that it won’t be too long before some anti-Fannie/Freddie allegation is leveled at the companies by the usual suspects on the Hill, in the media, and the right wing think tanks. (Knowing the straight arrows who run these shops now, I suspect the charges will be “littering” or “breaking the Sunday blue laws,” something heinous like that.)

That salvo will be FM Watch’s opening round.

we're still left with the reality that Fannie and Freddie are puppets managed by the Geithner Treasury. If FM Watch is ready to take on the Treasury, their member organizations must have their own ducks in line and don’t require Treasury or Obama good will or else why would you “pee on the Pope?”

Dede Scozzafava and Conservative Politics

Shortly after this blog gets out, we’ll know who won the special election in New York’s 23rd congressional district race, between Conservative/Republican Doug Hoffman and Democrat Bill Owens. But, already we know who lost, New York Assemblywoman Dede Scozzafava, the original the Republican Party candidate—until this past Saturday—who suddenly dropped out after getting embarrassed, denied resources and forced to resign by the GOP’s national right wing. (BTW. Is there any wing left in the GOP, but the right or the righter?)

It would be fitting, but not significant to the Democrats control of the House, if Democrat Owens somehow still wins this traditionally Republican seat—since Scozzafava still will be on the ballot and could draw votes from the conservative Hoffman. It sure would be a shot at the intruders, like Sarah Palin, Tim Pawlenty, and Newt Gingrich who reversed himself—in a two day stretch--going from Scozzafava to Owens. These non-New Yorkers saw fit to stick their noses into this local, meaning New York decision, and meddle.

The “GOP Wingers,” who love to preach the sanctity of local control (remember Florida in 2004/5), but only practice it when it serves their agenda, decided they knew better than the New York Republican Party who the republican should be in the 23rd District race and threw their collective weight against Ms. Scozzafava, causing her to come unglued and bolt.

That’s what’s going to happen to conservatives who aren’t conservative enough! Win or lose on Tuesday, we can expect more of that from the “national” conservatives, who will use their “pro-life, anti-gay, pro-business, pro-war, anti-government (except when they run it and balloon deficit spending by $6 Trillion) standards to influence getting the “right kind” of Republican candidates to seek office.

I wonder how many of these conservatives know the “Horst Wessel?”

(Early Sunday evening, as I put the blog to bed, Dede Scozzafava endorsed her former Democratic opponent Bill Owens.)

The Beat Goes On

Rush Limbaugh, one time hydrocodone and oxycodone abuser (for his “back pains”) and right wing Poobah, again is challenging President Obama’s fealty for the nation. This weekend Limbaugh claimed that the President and the Democrats are trying “on purpose” to destroy the United States. What won’t these say next? (Hey Rush, did the drugs fog your memory, where were you between 2000 and 2008 when some really danger stuff was carried out?)

Many Democrats whisper among themselves about their fear that some yahoo driven by the haters Limbaugh, Beck, O’Reilly, and the “fair and balanced” Fox News hot air machine air machine, might try and do serious harm to the President.

Now, I am wondering if the reverse may not be the equally true situation.

Debate,town hall meetings, the Internet, elections, our free press, and the First amendment traditionally have been our national safety valves for letting off partisan steam. But the right wing seems to be trying to change that. Why they think they are immune from the rhetorical and soemtimes physical violence which they espouse?

This batty crew could trigger some left winger to lose his mind and kill someone just as easily as they could rattle a conservative.

Eight years of George Bush and the type of federal government that Rush, Beck. Fox, Haley Barbour, Boehner, Palin, Newt, Pawlenty, Fox News and others want, is what gave us two wars, non-existent financial regulation, attempts to gut the Constitution and trillions in deficits.

That’s what the Democrats inherited fromt he Bush Administration.

Ten months into the Obama Administration, with a Congress voted by the people who threw out the GOP, the conservatives now complain that the Democrats don’t care for America, presumably as much as the GOP cares for the country?

If there is justice, all of the “moderate” Republicans will caucus in a phone booth and let the conservatives have their way and let the resulting “mass” become a true long time minority party—blissfully claiming you are welcome in their big tent—unless you are from labor, support government regulation of anything, don’t believe in the Bible, support “a public health care option,” are non-white, gay or lesbian, don’t support guns in church, school, or national parks, and a growing list of other minimum GOP litmus tests.

Left wing Democrats are a nuisance, more likely to turn on each other than to pull off anything spectacular. The right wing conservatives are dangerous, violence prone, and deceive themselves that they are the true Americans and those who oppose them are not.

I believe that any number of these “entertainer provocateurs,” like O’Reilly, Limbaugh and Beck, think their act is just a harmless game and that people won’t rise up and do violence based on their incendiary partisan assaults.

I think they are wrong and I hope I am.

Maloni 11-1-2009