Ohio TV station WOIO is re-enacting highlights of a local corruption trial with puppets (cross-posted from Overlawyered).
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FHA and the Foreclosures of Tomorrow
The recently released Federal Reserve White Paper on the Housing Market has received considerable attention, at least for its policy proposals. I found one of the more interesting pieces of data in the paper to be the number of mortgages with negative equity, reproduced below (Figure 3 in the Fed paper).
What I found both interesting and distressing is that despite the fact that the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) was only about 2 percent of mortgages at the height of the bubble in 2005/2006, FHA is now over a fourth of total mortgages with negative equity. Of course this was all predictable (I actually predicted it). If you decide, as did our federal government, to get lots of borrowers into loans with very little equity, at a time when prices are falling, you will create a whole lot of loans with negative equity. Thank you FHA for creating a mess that was completely 100% avoidable. But who cares when you’re ultimately just sticking it to the taxpayer, right?
The 99 Percent
A New York Times-CBS News poll finds that 15 percent of the population consider themselves “upper middle class.” (Question 94) That same survey finds 16 percent report household incomes above $100,000 annually. I suspect there is a high correlation between the two groups.
The six-figure income must make it easier to cope with being oppressed by the 1 percent.
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The Citizens United Anniversary
The second anniversary of the Citizens United decision has arrived bringing with it a new poll by The New York Times and CBS News. Question 68 asks whether groups unaffiliated with a candidate should be permitted to spend unlimited sums on advertisements during a political campaign. 67 percent say such spending should be limited; 29 percent say it should not be limited.
Three points here.
First, the majority disagrees not just with Citizens United but also with the basic campaign finance law decision, Buckley v. Valeo, which established that while contributions could be limited, spending could not be restricted under the First Amendment.
Second, it is discouraging but not surprising that freedom of speech in this concrete case does not receive majority support. While majorities support the First Amendment as an abstract symbol, polling has shown for decades that majorities oppose concrete applications of many provisions of the Bill of Rights. It is good, therefore, that a constitutional republic is not just rule of a majority.
Third, the glass is half full. Support for spending unlimited sums on advertisements has increased by 45 percent over the last 15 months (from 20 to 29 percent). The trend is better than the headline number. Moreover, after a few elections, independent spending may become less a partisan issue, thereby adding to the support for free speech by such groups.
“You could use it at a specific event. You could use it at a shooting-prone location…”
That’s NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly touting a new technology called “terahertz imaging detection” to a local news outlet.
Terahertz radiation is electromagnetic waves at the high end of the infrared band, just below the microwave band. The waves can penetrate a wide variety of non-conducting materials, such as clothing, paper, cardboard, wood, masonry, plastic, and ceramics, but they can’t penetrate metal or water. Thus, directing terahertz radiation at a person and capturing the waves that bounce off them can reveal what is under their clothes without the discomfort and danger of going “hands-on” in a search for weapons. Many materials have unique spectral “fingerprints” in the terahertz range, so terahertz imaging can be tuned to reveal only certain materials. (In case you’re wondering, I got this information off the top of my head…)
Will the machines be tuned to display only particular materials? Or will they display images of breasts, buttocks, and crotches? The TSA’s “strip-search machines” got the moniker they have because they did the latter—until the agency tardily re-configured them.
Then there’s the flip-side of not going “hands-on.” Terahertz imaging detection doesn’t natively reveal to the person being searched that law enforcement has picked him or her out for scrutiny. A pat-down certainly lets the individual know he or she is being searched, positioning one to observe and challenge one’s treatment as a suspect. Terahertz imaging lacks this natural—if insufficient—check on abuse.
So terahertz imaging is not just a “hi-tech pat-down.” Its potential takes what would be a pat-down and makes it into a secret, but intimate, visual examination—a surreptitious strip-search. Pat-downs and secret strip-searches are very different things, and it is not necessarily reasonable, where a pat-down might be called for, to use terahertz imaging.
And that brings us to the fundamental problem with Commissioner Kelly’s proffer to use this technology at a “specific event” or at a “shooting-prone location.” These contexts do not create the individualized suspicion that Fourth Amendment law demands when government agents are going to examine intimate details of a person’s body and concealed possessions.
It is certainly possible to devise a terahertz imaging device and a set of use protocols that are constitutional and appropriate for routine, domestic law enforcement, but Commissioner Kelly hasn’t thought of one, and I can’t either.
Consider the dollar costs and potential health effects of terahertz imaging detection, it might just be that the pat-downs pass muster far better than the high-tech gadgetry.
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Oh.
From today’s Politico Pulse:
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi did her part Wednesday to drum up support to use war savings to pay for the ‘doc fix,’ saying both parties have embraced the savings in the past. ‘It is not a gimmick,’ she told reporters during her weekly Capitol Hill press conference. ‘It’s what the Republicans used in the Ryan budget.’
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‘Will the Feds Be Ready With the Fallback Insurance Exchanges by October 2013?’
That’s the title of Robert Laszewski’s latest blog post:
The White House just released a report saying that good progress is being made [toward creating health insurance Exchanges] in 28 states. That begs the question, what about the other 22?
Writing in Kaiser Health News, Julie Appleby recently reported that that HHS has let just two contracts toward building the federal fallback exchanges. One is for $69 million to build the data hub so that federal agencies can share data with the exchanges–the IRS for example. The other contract is more directly related to building federal fallback exchanges, a $94 million contract.
But in their progress report today, the administration said that they have already advanced $729 million to the states for exchange construction––17 of those states receiving $1 million, or less. So, more than $700 million has gone to 33 states–and that is just federal money to date.
If the feds are going to be ready to launch 10 or 20 federal fallback exchanges these numbers just don’t compute. It is going to take a lot more than the $94 million HHS has contracted for to launch that many federal exchanges in the states that refuse to do so.
HHS says they will be ready. But they have been awfully secret over just how they are going to have lots of exchanges ready to go in 20 months. It is hard to see how that $94 million contract is more than just a down payment…
Right now, the numbers don’t compute–the number of states that could well not be ready, the federal money being spent by states that say they will offer exchanges, and the much less money HHS admits to be spending for those that will not be ready.
Where’s the plan?
The administration’s claim that 28 states are taking “strong steps” toward creating Exchanges is questionable. For one thing, the administration should update their “good progress” count to reflect the fact that Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) just returned a $37 million ObamaCare grant and refused to create an Exchange. In that light, the administration’s announcement is reminiscent of a scene from Animal House:
The question of whether states create ObamaCare Exchanges is, of course, central to the survival of the law.