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Palin's Cunning Sleight of Hand
By FRANK RICH
Published: February 14, 2010
Republicans are getting away with their populist masquerade, and Democrats are not convincing the country that they offer anything better.]]>
Still, Mr. Leocata maintains that borrowers default on these loans less frequently than those with conventional mortgages. Borrowers must pay monthly mortgage insurance premiums. For a 3 percent down payment, the monthly premium is 0.8 percent of the loan amount; for 5 percent, it's 0.67 percent; and for 10 percent, 0.42 percent.
Borrowers must also fall within the household income limits -- $107,520 in Manhattan, $142,520 in Long Island and $146,420 in Westchester -- and the purchase price cannot exceed $637,640.
]]> George Leocata, a senior vice president at Sonyma, says demand for the Low Interest Rate Program has been the highest in 12 years, which is hardly surprising given the difficulty in qualifying for conventional loans in recent months.Thanks to an infusion of federal support late last year through the economic stimulus package, the State of New York Mortgage Agency, or Sonyma, is now offering 30-year affordable-housing loans at 4.75 percent, down from an average rate of 5.25 to 5.75 percent last year and well below the 5 percent or so being offered by mainstream lenders to their best customers.
REAL ESTATE
Help for First-Time Buyers
By BOB TEDESCHI
Published: March 3, 2010
The State of New York Mortgage Agency, or Sonyma, is offering 30-year affordable-housing loans at 4.75 percent.
I think it's obvious....that the answers are "no." For if the answers were "yes" it would have been a huge story! No fair description of the current situation, nothing in what the Washington bureau and investigative staff of the New York Times has picked up from its reporting, would support a characterization like "impending tyranny."
In a word, the Times editors and Barstow know this narrative is nuts, but something stops them from saying so-- despite the fact that they must have spent over $100,000 on this one story. And whatever that thing is, it's not the reluctance to voice an opinion in the news columns, but a reluctance to report a fact in the news columns, the fact that the "narrative of impending tyranny" is ungrounded in any observable reality, even though the sense of grievance within the Tea Party movement is truly felt and politically consequential.
My claim: We have come upon something interfering with political journalism's "sense of reality" as the philosopher Isaiah Berlin called it (see section 5.1) And I think I have a term for the confusing factor: a quest for innocence in reportage and dispute description. Innocence, meaning a determination not to be implicated, enlisted, or seen by the public as involved. That's what created the pattern I've called "regression to a phony mean." That's what motivated the rise of he said, she said reporting.
-- Jay Rosen
]]>See also
He Said, She Said: False Balance
Journalism is a Religion (2004):
1.) J-School as School of Theology
2.) The Journalist's Creed
3.) The Orthodoxy of No Orthodoxy
4.) Practicing Journalism But Not Understanding It
5.) The First Amendment as Press Religion
6.) The God Term of Journalism is the Public
7.) A Breakaway Church in the Press
8.) Interview at the Axis of Evil
One reason some people are willing to pay a full-time planner is that they know they can call at any time without being on the clock. Mr. Richards, who runs the Behavior Gap site, said his clients had told him they called him first when they had a question or a calamity because they knew he wasn't "starting a stop watch."
"You don't fix emotional problems with logic, you fix them with trust," he said. "And that is really difficult to do, to build that over the phone if you aren't having an ongoing relationship."
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Using credit bureau data, consultants at Oliver Wyman calculated how many borrowers went straight from being current on their mortgage to default, rather than making spotty payments. They also weeded out owners having trouble paying other bills. Their estimate was that about 17 percent of owners defaulting in 2008, or 588,000 people, chose that option as a strategic calculation.
]]> BUSINESSIn 2006, Benjamin Koellmann bought a condominium in Miami Beach. By his calculation, it will be about the year 2025 before he can sell his modest home for what he paid. Or maybe 2040.
No Help in Sight, More Homeowners Walk Away
By DAVID STREITFELD
Published: February 3, 2010
By June, about 5.1 million people will own a home whose value is below 75 percent of what is owed.
"I don't think an insurance commissioner should tread on the toes of the banking industry," said Karen Weldin Stewart, the commissioner in Delaware. "This started out as a bank product."
Her special deputy for examinations, John Tinsley, explained the reasoning. "In insurance, you're putting together a pool," he said. Each customer would be charged a premium based on the total risk of the pool.
A credit-default swap cannot be insurance, Mr. Tinsley said, because it does not involve a pool. There is just one seller and one buyer for every contract.
"It's an investment product," he said. "It's closer to buying an option."
Not everyone agrees. Eric R. Dinallo, New York State's insurance superintendent when A.I.G. imploded, said he believed credit-default swaps were insurance and should be regulated as such.
The original Title VII, in 1964, prohibited "disparate treatment" on the basis of race. In 1991, Congress amended the law to prohibit employment policies that have a "disparate impact" as well. The question for the Supreme Court last June was whether, in trying to avoid the racially disparate impact of the exam, New Haven had made the successful white firefighters the victims of disparate treatment.
The court ruled against the city; Justice Kennedy wrote for the 5-to-4 majority that New Haven's concern about liability for the racially disparate impact of the exam was overblown and insufficient to justify withholding promotions from the successful white test-takers.
The decision avoided a tricky question: suppose the racially disparate impact of a municipal employment policy is so grave that the Civil Rights Act requires a remedy that itself takes race into account - in other words, a remedy for disparate impact that requires disparate treatment.
The court's current majority has made clear that for the government to count individuals by race for almost any purpose is a violation of constitutional magnitude. So how could a statute that could require such an outcome be constitutional? In the New Haven case, Justice Kennedy left it to Justice Scalia to observe sarcastically in a concurring opinion that the court's resolution of the firefighter dispute "merely postpones the evil day on which the court will have to confront the question" of the Civil Rights Act's constitutionality.
Finding the law unconstitutional would be an astonishing step, all the more so because the Civil Rights Act's current form is a Congressional response to a series of Supreme Court decisions in the late 1980's that gave the law a reading that Congress thought was too narrow. The 1991 amendment codified a unanimous opinion of the Burger court, which in 1971 interpreted the original Civil Rights Act to bar employment policies that had a racially disparate impact, such as education requirements that were unrelated to the actual job.
]]> Opinion"You may trust your friends and roommates, but you don't have to," said Jeffrey E. Levine, the chairman of Douglaston Development and its construction arm, Levine Builders. "And every medicine cabinet has a keyed lockbox for pharmaceuticals. Viagra, Vioxx, Vicodin -- nobody needs to know but you."
The smallest studio is just under 400 square feet and it's $1,850 a month and one month free rent. The smallest two-bedroom apartment is just under 900 square feet and it's $3,590 and one month free.
Real Estate
A Nightclub to Call Home
By ALISON GREGOR
Published: January 28, 2010
Douglaston Development is marking Ohm, a 288-unit tower at 312 11th Avenue and 30th Street, using the neighborhood's nightclubs.
The solution: a checklist like psychologists use to determine if someone is suffering from, say, depression. So here is Mr. Shiller's checklist.
Researchers in British Columbia randomly assigned 155 women ages 65 to 75 either to strength training with dumbbells and weight machines once or twice a week, or to a comparison group doing balance and toning exercises.
A year later, the women who did strength training had improved their performance on tests of so-called executive function by 10.9 percent to 12.6 percent, while those assigned to balance and toning exercises experienced a slight deterioration -- 0.5 percent. The improvements in the strength training group included an enhanced ability to make decisions, resolve conflicts and focus on subjects without being distracted by competing stimuli.
Older women are generally less likely than others to do strength training, even though it can promote bone health and counteract muscle loss, said Teresa Liu-Ambrose, a researcher at the Center for Hip Health and Mobility at Vancouver General Hospital and the lead author of the paper, which appears in the Jan. 25 issue of Archives of Internal Medicine.
-- RONI CARYN RABIN
The result, some authorities hypothesize, is that it may be more lucrative for some Calabrian landowners to let their harvests rot on the tree and collect the subsidies than to pay pickers. In theory, the migrants may have become less useful and, possibly, less tolerated.
Still, the violence was dramatic. After immigrants struck residents and shops with sticks and burned and smashed cars, residents began responding with violence. By late Saturday night, most immigrants feared for their safety and voluntarily boarded buses and trains that took them to immigrant detention centers elsewhere in southern Italy, Rosarno authorities said.]]> International / Europe
Labor leaders say the tax would hit not only wealthy executives with expensive health benefits, but also many rank-and-file union members who have often settled for lower wage increases in exchange for more generous health benefits.
The tax would affect individual insurance policies with annual premiums above $8,500 and family policies above $23,000, which by one union survey would affect one in four union members.
Many Democrats fear that enacting the tax will hurt their re-election chances.
"This would really have a negative impact on the Democratic base," said Representative Joe Courtney, Democrat of Connecticut, who has enlisted 190 House Democrats to sign a letter opposing the tax. "As far as the message goes, it's a real toughie to defend."
While union leaders would prefer killing the tax, some say privately that they could live with it if the threshold is lifted to $27,000, say, or $30,000. They argue that many insurance policies above $23,000 are typical of the coverage in high-cost areas like New York or Boston, or policies that cover small businesses or employers with older workers.
According to a union survey, one in four members would be hit by a $23,000 threshold, but only one in 14 if the threshold were raised to $27,000.
White House officials, however, voice concern that raising the threshold that much would lose $50 billion of the $149 billion in revenue that the tax is expected to generate over 10 years.
Business
Unions Rally to Oppose a Tax on Health Insurance
By STEVEN GREENHOUSE
Published: January 9, 2010
Labor leaders say President Obama is betraying unions by supporting a tax on high-priced, employer-sponsored health insurance.
Now, the individual mandate made excellent sense at the beginning of this re-sewing process, because if people were allowed not to buy insurance at all then the low-risk young people would do exactly that. This would have had two bad consequences: First, they would still need charity care if they got sick or hurt in an accident. Second, the average price of insurance would be higher because the lower-risk people would not be contributing towards it.
]]> Though this sounds backwards,Ending with a compromise is like ending with a shirt which has humongous breast bags and too tight a waist. And that's why I'm not very happy with what we have so far.]]>
In his book "Cloak and Gown," published in 1987, the Yale historian Robin Winks pointed out, "The 'intelligence debate' was framed in 1949." That was the year a classic text, Sherman Kent's "Strategic Intelligence for American World Policy," came out.
To Kent, the best intelligence-gathering was the work "of devoted specialists molded into a vigorous production unit," who prized the arts of data accumulation and nonideological analysis.
Kent's book was widely adopted by intelligence services around the world. But it also had critics, among them the political scientist Willmoore Kendall, a onetime adviser to the C.I.A. He wrote that Kent's approach, influenced by the Pearl Harbor attack, betrayed "a compulsive preoccupation with prediction, with the elimination of 'surprise' from foreign affairs."
This was a worthy goal in wartime, Mr. Kendall said, but in peacetime the most useful intelligence provided the big "pictures" of the world that decision makers needed for formulating broad policy. Intelligence experts therefore should not just acquire and analyze information; they should interpret it as well.