The Republic of T.

Here are some of the people writing about some of the stuff I wish I had time to write about, for July 31st from 16:18 to 17:14:

• Joe Lauria: Unitarian Church Shooting is Terrorism - Even if this man hopefully acted alone it is chilling to all progressive people and groups, like the Unitarians. Are we free to express our views, indeed to allow our children to perform in a church play?
• Wayne Besen: Messages That Lead To Murder - The far right's dirty little secret is that they depend on the threat of violence to retard the advancement of the GLBT movement. Without the fear of physical attack, the number of people who are out of the closet would quickly multiply. Gay couples would hold hands in every city in the nation. On each block, from San Francisco to San Antonio, gay and lesbian people would be visibly present.
• Sara Whitman: Tennessee Shooting: When will the Right Wing Go on Trial? - When will we examine the right wing groups that create such hatred in our society? When will we put them on the stand and cross examine their lives, their homes, their parents? When will their hatred be abnormal?
• RJ Eskow: A Murderer’s Bookshelf: Hannity, O’Reilly, and Savage On Killer’s Reading List - This evening we learn from the Knoxville News that officers entering the home of murder Jim Adkisson "found Liberalism is a Mental Health Disorder by radio talk show host Michael Savage, Let Freedom Ring by talk show host Sean Hannity, and The O'Reilly Factor, by television talk show host Bill O'Reilly."
• Booman Tribune ~ How To Make A Liberal-Hunter - Let me ask y'all a question. In all your blogreading or listening to Air America or watching Phil Donahue or Keith Olbermann on your teevee, have you have ever heard a Democrat or a liberal advocate the murder of a political opponent or the destruction of, say, the Colt Tower in San Francisco or the New York Times Building in Times Square? Have you ever heard any of these liberals talk about taking an opponent's life, freedom, or property without due process of law?
• Did Right-Wing Shock Jocks Motivate Knoxville Killer? | PEEK | AlterNet - Hateful talk about one's enemies undermining the nation leads to hateful acts in response.
• On the (New) “New Old Gay” Stereotype - So, are you New Gay or “New Old Gay? (Note: Apparently those are your only two choices.)
• 10 Things You Should Know About the Internet | The Best Article Every day - Ah, the Internet: you use it every day for school, work or fun. In such a short period of time, the Net has grown into an essential every day thing that it’s hard to imagine life without it. Here are the 10 Things You Should Know About the Internet:
• Box Turtle Bulletin » Relief Fund Set Up For Knoxville Churches - A relief fund has been set up by the Boston-based Unitarian Universalist Association as more than a hundred Unitarian Universalist congregations hold special services this week in memory of the shooting Sunday at the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church in Knoxville.
• Box Turtle Bulletin » LaBarbera’s Incoherence on Hate Crimes - Besides, here’s a news flash for LaBarbera. The FBI is already investigating this as a hate crime. Why? According to Stacie Bohanan, spokeswoman for the FBI’s Knoxville division, “Anytime someone uses force to obstruct another person in the free exercise of their religious beliefs, that becomes a violation of the federal civil rights statutes.”
• Religion, Babies Help Fuel Gay Nup Decisions / Queerty - Social conservatives will no doubt use this as evidence of some gay plan to usurp organized religion and erect some evil alternative.
• Open Left:: People Who Are Different Suck - The title of this post is the crystallized distillation of the Republican message: people who are different suck. And, whether we like to admit it or not, this has actually been the primary dynamic of American politics for several decades.
• God’s Politics - Jim Wallis blog, faith blog, religion, christian, christianity, politics, values - This is the kind of tragedy that occurs when we adopt war rhetoric, turning our fellow Americans into enemies. Both sides have effectively demonized the opposition, laying blame for our problems at others' feet. Would it "kill" talk radio announcers to tone down their tenor for the sake of the common good? Could they sacrifice a few ratings points by refusing to serve the red meat their most radicalized listeners relish? Can we discipline ourselves to change the channel when the scapegoating begins?
• God’s Politics - Jim Wallis blog, faith blog, religion, christian, christianity, politics, values - It is appropriate, because ultimately it was government policies that were both complicit in and directly responsible for this great inhumanity and injustice. Nobody alive in America today participated in slavery, many have no ancestors who did, and large numbers of families came to this land only after slavery was officially abolished — but all white Americans have benefited from the poisonous legacy of slavery and discrimination.
• Feministe » Your class is in your skin: What are your experiences? - I grew up a poor kid, surrounded mostly by other poor kids and a bunch of lower-middle-class kids. These kids got acne just as much as the upper-class kids did — it’s hard to go through teenagehood and not explode into pimples at some point or another. But to most of these families, acne was an annoyance. It wasn’t a medical condition.
• Dispatches from the Culture Wars: The “Satanic Ten Commandments” - Ah, but there's just one tiny little difference that Dice fails to mention: this monument is on private property. Doesn't have a damn thing to do with the government. It was commissioned by a private individual and built on property owned by a private trust that he set up. Guess what that means? It means you don't get to remove it no matter how much you'd like to.
• Under New Proposals, Some Rape Victims Wouldn’t Get Emergency Contraception | Reproductive Justice and Gender | AlterNet - Conservatives are proposing a federal rule that would go so far as to allow providers to deny rape victims emergency contraception.
• 8 Great Anti-Hacks to Fundamentally Change Your Life | Zen Habits - 1. Embrace Your Inner Dilettante, be Flaky, and Denounce the Cult of Permanence. After college graduation, we’re allowed a couple years of experimental wiggle room. And when those years are oven we’re supposed to semi-permanently stay put. We’re supposed to stop vagabonding through life. We’re supposed to sit down and shut up.
• Why Bandwidth Is the Oil of the Information Economy - Op-Ed - NYTimes.com - Just as the industrial revolution depended on oil and other energy sources, the information revolution is fueled by bandwidth. If we aren’t careful, we’re going to repeat the history of the oil industry by creating a bandwidth cartel.

Damn. I guess eight of of ten ain’t so bad. I started going down this list of 10 skills you need to succeed at almost anything and I was doing fine until I got to number seven.

7. Math

You don’t have to be able to integrate polynomials to be successful. However, the ability to quickly work with figures in your head, to make rough but fairly accurate estimates, and to understand things like compound interest and basic statistics gives you a big lead on most people. All of these skills will help you to analyze data more effectively - and more quickly - and to make better decisions based on it.

And number ten threw me.

10. Basic Accounting

It is a simple fact in our society that money is necessary. Even the simple pleasures in life, like hugging your child, ultimately need money - or you’re not going to survive to hug for very long. Knowing how to track and record your expenses and income is important just to survive, let alone to thrive. But more than that, the principles of accounting apply more widely to things like tracking the time you spend on a project or determining whether the value of an action outweighs the costs in money, time, and effort. It’s a shame that basic accounting isn’t a required part of the core K-12 curriculum.

OK, really I guess I can do those things. Or at least I can do them well enough most of the time. I can do some figures in my head, fairly quickly. I had to look up compounded interest to find out that I already knew what it was. And I can do statistics well enough to understand the between the mean and the median.

And I can track my income well enough to keep a positive balance in the bank, and to know when I need to curtail spending for a while.

The only one that seriously trips me up is number three.

3. Self-Management

If success depends of effective action, effective action depends on the ability to focus your attention where it is needed most, when it is needed most. Strong organizational skills, effective productivity habits, and a strong sense of discipline are needed to keep yourself on track.

My ADD makes that a constant struggle, and often a losing battle.

But seriously, does anyone do all of them well, all of the time? If they do, they’re not human.

I don’t remember how old I was the first time it happened. I couldn’t have been more than ten years old. We were in Philadelphia — my mother, my younger sister, and I — visiting my great grandfather on my mother’s side of the family. For my sister and me, it was our first time traveling that far from home, and our first time in a city like Philadelphia. Everything amazed us, from the size of the buildings, downtown to the narrow little houses on my great great-grandfather’s street, with no yards to speak of and no space between them; so different from our suburban home back in Augusta, GA.

Even going shopping was different. Instead of driving to the store, my mom pushed her grandfather’s folding cart a few blocks to a store a few blocks away, and we followed her. The store was a wonder unto itself; on the outside a rowhouse like the one my great grandfather lived in, but on the inside there were long, narrow shelves holding food, toys, and other items we’d never seen before.

Our mother had told us time and time again not to touch anything whenever we went shopping, but we couldn’t help it this time. We picked up toys and candy and other items, exclaiming to each other to “come look at this.” Until it happened.

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The hubby and I took what I call a “marriage health day” yesterday. It’s when we take the day off from work, drop the kids off at daycare, and head into the city for a “daylight date.” We usually have breakfast, take in a movie, and grab lunch. We just spend time, y’know, being a couple, and taking a few minutes to remember what brought us together eight years ago in the first place. By then it’s usually time to go get the kids. This time, the movie had special resonance for us.

As soon as we heard that Meryl Streep had agreed to star in Mama Mia! we knew it would be our next “date movie.” (Normally, we have entirely different tastes in movies. I tend toward darker, dramatic fare, and documentaries. He prefers comedies and light fare.) We’d gone to see the stage version at the National Theater when we were dating. Later on, the Abba song from which the show and movie borrowed their title became part of a special memory for our family.

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Head over to the Cult of Gracie — whose tagline I love, “The Variant of Gnostic Sexuality” — and check out the latest Carnival of the Liberals, which includes a post from yours truly.

You can tell a lot about a person by what in their medicine cabinet. A quick peek during a trip to the bathroom and the nosey neighbor could find out whose taking anti-depressants or birth control pills. Maybe someone is being treated for heart disease or bipolar disorder. Or perhaps someone is taking antibiotics for any number of conditions, from a sinus infection to an STD. Certain medicines, if you know what to look for, are a clear sign that someone is undergoing treatment for cancer of HIV.

Of course, most of keep to ourselves what medications we’re taking. That’s why they’re behind the medicine cabinet door, and not lined up on the kitchen counter. Most of us don’t go snooping in other people’s medicine cabinets. (Do we?) And if we did, the worst we could do with the information is use it to spread gossip.

That is, unless we’re in the business of looking into other people’s medicine cabinets, using the information obtained by those who are in that business.

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Here are some of the people writing about some of the stuff I wish I had time to write about, for July 29th from 07:56 to 16:40:

• Preemptive Karma: Fox News Mocks Jesus - A lot of Christians watch Fox News because they've bought into the idea that it's somehow more honest, good, and godly than the other networks (a lot of Christians believe their faith is only compatible with Republican views). But this video, in my opinion, mocks the entire concept of a Messiah. I
• Preemptive Karma: Knoxville shooting but a symptom of the disease - The would-be mass murderer in Knoxville was likely mentally disturbed - to say the least. He was unhappy and apparently deeply stressed over lack of work when he started planning the shooting at the Unitarian/Universalist church. But why did he choose that church?
• Right-Wing Pathologies Revealed After Adkisson Shooting at Unitarian Church | Media and Technology | AlterNet - The grotesque irony of the FR discussions is that, after early posters have indulged all their bigoted guesses about the identity of the killer, they find out the gunman was actually straight out of their own demographic: a 59-year old white man named Jim Adkisson, who left a four-page letter ranting against liberals, was known by his acquaintances to hate "blacks, gays and anyone who was different from him," left a pile of books by O'Reilly, Savage and Hannity behind in his car, and even wore a red-white-and-blue shirt to his church killing spree.
• Pharyngula: City workers in Birmingham are not reading this right now - The Birmingham city council has put up blocking software to lock out atheist websites, which is OK — they've got to crack that whip and keep their employees focused on the work at hand, of course. Unfortunately, they apparently aren't doing this to improve productivity, but simply to shut down a point of view some bureaucrat doesn't like.
• Dispatches from the Culture Wars: The Wingnut Index - It works the same way, by assigning point values to the rhetorical claims of conservatives to determine whether they should be taken seriously or whether they are simply wingnuts mindlessly repeating the talking points (and one could do the same thing on the other side, of course).
• Judge: Principal Went On Gay Witch Hunt | 365 Gay News - During the two-day trial in May, Davis testified that he believed clothing, buttons or stickers featuring rainbows would make students automatically picture gay people having sex. He went on to admit that while censoring rainbows and gay pride messages, he allowed students to wear other symbols many find controversial, such as the Confederate flag.
• Gay American war hero with Purple Heart who didn’t tell unless asked - Americas, World - The Independent - In life, Major Alan G Rogers was an American patriot, committed to the US Army in which he had served for 18 of his 40 years. His death this year, from a roadside bomb, which took the number of American losses in Iraq to more than 4,000, robbed the service of an outstanding military intelligence officer and deprived his friends of someone they all described as a great listener and a profoundly religious man. Major Rogers was also gay.
• Peterson Toscano’s A Musing: Spirit of Perversion??? Ex-Gay Survivor in Malta Speaks Out - On my recent trip to Malta, I met Paolo (not his real name), who when he was 18 (three years ago) stumbled into the ex-gay movement. His story helps illustrate how the US-based ex-gay theories and practices sneak in under the radar in Europe.
• Latest Dean Deposition Addresses DNC’s Internal Gay Delegate Feud / Queerty - The hits just keep coming for Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean. And when we say “hits,” we mean video of his testimony in the ongoing discrimination lawsuit filed by former gay outreach director Donald Hitchcock.
• Lavena Johnson Was Raped and Murdered: Then the Army Covered It Up | War on Iraq | AlterNet - Lavena Johnson died a horrific death at the hands of her fellow soldiers — and then the Army called it a suicide.
• Box Turtle Bulletin » Frothing Lunacy - Sometimes the anti-gays come out with something so ludicrous, so froth-at-the-mouth insane, so raving lunatic that it’s worth of Lewis Carroll. Except, of course, they believe themselves… or the less sane among them do.
• Rod 2.0:Beta: Saro Harvey at DC PFLAG, Discussion on Black Families and Gay Children - Ironically, on the same evening that CNN broadcasts its much-heralded Black in America series that totally ignores black gays and lesbians and "the black family", there was an excellent discussion on the subject at the campus of the University of Washington DC. O

Here are some of the people writing about some of the stuff I wish I had time to write about, for July 28th through July 29th:

• Suicide Spreads as One Solution to the Debt Crisis | Corporate Accountability and WorkPlace | AlterNet - In a culture where credit rating is the key measure of self-worth, the increasing response to huge debts is “Just shoot me!”
• ACLU Blog: Because Freedom Can’t Blog Itself: Official Blog of the American Civil Liberties Union » Lunatics in the White House - One such attorney, speaking of those in the Bush administration, reportedly told Mayer: “I can’t, I could not believe these lunatics had taken over the country.”
• The Killing of Rachel Hoffman and the Tragedy That Is Pot Prohibition | DrugReporter | AlterNet - Police caught Hoffman with pot but promised to drop charges if she agreed to go undercover in a drug bust. She was killed soon afterward.
• The Danger of Meat-Heavy Diets | Media and Technology | AlterNet - The Atkins, eat-lots-of-meat diet is about as unhealthy as they come. But you’d never know it from media coverage.
• Erkan’s field diary: “Meet the first gay honor killing victim…. - In a corner of Istanbul today, the man who might be described as Turkey’s gay poster boy will be buried – a victim, his friends believe, of the country’s deepening friction between an increasingly liberal society and its entrenched conservative traditions.”
• Straight Talk Express can’t handle gay adoption - Minnesota Independent: News. Politics. Media. - Sen. John McCain’s “Straight Talk Express” seems to be derailing on the issue of gay and lesbian couples adopting abandoned or orphaned children
• RJ Eskow: Monster: Who Really Killed the Knoxville Unitarians? - Who really killed those Unitarians? Was it the preachers who spread hatred and intolerance? The politicians who court and flatter them instead of condemning their hate speech? The media machine that attacks liberals, calls them “traitors” and suggests you speak to them “with a baseball bat”? The economic system that batters people like Jim Adkisson until they snap, then tells them their real enemies are gays and liberals and secular humanists? If you ask me, it was all of the above.
• RedLasso Ends Blogger’s Video Embed Services - Redlasso, the web service we occasionally used here at Mashable to illustrate a point using footage from mainstream television, has shuttered their service for the time being in the face of a lawsuit being brought against them by NBC Universal and Fox.
• Box Turtle Bulletin » AFA Approved Comments: Knoxville Church Doing “Satan’s Work” - “While this is a tragedy, the article may mislead those who are not familiar with the Unitatian [sic] ‘non-religion’. Unitarians are not Christians, and like all non-Christians they are doing Satan’s work.”

I’ve written before about Amy Winehouse’s sad, scary, and very public struggle with addiction. In fact, I as I discussed with a co-worker an article I read an on Friday that suggest to me a parallel with another a similar celebrity story; one that turns out to be ongoing.

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Here are some of the people writing about some of the stuff I wish I had time to write about, for July 28th from 14:36 to 16:45:

• Hate Politics Leads to Violence: Tennessee Shooter Attacked Liberals | PEEK | AlterNet - Right-wingers love to "joke" about mowing down, rounding up, and otherwise "wiping out" all things liberal. It's become a standard feature of conservative-movement rhetoric. And whenever anyone calls them on it, they have a standard response: "Aw, c'mon — it's just a joke!"
• The Bilerico Project | Why Black Transgender Issues Are Black Community Issues - As a proud African-American that also happens to be a transwoman, there is no doubt- and I make it quite clear on many TransGriot and TBP posts- that I love my people. But some of them don't love me.
• Pharyngula: Conservative confederate killer - I don't know what happened, but despite it happening in a church, I don't get the impression that it's a consequence of a conflict between Christians and an atheist. It was a Unitarian church, full of secular humanists and deists and non-specific theists, not exactly a prime target for a psychotic atheist. More likely issues are that the place had a sign out front saying "Gays welcome", that he was a Confederate South sympathizer, that he was insane, and that he "was motivated by frustration over being unable to obtain a job and hatred for the liberal movement." At least, that's the word that has leaked out of a long note he left behind.
• HRC Back Story - It was another memorable week where a major GLBT civil rights issue headlined on Capitol Hill, as Joe Solmonese wrapped up in his weekly message. Eric Alva was one of the stars at this week's congressional hearing on Don't Ask, Don't Tell - and like Joe said, we're so thrilled to have Eric as a part of our family. He's also a great friend.
• Leah Daughtry Defines Marriage As “One Man, One Woman” / Queerty - When asked about whether she supports gay marriage, Daughtry replied that she does not. The Pentecostal minister turned politico goes on to explain that same-sex nuptials go against her personal beliefs: “I believe, as the church believes, that marriage is intended for one man and one woman.” Daughtry goes on to insist that she keeps her religious beliefs separate from her duties at the DNC: “People know that I am a reverend but it is completely separate from the work at the DNC.”
• Think Progress » McCain Caves To Right Wing On Gay Adoption, Says Orphans Shouldn’t Have Gay Parents - McCain didn’t acknowledge that a two-parent family can also consist of same-sex parents. Unlike his spokeswoman, he also didn’t recognize that rejecting adoptions by same-sex parents means leaving thousands of children with no parents. As Winnie Stachelberg and Robert Gordon noted, about 130,000 children wait in the foster care system each year for a permanent home. And every year, half of these children are never placed.
• ‘Doctor Who’ Actor Meets Ex-Gay Preacher | Ex-Gay Watch - Barrowman asked him whether being gay could simply be a matter of wiring in the brain. Woolsey’s reply confirms what most of us have experienced for ourselves, that being ex-gay does not change underlying orientation, but simply denies it.
• Box Turtle Bulletin » Just Concluded: Knoxville Press Conference - According to Chief Owen, Jim David Adkisson had spent at least a week planning the attack, based on the four-page letter that was recovered from Adkisson’s vehicle. The shotgun was purchased about a month ago. The police spokesman said that Adkisson was frustrated over not being able to find an job, and that he “hated the liberal movement.” Owen targeted TVUUC because of some “recent publicity” the church had received regarding its “liberal stance on things,” but he would not provide any further details. They are investigating the crime as a possible hate crime.
• ACLU Blog: Because Freedom Can’t Blog Itself: Official Blog of the American Civil Liberties Union » Faith-Based Termination - Last week the LGBT Project and Americans United for Separation of Church and State filed a brief before a federal appeals court on behalf Alicia Pedreira, who was fired from her job at a publicly-funded Baptist group home for wards of the State of Kentucky because she didn’t observe the organization’s belief that being a lesbian is sinful.
• Trans Formed: To Be Homeless & Transgender - washingtonpost.com - Six young people arrived in a clump at 10 p.m., clutching pillows and belongings and, in one case, a teddy bear. They came from Sylvia's Place, an overcrowded downtown shelter. One woman, wearing a do-rag under a baseball cap, surprised me with a quick hug. In the coming months, she would outline the danger she felt in our relatively safe-seeming Manhattan neighborhood, how every time she walked outside she'd hear some comment, how she was hit in the face just waiting for the bus.

It was a jaw-droppingly, mystifyingly obtuse, callous moment in an administration that’s given us enough of them to fill what would have to be the world’s most depressing bloopers reel. It also brilliantly captured a president and an administration who don’t feel American’s pain, but smirk at it instead.

I didn’t think he could top his farewell shout-out to the G8 — “Goodbye from the world’s biggest polluter” — but he did it.

A while back, I attempted to create a kind of Bush blooper reel.

Now I’ve got something to add to it. You can’t blame the president for wanting the cameras turned off for this.

My first thought was, “Well, who supplied the open bar?” But Jeff Danziger said it best with a political cartoon depicting a passed-out drunk to represent Wall Street, and Bush, dressed as a bartender, leaning against the bar and — with that trademark smirk — claiming ignorance about how the drunk got, well, drunk.

I can’t help wondering what late, great, former-Bush-classmate Molly Ivins would have made of Bush’s most recent stunner. In a 2003 Mother Jones article titled “The Uncompassionate Conservative,” wrote this about her fellow Texan.

In order to understand why George W. Bush doesn’t get it, you have to take several strands of common Texas attitude, then add an impressive degree of class-based obliviousness. What you end up with is a guy who sees himself as a perfectly nice fellow — and who is genuinely disconnected from the impact of his decisions on people.

I might differ with Ivins’ “perfectly nice fellow” assessment, given all that’s passed since she wrote it. Later on in the piece, she includes a description of a telling moment between Bush and Rev. Jim Wallis — progressive evangelical author of God’s Politics, and editor-in-chief/ CEO of Sojourners.

The Reverend Jim Wallis, leader of Call to Renewal, a network of churches that fight poverty, told the New York Times that shortly after his election, Bush had said to him, “I don’t understand how poor people think,” and had described himself as a “white Republican guy who doesn’t get it, but I’d like to.” What’s annoying about Bush is when this obtuseness, the blinkeredness of his life, weighs so heavily on others, as it has increasingly as he has acquired more power.

Four years hence, it’s got to be clear enough by now that Bush’s obtuseness — his ignorance of simple every-day-life matters affected by his policies, like the price of gas — is willful. If he “doesn’t get it,” when it come to the economic pain more and more American’s are dealing with, it’s because he doesn’t care to.

And that pain is more and more real each day. Just the headlines from the past week would make that clear to anyone who picked up a newspaper. (Something I suspect the President is still disinclined to do.)Foreclosures are up 120%. Some 220,000 homes were lost to repossession in the last quarter, and another 739,714 entered foreclosure in the first quarter. That’s one in every 171 American homes involved in what Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson euphemistically calls the “housing correction”, which he says must go on, even in the midst of a handing some very wealthy people a blank welfare check that I’ll get to in a bit.

Meanwhile, jobless claims pushed past 400,000 for the second time this year. That’s probably related in no small way to the spike in business bankruptcies, which is hitting small business particularly hard as they, struggle with the same things that consumers are struggling with. Like fuel costs driving up electricity bills, and causing an increase in cut-off notices as consumers have trouble keeping up with their bills. In fact, as the price of just about everything is going up, consumers are behind on or have walked away from $800 million in household debt; including mortgages, credit cards, and car loans. (That last one means that when some of them lose their homes they won’t even have cars to live in, because repo is about the only business that’s booming now.) And they can’t borrow against the equity in their homes in order to get caught up, because home values are still falling so hard that people count themselves lucky if they don’t owe more than their house is worth.

Meanwhile, the Fed has not only bailed out Bear Stearns by putting the same taxpayers mentioned above one on the line for $30 billion of Bear’s debts (y’know, the company that had $30 in debt for every $1 it had in assets?), it’s gone one better. The housing bill that passed this weekend included at bailout for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac that could cost taxpayers anywhere from $25 billion to $100 billion. Despite business decisions that ran both companies into the ground, the housing bill passed this weekend with none of the conditions that both critics and common sense recommended. It amounts to that blank corporate welfare check I mentioned earlier.

The House dealt Fannie Mae (FNM) and Freddie Mac (FRE) a “Get Out of Jail Free” card on July 23, passing a bill that authorizes the Treasury Dept. to extend the mortgage-finance giants a lifeline without any of the conditions that the companies’ critics had demanded. The bill now heads to the Senate, where passage is expected within days. President Bush earlier dropped his threat to veto the legislation, so it should be signed into law soon.

…The bill would let the Federal Housing Administration back up to $300 billion in new loans so homeowners who cannot afford their house payments could try to escape foreclosure by refinancing into more affordable mortgages. Lenders would have to agree to take a substantial loss on the existing loans, and in return, they would walk away with at least some payoff and avoid the often-costly foreclosure process.

The plan also includes about $15 billion in housing tax breaks, including a credit of up to $7,500 for first-time buyers, and increases the statutory limit on the national debt by $800 billion, to $10.6 trillion.

Granted, the president finally dropped his threat to veto the bill, but his sticking point was a $4 billion dollar aid package for communities hardest hit by the wave of foreclosures to buy up foreclosed properties that are now part of an epidemic of blight facing urban neighborhoods. (Read, minority communities.)

House Democrats say a new $3.9 billion federal program to help state and local governments buy up foreclosed properties would be part of the solution. The Bush administration has opposed such block grants on the grounds that “the principal beneficiaries of this type of plan would be private lenders – who are now the owners of the vacant or foreclosed properties – instead of struggling homeowners who are working hard to stay in their homes.”

Still, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said last week she doubts Mr. Bush will veto the housing-rescue package, which contains a separate provision he wants to strengthen the financial positions of faltering mortgage companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The disputed funds enable communities to buy up properties once on the revenue rolls that are now “taking the value of their neighbors’ homes,” she said.

Never mind that some of those “homeowners who are working hard to stay in their homes” would also like to protect what remains of the value of their homes and the quality of life in their communities from the consequences of blight caused by boarded up properties.

From Atlanta’s urban core to leafy neighborhoods filled with chirping crickets in Charlotte, N.C., some 2.2 million homes are expected to go through foreclosure – and stand empty – by the time the mortgage meltdown ends, according to Global Insight, an economic research firm. As the housing dominoes fall far from Wall Street, growing urban “ghost towns” of vacant houses are resulting in a costly crush of weeds, trash, and dereliction on a scale unseen in American cities since the Great Depression, economists say.

As a $4 billion package to help municipalities deal with foreclosure-related blight hangs fire in the US Senate, US mayors met last weekend in Miami to vent about the scourge of abandoned homes. Cash-strapped cities are now scrambling – often using on-the-fly ingenuity – to rescue neighborhoods suddenly vulnerable to crime and stunned by millions of dollars in lost equity wrought by loose credit, opportunistic speculators, and predatory lending.

…Some 44.5 million homes in the US now stand next to an empty house, resulting in a drop of at least $5,000 in property value per house. By that calculation, a total loss of home value of $220 billion across the US can be attributed to the vacancy problem.

“This is a man-made disaster that’s had more dramatic impacts on real estate markets than natural disasters [have],” says Bruce Katz, a housing analyst at the Brookings Institution, a think tank in Washington. “In a way, we have a lot of mini-Katrinas across the country.”

The cost of helping those communities turns out to be an unconditional bailout for the institutions that helped create the crisis, financed by the very people struggling to stay afloat in its wake, and several times larger than the amount proposed to help those communities.

The unconditional, accountability-free bailout is, according Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, necessary to protect Fannie and Freddie against attacks from short selling speculators. It’s like, he says, a bazooka that scares off would-be attackers even if it’s never used. This from a guy who just a few weeks ago inveighed against helping homeowners in foreclosure because:

Faced with record-high foreclosure rates, the Bush administration has been scrambling to keep people from losing their homes, but many are beyond help, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson said Tuesday.

Lax lending standards that accompanied the once high-flying housing market allowed people to buy homes they could not afford, Paulson said.

“Many of today’s unusually high number of foreclosures are not preventable,” he said in prepared remarks to a mortgage-lending forum meeting in Arlington, Va. “There is little public policymakers can, or should, do to compensate for untenable financial decisions.”

However, when Lawrence Summers puts the Fannie/Freddie bailout in the context of the Bear Stearns bailout, it seems clear that’s exactly what policymakers are doing: compensating for untenable financial decisions. It’s just that these untenable financial decisions were made by people much higher up on the economic food chain.

This, to put it mildly, is a highly problematic posture for policy. While I strongly supported the Federal Reserve’s policy response to the crisis at Bear Stearns because it was necessary to avoid systemic risk, it is easy to sympathize with those who fear that bailouts inhibit market discipline. Consider how much more problematic the Bear Stearns response would have been had policy-makers signaled their commitment to back the company’s liabilities without limit; left management in place with no change in the business model; and allowed dividends to be paid and shareholders to keep going with hope for a better tomorrow. Yet all of these elements are present in the cases of Fannie and Freddie.

To see the temptation and danger inherent in a situation of this kind, one need only look back to the mismanagement of the savings and loans crisis during the 1980s. Policy-makers protected depositors, allowed institutions to operate even when their fundraising depended on government support, and suspended regular standards in order to attract private capital. With gains privatized and losses socialized, taxpayers ultimately ended up with a $300bn-plus bill measured in today’s dollars.

That’s right. The management stays in place, despite financial decisions that ran the companies aground — helped along by the HUD requiring Fannie and Freddie to purchase subprime mortgage loans and allowing them to count billions invested in subprime loans as a “public good” that would foster affordable housing, while ignoring regulators’ warnings that subprime loans would be detrimental to those receiving them. And, as I mentioned before, the CEOs will probably keep their salaries. They will probably remain among the best paid executives in D.C.. Come next year, they will probably still have ten of the top 100 best paid executives in the country.

And why shouldn’t they? It’s par for the course. Many of us may have ended up about $1.7 trillion poorer in the Bush economy.

Americans saw their net worth decline by $1.7 trillion in the first quarter - the biggest drop since 2002 - as declines in home values and the stock market ravaged their holdings.

Meanwhile, the amount of equity people have in their homes fell to 46.2%, the lowest level on record.

The net worth of U.S. households fell 3% to $56 trillion at the end of March, according to the Federal Reserve’s flow of funds report, which was released Thursday.

The value of real estate assets owned by households and non-profits declined by $305 billion, while financial assets fell by $1.3 trillion, led mainly by a $556 billion drop in stocks and a $400 billion decline in mutual funds.

But the top 1 percent got richer.

In a new sign of increasing inequality in the U.S., the richest 1% of Americans in 2006 garnered the highest share of the nation’s adjusted gross income for two decades, and possibly the highest since 1929, according to Internal Revenue Service data.

Meanwhile, the average tax rate of the wealthiest 1% fell to its lowest level in at least 18 years. The group’s share of the tax burden has risen, though not as quickly as its share of income.

The figures are from the IRS’s income-statistics division and were posted on the agency’s Web site last week. The 2006 data are the most recent available.

The figures about the relative income and tax rates of the wealthiest Americans come as the presumptive presidential candidates are in a debate about taxes. Congress and the next president will have to decide whether to extend several Bush-era tax cuts, including the 2003 reduction in tax rates on capital gains and dividends. Experts said those tax cuts in particular are playing a major role in falling tax rates for the very wealthy.

They almost certainly played a major role in creating the record deficit we’ll be facing when Bush finally ends his shift behind the bar. No wonder 85% of us are unhappy with the economy, and 75% of us blame Bush’s policies for its sorry state.

In some places, after all, the bartender who kept pouring drinks for the obvious drunk is liable when that drunk staggers out of the bar, wreaks havoc, and wrecks lives. But in the barroom that is the Bush economy, Wall Street does indeed get drunk, but the rest of us get the hangover and get stuck with the tab.

It’s not the cast I would have chosen, but it’s looking like Oliver Stone’s W. will be worth getting a babysitter for.

What do you think?

The Washington Post has wrapped up its 13-part “Who Killed Chandra Levy” series, and I’ve been following it; unable to resist a combination of local interest and the kind of crime story that has always fascinated me. (I think in another life I’d like to be a crime writer of some sort. I channeled some of that into the LGBT Hate Crimes Project, I think.)

But as I followed along I never forgot about some of the cases I wrote about in the previous post. In the process of researching that post, I came across many more cases that I didn’t include because the length of the post made me decide to limit it to the cases of those women mentioned in the comments of a WaPo blog post about the Levy series. Since the series on the Levy case is wrapping up, I wanted to take the opportunity to post about a few more cases that have gotten less attention than the Levy case.

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