Month: February 2011

Foreclosures

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

This will be interesting:

Arizona may become the first state to require lenders to prove they have the right to foreclose by providing a complete list of any previous owners of the mortgage, under a bill passed yesterday by its Senate.

The legislation, which is headed to the House after being approved 28-2 in the Republican-dominated Senate, would allow foreclosure sales to be voided if lenders that didn’t originate the loan can’t produce the full chain of title. Arizona permits nonjudicial foreclosures, meaning property can be seized from the homeowner without a court order.

Lawmakers in states including New York, Oregon and Virginia also have proposed legislation to address concerns among consumer advocates that lenders or mortgage servicers are using incomplete or false paperwork to repossess properties in default. The attorneys general of all 50 states are jointly investigating how the mortgage-servicing industry operates.

“If you foreclose on somebody you should have to tell them who owns the property,” Michele Reagan, who sponsored Senate Bill 1259, said in a telephone interview. “People have the right in this country to face their accusers.” The Republican lawmaker is in litigation with her mortgage servicer, which she said won’t identify the owner of the loan.

Global warming

~ susie

I’m sure this will be the lead story on Fox News tonight, right?

“The NY Times reports that an inquiry by the Commerce Department’s inspector general has found no evidence that NOAA scientists manipulated climate data (reg. may be required) to buttress evidence in support of global warming after climate change skeptics contended that e-mail messages between climate scientists that were stolen and circulated on the Internet in late 2009 showed that scientists were manipulating or withholding information to advance the theory that the earth is warming as a result of human activity. ‘None of the investigations have found any evidence to question the ethics of our scientists or raise doubts about NOAA’s understanding of climate change science,’ says Mary Glackin, the agency’s deputy undersecretary for operations. The inquiry, requested last May by Senator James M. Inhofe, Republican of Oklahoma, who has challenged the science underlying human-induced climate change, comes at a critical moment for NOAA, as some newly empowered Republican House members seek to rein in the EPA’s plans to regulate greenhouse gas emissions, often contending that the science underpinning global warming is flawed. Inhofe says the report (PDF) was far from a clean bill of health for the agency, and that contrary to its executive summary, showed that the scientists ‘engaged in data manipulation.'”

Self defense

~ susie ~ 4 Comments

I don’t know if it’s from growing up with three brothers, but my responses to attack are much more typically male than not.

The first time someone tried to rape me, I was 15. I was in the subway, walking through a tunnel toward the stairway up to the street when a man pushed me up against the wall, holding my neck with his forearm (which was holding a knife).

I remember thinking to myself, “It’s 10:30 in the morning in the subway, and this guy’s trying to rape me?” Fortunately for me, I’m good at multitasking, because while I was being incredulous, my body just dealt with it; without even thinking, I kneed the guy in the groin with all my might. The guy crumbled, and I walked away, fast.

I remember he was lying on the ground, shouting as I left, “I thought your kind liked that!”

I never did figure out what kind he meant. Just women in general, I guess. We’re all asking for it.

Crazy silly wingnut

~ susie ~ 3 Comments

Another hotdog Republican governor. How dumb is this? Even the other Florida Republicans think he’s crazy!

Florida Governor Rick Scott, defending his rejection of $2.4 billion from the Obama administration for a high-speed rail project, said the program would have been a bad deal for taxpayers.

Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood rejected Scott’s criticism as “baloney.”

Scott, facing objections from Democrats and fellow Republicans in his state for nixing the planned Tampa-to-Orlando rail line this month, said such projects historically cost more to build than budgeted and lose money once in operation.

“I don’t want our taxpayers to fund that,” Scott said in an interview on Bloomberg Television’s “Political Capital with Al Hunt,” airing this weekend. He said he didn’t need to review bids from private businesses that said they would cover any potential overruns.

“It was never going to happen,” Scott said, adding that the state would have had to repay the $2.4 billion if the program failed.

LaHood, in an interview at the Bloomberg News Washington bureau, said of Scott, “He doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”

“I don’t know of anybody else except for the governor who thinks that this would be a bad deal,” LaHood, a Republican and former member of Congress from Illinois, said later on Bloomberg Television. The project “would have put an enormous number of Floridians to work. It would have helped people that are unemployed. It would have helped the economy. So he’s the lone ranger on this.”