Save your house by not paying your mortgage. Sounds crazy, doesn’t it? But for more than a million homeowners, this might be the right answer. Those homeowners, for whatever reason, have defaulted on their first mortgage but continue to pay their second mortgage on time. This has created a crazy situation in which the lender holding the second lien is reporting a performing loan while the lender holding the first lien is reporting a delinquent loan. The majority of these second liens are held in the loan portfolios of just four banks – Bank of America, Citibank, J.P. Morgan Chase and Wells Fargo. These same four banks service most of the first mortgages owned by bondholders or other banks. When Joe Homeowner defaults on his first mortgage but continues to pay his second mortgage and then seeks relief from the Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP) or his first lender, he often is unable to obtain relief because the holder of the second lien refuses to take a loss on the lien. This upsets the whole priority of claimants in the event of default. The second lien holder is supposed to get wiped out before the first lien holder suffers a dollar of damage, but that isn’t happening in this bizarre world.
Archive for the 'Obama' Category
Thomas Lifson at American Thinker:
Woven into the new presidential seal rug adorning the Oval Office is a misattributed quotation, offering us a perfect metaphor for the Obama presidency. Jamie Stiehm reports in the Washington Post:“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” According media reports, this quote keeping Obama company on his wheat-colored carpet is from King.
Except it’s not a King quote. The words belong to a long-gone Bostonian champion of social progress. His roots in the republic ran so deep that his grandfather commanded the Minutemen at the Battle of Lexington.
For the record, Theodore Parker is your man, President Obama. Unless you’re fascinated by antebellum American reformers, you may not know of the lyrically gifted Parker, an abolitionist, Unitarian minister and Transcendentalist thinker who foresaw the end of slavery, though he did not live to see emancipation. He died at age 49 in 1860, on the eve of the Civil War.
I was alerted to this via a chain email and decided to look into it. I found several postings in forums and Web sites that seem to confirm the parts credited to Bear and Dr. Murk.
Subject: FW: Travel for Obama (less wife)
Allegedly: Shep Smith, Fox News.
If you check Obama’s last trip over seas. His wife left just after their visit to France as stated below. She has yet to accompany him to any Arab country. Think about it. This was sent to me from a very good and reliable friend. The pieces of the puzzle just keep on coming together!Interesting…
Travel for Obama
I was at a Blockbusters renting videos, and as I was going along the wall, there was a video called “Obama”. There were two men next to me. We talked about Obama. These guys were Arabs and I asked them why they thought Michele Obama headed home following her visit in France instead of traveling on to Saudi Arabia and Turkey with her husband.
They told me she couldn’t go to Saudi Arabia, Turkey or Iraq.
I said “Laura Bush went to Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Dubai.”
They said that Obama is a Muslim, and by Muslim law he would not be allowed to bring his wife into countries that accept Sharia Law.
I just thought it was interesting that two Arabs at Blockbusters accept the idea that we’re being led by a Muslim who follows the Islamic creed.
They also said that’s the reason he bowed to the King of Saudi Arabia. It was a signal to the Muslim world.
Just thought you would like to know.
Via Bear @ ObamaForwards:
When I received this it made sense to me, but there were also a couple blank spots. Thus, I sent it to a friend who is a Middle Eastern Scholar and expert, Dr. Jim Murk. Here is his explanation that states a little clearer what the Arabs at Blockbuster were saying.Bear,
An orthodox Muslim man would never take his wife on a politically oriented trip to any nation which practices shari’ah law, which includes Saudi Arabia. This is true and it is why Obama left Michelle in Europe or at home when he went to especially Arab countries. He knows Muslim protocol; this included his bowing to the Saudi king. Obama is regarded as a Muslim in these countries simply because he was born to a Muslim father. Note that he has downplayed his Christianity — even spoke of his Muslim faith with George Stephanopoulus — by not publicly joining a Christian church in D.C., but simply attending the chapel or services at Camp David.
He also played down the fact that the USA was a Christian country and said, unbelievably, that it was one of the largest Muslim nations in the world, which is nonsense. He has also publicly taken the part of the Palestinians in the conflict with Israel. Finally, he ignored the National Day of Prayer. He is bad news. He is God’s judgment on America.”
. . . . .Jim Murk
Bear: Thus once again ACTIONS speak louder than words; check out Obama’s. Do they appear treasonous to you or is it just millions of us who think so? God help us!
UNHRC = UN Human Rights Council
The radical Obama Administration used the new Arizona immigration law as an example of human rights violations even though it follows federal law. Gateway Pundit
Update: Go read Michelle Malkin’s view!
Randall Hoven at American Thinker:
“Realtors appreciate the swift action by Congress to extend the home buyer tax credit and expand it to some current homeowners… As the leading advocate of housing and real estate issues, we urge President Obama to sign this legislation into law quickly to keep the momentum going in the fragile recovery of the nation’s housing market.” Charles McMillan, National Association of Realtors President, November 5, 2009, as quoted by CNBC.
WASHINGTON – The Obama administration has told the United Nations that America’s human rights record is less than perfect but stressed that the U.S. political system has built-in safeguards that promote improvements.
In its first-ever report to the U.N. Human Rights Council on conditions in the United States, the State Department said Monday that some Americans, notably minorities, are still victims of discrimination. Despite success in reforming such inequities as slavery and the denial of women’s right to vote, the department said, considerable progress is still needed.
Nile Gardiner in the Telegraph:
The last few weeks have been a nightmare for President Obama, in a summer of discontent in the United States which has deeply unsettled the ruling liberal elites, so much so that even the Left has begun to turn against the White House. While the anti-establishment Tea Party movement has gained significant ground and is now a rising and powerful political force to be reckoned with, many of the president’s own supporters as well as independents are rapidly losing faith in Barack Obama, with open warfare breaking out between the White House and the left-wing of the Democratic Party. While conservatism in America grows stronger by the day, the forces of liberalism are growing increasingly weaker and divided.Against this backdrop, the president’s approval ratings have been sliding dramatically all summer, with the latest Rasmussen Daily Presidential Tracking Poll of US voters dropping to minus 22 points, the lowest point so far for Barack Obama since taking office. While just 24 per cent of American voters strongly approve of the president’s job performance, almost twice that number, 46 per cent, strongly disapprove. According to Rasmussen, 65 per cent of voters believe the United States is going down the wrong track, including 70 per cent of independents.
H/T: Bizblogger
Meanwhile, the WSJ thinks Obama should take more time off for golf and vacations.
We wish Mr. Obama played more golf. Seven days a week, in fact. Imagine how much better off America would be—and how much more popular the President would be—had he taken the rising public protests against ObamaCare last summer as an opening to drop the subject and work on his handicap?The more Mr. Obama and his White House team practice their putting strokes, the less time they’d have to pass more stimulus, overregulate more industries, or raise more taxes. The economy would recover more rapidly with less political handling.
Ted Nugent in The Washington Times:
As leftists gain confidence with their stranglehold on Congress, the media and the White House, it is getting easier all the time to identify their suicidal tendencies. Common-sense Americans are increasingly waking up to the Obama fan club that hates entrepreneurialism, capitalism and the American Dream of excellence. Listen to Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Howard Dean, Bill Maher, Keith Olbermann, Rachel Maddow, Joy Behar or President Obama, et al, for but a few moments, if you can stomach them, and their mantra is nothing less than putridly anti-individualism, anti-independence, anti-productivity, anti-logic and anti-common sense. I’m surprised Hugo Chavez hasn’t invited them to move in yet.[...]
It is unfathomable to me that such support exists for a man who was raised and abandoned by avowed Marxist parents, whose mentor was a self-avowed Marxist, who studied and preached Marxism and communism, who attended a radical, America-hating church led by a radical America-hating pastor, who had this radical, America-hating pastor baptize his children and marry him and his wife, who has appointed as czars a gang of flagrant communists, Marxists, socialists and America-hating, capitalism-hating, U.S. Constitution-hating radicals, who associated regularly with convicted homegrown terrorists and 1960s radicals and other such egregious violations. I ask, how can this be?
[...]
As administrator for the $800-billion-a-year Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, Dr. Donald Berwick is charged with implementing many of President Obama’s sweeping health care mandates in ways that undoubtedly will affect health plans, hospitals and health care providers across the country.
But a review of some of the funding sources of the nonprofit think tank he co-founded and until recently headed show health care entities that don’t appear on Dr. Berwick’s financial disclosure or on the standard ethics agreement that officials use to root out potential conflicts of interest.
The BlueCross BlueShield Association of America, Cardinal Health Foundation, Aetna Foundation, the RX Foundation and Baxter International are among the nonprofit Institute for Healthcare Improvement’s publicly disclosed donors, and it’s unclear whether they figured into the government’s standard ethics review.
Those entities have provided anywhere from $50,000 to as much as $5 million each to the institute’s “5 Million Lives Campaign,” which aims to improve hospital safety.
White House officials say Dr. Berwick is in full compliance with all ethics rules, and his financial disclosure form instructs nominees to list only former clients of a business or nonprofit in which the nominee was directly involved in providing a service for a fee for more than $5,000.
Dr. Berwick, 63, would have faced standard questioning about the finances of the Massachusetts-based nonprofit group if he had gone through the normal confirmation process, but his recess appointment last month means he can serve until the end of the next session of Congress without a Senate vote or a hearing.
A Ballad of the Republic Sung in the Year 2010
You’ll better understand this clip if you know the original poem upon which it is based, “Casey at the Bat” by Ernest Thayer, often considered one of baseball’s greatest writings.
