Sunday Afternoon News Roundup

— Wow, Obama won’t get most white male Republican voters in Indiana in the Democratic primary or the general election! Gosh, what a surprise! Oddly enough, neither will Clinton, but that fact gets lost in the spin. (Meanwhile, Obama’s doing better among white voters — after the months-long crapstorm of manufactured FarrakhanMuslimRezkoWrightBitterWright (take a deep breath) ElitistWrightWrightOrangeJuiceWrightWrightWright — than he was at the start of his campaign, and Hillary’s doing worse. But that doesn’t fit the media narrative, so it’s generally ignored.)

— Lead Siegelman whistleblower’s house torched, her car run off the road by a former local cop. Ho-hum, nothing to see here, Uncle Karl says so.

— Michele Bachmann hired Jack Tomczak to work in her state office as a field and case worker last week. Tomczak is a local GOP operative whose last brush with fame was being one of the two parties involved in making the nuisance complaint against Mark Ritchie, a complaint in which Ritchie was ultimately cleared.

The mortgage post-mortem

Mary Kane of The Washington Independent (via t/o) has done the post-mortem on the mortgage market that the Congress and the Fed should have done before turning on the money machine. She documents massive fraud. Among her findings:

“Did most people simply buy big homes they couldn’t afford? In 2007, 62 percent of all securitized Alt-A loans involved refinances…In the subprime market, 64 percent were refinances…” [so, no. The typical loan didn’t involve new home purchase, but people trying to extract home equity to pay medical bills, cope with unemployment, and so on.]

“Were they just trying to make a quick buck? Regarding investors versus homeowners, in 2007, about 5 percent of all securitized subprime loans and 14 percent of Alt-A loans were reported as investor loans.” [so, no, the typical loan wasn’t to someone flipping their house; the figures, however, don’t include second homes, but those are a small fraction].

“Then there’s the question of who really lied on the liar’s loans.” [Kane shows that lenders encouraged borrowers to lie].

This isn’t the last word, but it’s a start in understanding what happened and who should be blamed for the mortgage crisis.

Life’s Little Ironies

When Don Cazayoux won a special election yesterday in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Democrats gained a Congressional seat that the Republicans had held for 34 years.

The former incumbent, Richard Baker, had held the seat for the past 20 years, but resigned in mid-term to take a lobbying job. He’s so greedy, he couldn’t wait to retire at the end of his term. The irony is that his greed diminished his party’s influence and therefore his effectiveness as a lobbyist.

It’s exactly this greed that’s destroying the Republican Party. Baker just hastened the consequences a bit in his little corner of America.

There’s another message in this election for the Republican Party — and for the Democratic Party. The attack ads that tied Cazayoux to Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi apparently didn’t hurt him. Maybe people don’t think it’s a bad thing to be in the “liberal” Democratic camp.