Category: Blithe Spirit

Follow the bouncing taxes ball

The irrepressible Patrick Hickey comments on that maddening teacher-union radio ad:

The Teachers Unions have flooded the air-waves with a whiny voiced ‘Hush-talker’ posing as a teacher -” it’s a bad idea, Governor Quinn!” The ads beg for more revenue – more taxes.

If not -Illinois will lose quality teachers! Non Sequitur! The ad also whines that Illinois Public School teachers ‘only qualify for Partial Social Security Benefits!!!!’ Why is that Murial? Could it be that Illinois Teachers opted out of ‘paying into Social Security’ – their fair share – in order to allow tax-payer to buck up for their retirement?

Really.  Are we to believe that union members are better teachers than those recruited for charter schools, to give one example.  Or than (non-unionized) Catholic school teachers coast to coast?

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Our dubious ways

Look, Ma, we’re infamous.

“The Chicago approach to governing” is what Republican senator Judd Gregg calls the White House’s tactics on health-care reform: “You’re talking about running over the minority, putting them in cement, and throwing them in the Chicago River.”

That’s from City Journal’s David Gratzer on how legislative “reconciliation” as way to achieve health care revamp can turn and bite Obama.

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Out of the mouths of cardinals . . .

Cardinal George of Chicago gave a spicy account of his tete-a-tete with Obama last March 18.

“It’s hard to disagree with him because he’ll always tell you he agrees with you,” he [told 200 priests in Louisiana].  “. . . You have to say, again and again, ‘No, Mr. President, we don’t agree (on abortion).’

He told Obama he was concerned about his decision to rescind the Mexico City policy, which meant taxpayer money would go to fund abortion overseas.  He apparently said we were “exporting abortion” by that decision.

“He said we weren’t exporting abortion,” the cardinal said. “I said, ‘Yes we are.’ He would say, ‘I know I have to do certain things here.  . . . . But be patient and you’ll see the pattern will change.’ I said, ‘Mr. President, you’ve given us nothing but the wrong signals on this issue.’ So, we’ll see, but I’m not as hopeful now as I was when he was first elected.”

Why he was hopeful at any time escapes me, but if that was naive of him, the same simplicity, or at least directness, led him to provide a fascinating glimpse at the man who the inimitable Mark Steyn says “has the knack of appearing moderate while acting radical,” calling it, however, “a lethal skill.”

It seems from the cardinal’s account that he was not fooled.

 

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Obama prays alone

Obama will pray privately, as usual for him, says White House spokesman Robert Gibbs.  He will sign his proclamation of the National Day of Prayer but will let it go at that, reverting to how it was before GW Bush.

He did host a Passover Seder for family and friends in April, for a presidential first, but he took a pass on the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast at the Washington Hilton, where 1,300 were expected.  Didn’t ask to come, said a Breakfast spokesman. 

If he had asked and did come to the Catholic breakfast, as GW Bush did, he would not have been allowed to speak, however, as Bush regularly did, because of

a 2004 directive from the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops saying that public figures who have taken positions opposing Catholic doctrine should not be publicly honored. [! Except at Notre Dame?]

“We’d host him graciously, but we’d not give him a platform to speak,” [spokesman Joe] Cella said.

All major presidential candidates were invited to attend last year, he added, but none responded.

Catholic Obama-ites were invited this year — Biden and cabinet officers Sebelius, Donovan, Napolitano among them — but none responded, said Cella.

They might have gotten an earful from the keynote speaker, Archbishop Raymond Burke, formerly of St. Louis and now of the Vatican, who has recommended pro-choice Catholics such as Sebelius be denied Communion.

Justice Scalia was scheduled to speak.

Meanwhile, National Day of Prayer ceremonies were to be held Thursday morning in the Cannon House Office Building on Capitol Hill — without Obama.

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The root of our current difficulty

Affordable housing run amok:

A major lesson of Fan and Fred and the subprime fiasco is that no one benefits when we push families into homes they can’t afford. Yet that’s what Congress is doing once again as it relentlessly expands FHA lending with minimal oversight or taxpayer safeguards.

That’s Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-sponsored lending programs asking a mere 3.5% down, vs. 10% minimum on conventional loans — with 100% tax-paid guarantee on defaults. 

Which guarantee “means banks and mortgage lenders have no skin in the game,” observes WSJ.  No-skin means no risk, means wotthehell wotthehell, let’s do it, why not?  (If this devil-may-care approach was good enough for that cat mehitabel, it’s good enough for us.)

The VA housing program, to site another way of doing business,

has a default rate about half that of FHA loans, mainly because the VA provides only a 50% maximum guarantee. [italics added]

Thus providing “a market test that the loan shouldn’t be made.”

As for the downpayment, the FHA minimum was 20% when the agency opened in the 30s.  In the 60s it dropped to10%, in 1978 to 3% — raised to 3.5% last year.  The road to national meltdown was paved with good affordable–housing intentions.

Among which was the “bizarre initiative” in 2007 and since then to help the FHA “regain market share” as banks chose en masse to go elsewhere, namely to proliferating subprime lenders.  So now we have what WSJ calls “the federal subprime lending program.”

Wotthell, it’s save-the-agency time.  Damn the default rate, full speed ahead.

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No Laetare award but boffo speaker

John T. Noonan to the barricades:

Judge John T. Noonan Jr., the 1984 recipient of the Laetare Medal, has accepted an invitation to deliver an address in the spirit of the award at Notre Dame’s 164th University Commencement Ceremony on May 17.

His speech will be in lieu of awarding the medal this year.

In Contraception, Noonan in 1965 compared centuries-old anti-usury church legislation (opposed to lending with any amount of interest), which was eventually abandoned, with its much-debated anti-birth control prohibition, leaving Catholics with at least a conundrum of major dimensions.

Shrewd, shrewd move by Notre Dame: Noonan on stage with Obama, with considerable chance of focused confrontation, or at least provocative juxtaposition — especially in giving no award this year and calling Noonan’s a Laetare-style speech. 

A speech by one highly praised by this year’s Laetare recipient, who refused it because of Obama’s being honored at the same graduation ceremony.

[T]he quality of his legal scholarship and judicial opinions prompts Harvard Law School Professor Mary Ann Glendon to place Noonan alongside Learned Hand, Benjamin Cardozo, and Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. as “one of the legal giants of the twentieth century.”

Major hat tip to David Gibson at Dot Commonweal.

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I’ll have that plaque, if you don’t mind

Melissa Isaacson went to the Lisagor Awards dinner days after she’d been laid off by Chi Trib, thanks to WBEZ’s buying tickets for two former employees who said theirs should go to laid-off newsies, Michael Miner reports at his News Bites blog.

This led to the amusing incident — amusing, at least, to those who witnessed it from the Sun-Times table — in which Isaacson’s victory was announced but by the time she made her way up front to accept her plaque it had disappeared. That’s because [managing editor Jane] Hirt had hopped up from the Tribune table next to the dais to claim it for the Tribune. “My friends asked me later if I got to bask in any of the applause,” says Isaacson, “but there was no basking. I had to go find my award.”

I assumed she didn’t find it, or Hirt didn’t relinquish it, and so was ready to howl at managerial insensitivity.  But after giving no comment to Jim Romenesko, she changed her mind and told him she regrets “the awkward moment.”  Had missed Isaacson in the crowd (of 280) and “wanted to pick up the plaque to make sure she got it. When she arrived at the stage at the same time I did, I handed her the plaque. I wasn’t planning on keeping it for the Tribune.”

OK.  In any case, the 280 was the biggest crowd yet, says Miner, even as the 443 entries were down precipitously.  It costs to enter — $30 for Headline Club members, $50 for others — so cash-short outlets cut back.

Whatever the awkward part, the affair went well, says Miner.  This is good, especially against a dispiriting desk-chairs-on-Titanic background.

Another generous gesture was made by Chicago Journal, Inc., who sponsors my column in the Wednesday Journal of Oak Park & River Forest.  This outfit bought a ticket for Ben Myers, former editor of Skyline, a Chicago Journal property, Miner reports.  Myers was there to pick up his award, sans awkward moment at podium, which was nice.

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The state will provide

Sen. Roland Burris is “Tombstone” to Chi Trib’s John Kass, and rightly so, but he made some sense in a South Side community meeting last week.  Pestered by former Chicago Housing Authority Director Phil Jackson (who complained mostly about Obama’s neglecting poor people), Burris 

told Jackson there was little the government could do to solve the problems of broken African-American families.

“No government, no senator, no alderman, no representative is going to be in your family dealing with those kids that we’re raising,” he said.

And Burris, 71, said he found himself at a loss trying to stop some children from turning to crime, saying “an old gentleman like me trying to deal with 10- and 12-year-olds that will cuss you out in a minute if you look at ’em . . . ”

Jackson interjected: “That’s what we need help on.”

“A dollar bill ain’t going to help that,” Burris replied.

“We need help to put structures into place,” Jackson countered.

There’s a lot in that “dollar bill” remark, and a lot in Jackson’s reply.  J. himself had raised the broken-family issue, which he sees in terms of “structures” to be installed by elected officials, starting with Obama, specifically

CeaseFire, an anti-gang violence program in the city which hasn’t gotten any federal stimulus money.

This is sad.  A government program is supposed to create a whole new culture for black families?  The same government that installed welfare-dependence structures that for generations made families virtual wards of the state?

And that all-purpose “stimulus.”  Of what?  Jobs for counsellors?

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Ford surges, builder gets inventive

Competition is alive and well in the U.S.A., no matter how the gentiles rage — i.e. “gentes,” or nations, in the Psalms, reading here U.S. Treasury and the governmental leviathan.

The results [lower than expected quarterly loss, thanks to union-contract negotiating and bond-buybacks] reflect in part Ford’s strategy: to steal customers from its weakened crosstown rivals and separate Ford from GM and Chrysler in the minds of the public, investors and lawmakers.

The strategy is part of a longer-term vision that would have Ford rise above its age-old competitors to form a new, global Big Three with the two largest car makers, Toyota Motor Corp. and Volkswagen AG, say people familiar with the company’s thinking.

Look.  It’s natural to man (and woman); so socialists, beware.  You can’t snuff this thing out.

Similarly, the Calif. home-builder builds a better mousetrap, not only installing furniture, but also making it worth a resident’s worthwhile to move in and add to salability.

This $1.2 million seaside pied-a-terre is occupied by Johnna Clavin, a 45-year-old Los Angeles event planner and decorator who has seen business slow. In exchange for giving the townhouse a stylishly lived-in look, she gets to stay there at a steep discount and stands to earn a bonus if the house sells fast.

It’s what you call making do, American-style.  How’d it happen?

Ms. Clavin responded to a Craigslist ad placed by Quality First Home Marketing, a San Diego startup. It aims to fill high-end empty houses with occupants who play the part of happy homeowners, in a bid to remove the price-depressing stigma of vacancy.

Go American!

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The day’s baddest news

Obama wants to fix “access to credit.”  Being from the government, he’s there to help.  Demurring politely, Congressman Scott Garrett (R.-NJ) explains the problem, closing with a politic sentence that has a key word missing:

I am a strong advocate for Access to Credit Reform, and I believe we need to ensure that government actions don’t cause greater problems in the marketplace and result in the restriction of credit availability for all consumers. [Italics added]

The key word is “but,” replacing “and” before “I believe.”

This is typical politic talk (he is a politico and has to negotiate) — downsizing the objection, refusing to give it the highlighting it deserves.  It comes after he has said what’s wrong with this foolish, if not execrable meddling by legislators.

This [reform] bill [to be considered next week] has the potential to reduce investment in the marketplace, increase rates and fees for all credit card holders, and restrict credit availability.

Problem: Legislative meddling drives out capital, further “tightening in marketplace liquidity,” and raises rates for all, “regardless of their level of credit risk.”

It can, he said — it will: why wouldn’t it? — make credit less available for all.  It’s supposed to protect borrowers with bad credit history, but it makes it harder for them and everyone else to get it.

Obama wants it, and that’s my most scarifying headline, in today’s Chi Trib:

President Barack Obama seeks crackdown on credit card rate, fee hikes: President wants crackdown on rate, fee hikes; industry defends practices as necessary

or, in hard copy, p-1, four columns, above fold:

Obama takes aim at ‘unfair’ credit card fees, practices: Industry likely to launch strong opposition

In the latter, Chi Trib leads with Wilma Erwin and her “surprise and anger” at the raised rate of her Discover Card and Thomas Charles Kenniff, who carries no balance but had his available credit “slashed nearly in half” by Bank of America.

Fie on those nasty lenders!  Make them lend at lower rates to help Wilma!  Make them lend more to Thomas Charles! 

So speaks Obama:

“There has to be strong and reliable protections for consumers, protections that ban unfair rate increases and forbid abusive fees and penalties,” Obama said after a White House meeting with credit card company executives. “The days of any-time, any-reason rate hikes and late-fee traps have to end.”

Can he be sued for abuse of power?  Maybe some well-financed court case that will tie up his lawyers and call witnesses to the stand.  Obama could call Wilma Erwin to the stand.  A jury of her peers could decide it.

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