links for 2009-07-13

President Barack Obama is mulling new ways to delay foreclosure for jobless homeowners who are unable to keep up with monthly payments, an administration official said on Monday.

The official told Reuters it was reasonable for policymakers to consider options for loan forbearance — allowing borrowers to delay, defer or skip payments — that are more effective than those currently available in the private sector.

The number of failing home loans has been climbing for three years as a risky borrowers have defaulted on their easy-to-get loans, property values have sunk and the unemployment rate has climbed.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg said her betrayal has cost the city $260 million in lost tax revenues and counting.

It didn't take long for Clinton to double cross New York City. Six months into her tenure as secretary of state she has suddenly exempted diplomats from paying some property taxes here.

"It is totally unfair," Bloomberg said.

The mayor said it's not only a double cross but a double flip flop. As New York's junior senator, Clinton fought to make diplomats pay up. And he said her reversal changes a longstanding policy.

"Since 1873 they've been saying this is taxable," Bloomberg said.

Anti-preferences activist Connerly endorses Poizner

Ward Connerly, who was a driving force behind the Proposition 209 ban on race- and gender-based preferences in university admissions and state hiring, is endorsing Republican Steve Poizner for governor.

Connerly, who became a national figure in the movement to roll back affirmative action, served on the University of California Board of Regents for 12 years.

In endorsing Poizner, the state insurance commissionr, Connerly said in a statement: "Steve Poizner has the experience and the vision to lead California at one of the most critical times in our state history."

Poizner said in a statement that Connerly is "one of the most respected members of the Republican Party in California and I look forward to his insight and counsel throughout the campaign ahead."

The White House summoned two lawmakers critical to President Barack Obama's hopes for health care overhaul to a private meeting Monday as the timetable for a comprehensive bill continued to slip.

Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, D-Mont., and House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Charles Rangel, D-N.Y., were to meet at the White House on Monday afternoon, according to an official who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss private deliberations.

Baucus and Rangel are in charge of the crucial job of coming up with how to pay for a comprehensive health care overhaul that would cost an estimated $1 trillion over 10 years, mostly for subsidies to help cover some 50 million uninsured Americans.

The meeting comes as Obama, newly returned from an overseas trip, must refocus on his top legislative priority: a sweeping health care bill to bring down costs and cover the uninsured.

P.S.: A day after his concerned post, Klein writes:

People don't like to cut costs in the health-care system. It's painful. Politicians do not voluntarily do painful things. But a lot of people want to achieve universal health care. And they're willing to make a lot of concessions to do so. The coverage expansion, in other words, can serve as leverage for the cost controls. [E.A.]

Huh? July 10 Ezra Klein should read July 9 Ezra Klein. If universal coverage in itself doesn't do much that's obvious "for the average American"–but rather seems to mainly involve "paying the health care bills of poorer Americans," why would average Americans be willing to "make a lot of concessions" in the form of painful cost cuts to achieve that goal–any more than they will be willing to endure painful tax increases?

Bonus question: Why would Klein abandon the sound contrarian insight he'd had a day earlier? Collective criticism on JournoList?

There are two different versions of the story of the end of the Cold War: the Russian version, and the truth. President Barack Obama endorsed the Russian version in Moscow last week.
The truth, of course, is that the Soviets ran a brutal, authoritarian regime. The KGB killed their opponents or dragged them off to the Gulag. There was no free press, no freedom of speech, no freedom of worship, no freedom of any kind. The basis of the Cold War was not "competition in astrophysics and athletics." It was a global battle between tyranny and freedom. The Soviet "sphere of influence" was delineated by walls and barbed wire and tanks and secret police to prevent people from escaping. America was an unmatched force for good in the world during the Cold War. The Soviets were not. The Cold War ended not because the Soviets decided it should but because they were no match for the forces of freedom and the commitment of free nations to defend liberty and defeat Communism.

Let’s see. Democrats want to make hay over a program to kill Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and the rest of the radical Islamist looney tunes? Best of luck with that. Show of hands: who in the US doesn’t want the heads of bin Laden and Zawahiri on a pike? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller? Bueller?

Congress authorized the Bush administration to use force against AQ. At the same time, the executive order against targeted assassinations remains in force, but that hardly applies to an enemy at war. The entire point of authorizing force is to make your enemies dead by, like, y’know, killing them. Whether the CIA or the military carries out the mission makes no difference to me and probably not to 99% of the American public outside the Beltway, or I suspect, inside the Beltway either.

Since announcing her resignation, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin has been pummeled by critics who have called her incoherent, a quitter, a joke and a "political train wreck."

And those were fellow Republicans talking.

Palin has been a polarizing figure from the moment she stepped off the tundra into the bright lights last summer as John McCain's surprise vice presidential running mate. Some of that hostility could be expected, given the hyper-partisanship of today's politics.

What is remarkable is the contempt Palin has engendered within her own party and the fact that so many of her GOP detractors are willing, even eager, to express it publicly — even with Palin an early front-runner for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination.

Although still publicly beating the drums for President Obama's healthcare overhaul, representatives of some of the biggest players are beginning to express concern behind the scenes that it won't do enough about the major problem: runaway medical costs.

And, some say, the ballyhooed deals the White House recently struck with hospitals and drug makers to keep them at the negotiating table could make the problem worse.