And here we thought risky loans were not acceptable anymore. Guess the right wing initiative business is the last frontier for multi-level demagoguery.

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Vancouver City Council member Tim Leavitt, who has announced he will challenge long-serving Mayor Royce Pollard for the city’s top spot, complains about Department of Ecology stormwater regulations:

Leavitt, an engineer by profession, doesn’t believe that is a reasonable rule to follow.

“Where do I find a map of pre-European development?” he asked during a Monday city council work session. “Did Lewis and Clark produce a map when they came out this way?”

Um, yes.

So one thing federal financial regulators and Congress need to examine is why banks can pay virtually nothing in interest rates on standard savings accounts while continuing to charge in the 5 percent range for 30 year mortgages and 6.5 percent and up or so on new auto loans, even as the federal funds rate is very nearly zero in real terms. It strikes me as a hidden corporate subsidy, in a way.

Financial advice gurus are always encouraging Americans to save more money, which is sound advice. It seems likely more folks will want a greater proportion of their money in FDIC insured accounts as opposed to the Ponzi stock market right now.

But people shouldn’t have to lock up several thousand dollars in a CD for two years just to get a meager 2% return. I mean, if a banks loans money at 5% and pays depositors 2%, the advantage is still with the bank, to be overly simplistic about it.

Sure, there are those who can buy CD’s and do so with tens of thousands of dollars, and good for them, but families who have smaller savings accounts are likely reticent to trade liquidity for a couple hundred dollars a year or less in interest. If we want a higher savings rate as a matter of national policy, people should be encouraged to save.

I think there used to be institutions in this country geared towards ordinary consumers known as “Savings and Loans,” but something happened to them about twenty years ago and they went away, curiously enough during the reign of Bush the Elder.

Not sure the best way to address this exactly, but banks should at least have to pay out more in interest than they charge in fees, over a certain minimum balance. Either that or we bring back savings and loans, and keep everyone named Bush away from them while regulating the hell out of them.

And yes, there are credit unions, which can be a good option as well.

Scanning the old RSS reader and the impressive amount of speculation by both dirty hippie leftist bloggers and traditional media types, I vote for the sensible speculation of Joe Turner at Political Buzz, who wonders if this is all about Viaduct money and then adds:

It could be broader than that. Democratic governors are set to meet again with Obama this week about the stimulus package. Gregoire has been active in pushing for a large boost to state’s with shovel-ready projects but there is no word as to whether she will be part of any meeting

It is awfully hard to imagine Gregoire departing so soon after an election victory that ratifies the rather solid job she does as governor, although I’d imagine she’d be a fine Commerce Secretary as well.

Turner’s theory seems a lot more plausible to me. The Obama team started rolling out more information about the stimulus proposal today, so it makes sense.

I guess we’ll find out tomorrow, which is a bajillion million thousand years in blog time.

Former Columbian editorial writer Elizabeth Hovde, now of The Oregonian, introduces herself to Portlanders.

I supported the Iraq invasion in 2003. Heck, I even voted for George W. Bush — twice.

At the same time, I am against torture.

(Slapping forehead.) Okay then. Hovde was so troubled by torture she went ahead and voted for Bush after the Abu Ghraib scandal had been known for six months or so. That’s quite a commitment to human rights.

Like many people in this great, green, soggy region of independents, I am not partisan.

Other than writing far-right columns at The Columbian for a decade, of course, where her work appeared for years along with the likes of Michelle Malkin. People might have somehow formed the impression the editorial page Hovde worked on was intent on being as right-wing as possible. I know I did. But that is entirely and magically separate from the dirty, dirty world of candidates and parties and ugly, dirty partisanship.

But Hovde is honest about her views, if not their ideological origins and the purposes for which they were used.

I am conservative, however. I’m pro-life. I am anti-bailouts. I think unions are outdated, overly political and that every state should have a right-to-work law ending compulsory unionism. I oppose Oregon’s Death With Dignity Act; I oppose even calling it the “Death With Dignity” Act. I am skeptical of some of Portland’s Smart Growth policies and believe they’ve helped create massive sprawl just across the river.

I worry that many public schools teach sex education in ways that undermine parents. It’s maddening to me that minors can’t get tattoos in Oregon but they can receive abortions without a parent’s knowledge, care or guidance. I grow weary of government safety nets that not only comfort those in true need but also become hammocks for those with an ability to be self-sufficient.

Nope, nothing partisan about any of that. I will agree that Portland can be annoying.

Hovde does sort her garbage, though.

I’ll pack out my Diet Coke cans rather than leave them at my in-laws’ house where they don’t recycle.

So there you have it. Sorting one’s beverage containers is the exact moral equivalent of opposing torture, even if you voted for a guy who was pro-torture.

We should all become non-partisan conservatives, it sounds swell. You don’t actually have to identify with anything icky like a political party everyone now hates, and you don’t have to actually take intellectual responsibility for your past advocacy of that party’s main policy stances and propaganda, simply by declaring yourself non-partisan! Very cool.

I’m a non-partisan progressive, by the way. Thought you should know.

A new year, a new Tim Eyman personal profit making scheme. Turns out a 1% cap probably wasn’t enough, so it’s a good thing we did a special session to re-instate it! Way to teach Timmy a lesson! Now he’s likely coming back for more. Wonder what lesson he learned? My guess is that Dems are chumps.

Local governments should just cease operation, that would seem to be far simpler. The market will provide libraries, fire protection and such. I mean, if I want a book, I’ll just buy one I like. I shouldn’t have to pay for books other people like, and I definitely shouldn’t have to pay for firefighters to put out fires in other people’s houses.

And I’m not 65, so I don’t want people to get Social Security unless I get to vote on it. Every year. If I’m mad, distracted or gullible enough to believe political advertising, sorry grandma.

Maybe one of the remaining journalists can ask Tim whose his daddy? Enquiring minds want to know who is going to foot the bill for this silliness now.

Decline to sign, baby, decline to sign.

Trouble, trouble everywhere, not just with notorious big cases like Madoff.

Today’s wave of dubious deals is more pervasive and grass-roots in nature than the S&L debacle, which primarily involved thrift executives and their borrowers. Developers, mortgage brokers, appraisers, bankers and borrowers alike are under the microscope of state securities regulators and federal prosecutors.

“We’ve always had people fudging the numbers on their loan application to buy the home they wanted to live in,” said Joe Boyer, supervisory special agent for the FBI in Portland. “During the boom, we had people trying to do 50 homes. It was all about the real estate appreciation.”

Boyer is a key member of a mortgage fraud working group in Portland formed among local, state and federal investigators to combat real estate and mortgage fraud.

It’s good that law enforcement is finally taking action, I guess. The horses are out of the barn, down the road and on a plane to an offshore location, sipping tropical drinks and laughing, but hey, it’s something. Basically huge portions of American society became a kleptocracy, and with nobody enforcing existing laws or lending standards to any great extent, it seems like it became socially acceptable to do wrong.

Thus shall the disastrous neo-liberal epoch of 1980-2008 be remembered. Both parties shared in this, and to a certain extent many politicians seem not to have learned a great deal. This is TWICE in the last twenty years this has happened. It’s inexcusable, and more importantly, downright stupid and unnecessary.

While it’s true that proper regulation must be neither too burdensome nor too lax, we’ve lived through an age where the reflexive attitude of most bidness guys and gals, especially in the house building, buying and selling industry, is to oppose regulation just ’cause they wanna. It makes ’em mad and so they run lying third party expenditure ads and so on, kind of like a child holding its breath. And like a naughty child, they are now very, very sorry that they got caught and everything is all messed up.

Babbling about the invisible hand is all fine and dandy, but it’s neither realistic nor much of a policy. The automatic response to anyone still claiming markets will police themselves should be a belly laugh.

Okay then. Sounds like the northwest Nazis are kind of losing it (as if being a Nazi isn’t a sign in and of itself of insanity.)

The New Year was scarcely two hours old when Seattle police were forced to shoot an apparent neo-Nazi wearing a German military uniform in the Ravenna-University District.

Police say he aimed a rifle attached with a bayonet at them and refused to put it down.

The wounded man was taken to Harborview Medical Center with life-threatening injuries but was still alive shortly before 7 a.m., police spokesman Jeff Kappel said.

—snip—

Inside the residence from which the armed man emerged to confront police was Nazi regalia and alcohol, Kappel said.

It all happened shortly before 2 a.m. when a call from alarmed residents was made to 911 about five men in their 20s with guns, dressed in military uniforms and other dark clothing, who were firing shots in the west end of the alley on the 5200 block of 17th Avenue Northeast.

Police reached the caller and talked to witnesses who said two of the men had been firing guns. One was believed to be carrying a rifle and the other a shotgun.

According to the article, police are still on the lookout for a second man who might be armed and also wearing a similar uniform.

Happy New Year! And watch out for those Seattle Nazis, that’s just flipped out.

UPDATE Fri. Jan. 2 11:20 AM– At Slog, Jonathan Spangenthal-Lee reports that the man who was shot (and later died) was a University of Washington student majoring in German studies and a WWII buff. Some of the deceased’s friends are saying the Nazi aspect “is being blown out of proportion.”

A sad situation anyhow you slice it.

Seattle area house prices continued to fall:

House prices in King, Pierce and Snohomish counties dropped 1.4 percent from September and 10.2 percent from October 2007, according to Standard & Poor’s S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price Indices. Area prices now have fallen 11.4 percent from the July 2007 peak and are back to where they were in the spring of 2006.

The year-over-year decline was the first double-digit annual drop for S&P’s Seattle index, which goes back to the start of 1990, and put Seattle eighth among the 20 areas S&P tracks. The monthly drop was unchanged from September’s and good for fifth place.

The Portland area seems about the same:

The Portland-Vancouver area saw housing prices decline an average of 10.1 percent in the 12 months ending in October, according to the S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price Index report Tuesday.

The region’s price decline was not as bad as many other parts of the U.S. with urban areas such as Phoenix, Detroit and Las Vegas down more than 20 percent. Prices in the 20-city index have plummeted more than 23.4 percent from their peak in July 2006.

It’s good that our region might not be facing the kind of insane declines in value as some other places, but high inventory and economic uncertainty means more bumpy sledding lies ahead. It may be a “great time to buy a house,” as industry advertising suggests, but only for those with stellar credit. Not sure there are enough of those folks left to really stabilize things right now.

I would like to use my extra second to note that Samuel J. Wurzelbacher is an uninformed, hypocritical right wing douche and he can eat me. Just for the record.

God bless 2009.

Time Warner and Viacom are behaving badly:

Viacom Inc. (VIA) and Time Warner Cable Inc. (TWC) appear unlikely to reach an agreement on carriage fees before the New Year, according to a source familiar with the talks, meaning popular networks Comedy Central, MTV and Nickelodeon may be pulled from the cable company’s system, which include large parts of New York City and Los Angeles.

And now the Insight Bowl is on the lame-ass NFL channel, which gives customers a handful of crappy NFL games (and now a bowl game!) for an extra $380 or something.

As it is, Beck plans to watch the game from his home with family members. For other KU fans and alumni eager to watch their college football team trounce (they hope) Minnesota, they’ll have to settle for watching it at a subscribing friend or family member’s home, at a sports bar that carries the network, or they can just pony up and purchase the Cox sports tier before the game begins.

And of course there is Comcast and the Portland Trailblazers. This is from Dec. 11 but I saw a whiny Comcast ad the other day, so I suppose they are still being wieners about their own lame-ass sports channel.

Since there was quite a bit of talk in the Blazers Forum the other day about Comcast Sports Net and the satellite companies striking a deal, I fired off an email to CSN to find out whether or not this was true. Tim Fitzpatrick of CSN says that while there is nothing new to report, negotiations continue.

We used to have a concept in this country called “anti-trust laws.” Guess not so much any more. Why cable companies should be allowed to use their market position to threaten each other while punishing consumers is beyond me. Right now all the Viacom channels are running crawls about the dire threat posed by Time Warner, as if it’s some kind of 9-11 of the airwaves. It’s absurd.

I never have understood why there is an artificial distinction made between over the air broadcasters, who are considered to be using the public airwaves, versus satellite and cable providers, who are also granted the use of public resources in the form of other radio frequencies and rights of way.

The cable tee-vee industry far too often winds up resembling those old photos of New York City when a hundred phone companies all tried to string their own lines. It’s a basic regulatory function of government to bring and maintain order in markets where monopolies and oligopolies tend to exist.

A sales tax for thee but not for me.

Adding, Brunell is probably right that it’s bad to excessively tax capital and research investment with a sales tax.

So what does that tell you about the tax system in this state? That’s right, it’s so stupid, regressive and beyond broken that we have to create special tax exemptions to lessen the stupid brokenness. It helps a lot if you have lobbyists.

It’s not just the bidness guys and gals who are impacted by the regressive nature of our tax system, it’s everyone. Now go to the Legislature in January and see if they will give you a sales tax exemption to invest in your house or car, and good luck with that. What, your personal lobbyist is not available? Sucks to be you.

Shhhhh! I know you’re thinking “gee, there must be some other kind of tax that isn’t regressive, could apply to both individuals and corporations and be graduated based upon how much money an individual or business actually earns.” For shame.

You’re not allowed to think about that, because then we might wind up having a realistic discussion of the tax system rather than the usual “divide and conquer” situation pitting labor versus business, private versus public and so on. What kind of Legislative session would that be?

BORING.

I’m looking forward to whatever sex offender-NASCAR stunts the Republicans will dream up this time, like tying public sector unions to the Tate murders or High School Musical 3.

Besides, our sales tax should work wonders in a continued deflationary spiral. As prices and wages fall, sales tax revenue takes a double hit!

Rinse, repeat.

Good times.

Yet even by WaMu’s relaxed standards, one mortgage four years ago raised eyebrows. The borrower was claiming a six-figure income and an unusual profession: mariachi singer.

Mr. Parsons could not verify the singer’s income, so he had him photographed in front of his home dressed in his mariachi outfit. The photo went into a WaMu file. Approved.

“I’d lie if I said every piece of documentation was properly signed and dated,” said Mr. Parsons, speaking through wire-reinforced glass at a California prison near here, where he is serving 16 months for theft after his fourth arrest — all involving drugs.

While Mr. Parsons, whose incarceration is not related to his work for WaMu, oversaw a team screening mortgage applications, he was snorting methamphetamine daily, he said.

No wonder Republicans were always screaming about sex offenders. It diverted attention from the tweekers running amok in the house building, financing and selling industry. At least in the 1980’s it was just cocaine.

The Columbian just hates unions, period. Always has.

Not sure why it’s okay for business interests to aggressively pursue what they want, but not unions who represent mostly regular folks. Just because some regular folks’ job is teaching your kids, clearing your streets or making sure your drinking water is not fouled doesn’t mean they deserve special enmity. And it wasn’t the WEA or AFSCME that caused this economy from hell, it was the smarty-pants neo-liberal bidness guys and gals who fight tooth and nail against most regulations. And The Columbian is calling unions greedy? Talk about chutzpah.

If you follow The Columbian’s logic, contracts don’t actually count if one of the parties is workers who collectively bargain. It continues the newspaper’s long running attack on unions. In the end, essentially, they’re saying unions have no right to exist and are somehow illegitimate. Of course unions aren’t perfect, and one would imagine there will be a great deal of discussion in Olympia about what to do.

But it’s unwarranted and counter-productive for newspaper editorial boards to issue such virulent attacks against unions, and frankly makes the newspaper look silly. But since sacrifice is the order of the day, maybe legislators should start here. It’s time greedy newspaper owners start pulling their weight.

This is just one guy.

In a seemingly unprecedented move, President George W. Bush on Wednesday revoked a pardon he had issued just 24 hours earlier for a politically connected real estate developer who defrauded hundreds of low-income home buyers—acknowledging that White House aides had not fully described the scope of the crimes committed and the context of the clemency application.

The unexpected Christmas Eve reversal came after it was discovered that the pardon of Isaac Toussie had not met Justice Department guidelines and that Toussie’s father had donated $28,500 to the Republican National Committee, prompting some of Toussie’s victims to complain he had been bailed out thanks to White House ties.

That legacy thing isn’t going so well.

How many more scumbags are there that we’ll never know about? How many of them are in Washington state? Will the remains of the traditional media here endeavor to tell us? The house building, selling and financing industry needs to be held accountable. You shouldn’t be able to wreck an economy and get away with it, at least if you’re name isn’t Stalin.

Here Bush is trying to pardon a kleptocrat and the only way he gets called on it is because house owners who got screwed called foul. We could use some of that moxie here.