Foreign Policy Experience

It's funny how so many candidates are talking about how the "other" candidate has no foreign policy experience. Does anybody remember George W. Bush's foreign policy experience?? Still he managed to be President. Oh wait. Maybe that's a bad example.

The Will to Win

"A 6-year-old girl who won four tickets to a Hannah Montana concert with an essay falsely claiming her father died in Iraq."

The girl's mother had told Club Libby Lu officials that the girl's father died April 17 in a roadside bombing in Iraq, company spokeswoman Robyn Caulfield said. But the mother, Priscilla Ceballos, admitted later Friday that the essay and the military information she provided about her daughter's father were untrue.

"We did the essay and that's what we did to win. We did whatever we could do to win," Ceballos said in an interview Friday with KDFW-TV of Dallas.

Just Let Me Be Myself...

Dean and I had a great Christmas. We had dinner at Dean's mom. Dean's "uncle" Howard was there, and he set a marvelous table. He's very creative. Teri, Ellen, Kacy, Tony, Lyman, Ted, Howard, and Dean and I filled the house to overflowing. Everyone seemed to enjoy their gifts. Dean and I made almost all the gifts we gave, and they seemed to appreciate and enjoy them. And boy we made out like bandits! I got tons of books from my Amazon wish list (like 10 of them!). I also got an Aero garden, several audio CDs of classical radio programs like A Christmas Carol, and a few DVDs.

I just finished one of them--First Wives Club. I saw this 11 years ago when it first came out, but I didn't appreciate it then as much as I do now. It's a wonderful movie! I love how the women channel their rage and thirst for revenge into a positive thing and open that crisis center for women.

Of course, like everybody else, my favorite scene is the last one, where the three women sing "You Don't Own Me." It's a very empowering song It's not just for women, but for anyone who has ever lived by someone else's script.



You don't own me,
I'm not just one of your many toys
You don't own me,
don't say I can't go with other boys

And don't tell me what to do
And don't tell me what to say
And please, when I go out with you
Don't put me on display, 'cause

You don't own me,
don't try to change me in any way
You don't own me,
don't tie me down 'cause I'd never stay

Oh, I don't tell you what to say
I don't tell you what to do
So just let me be myself
That's all I ask of you

I'm young and I love to be young
I'm free and I love to be free
To live my life the way I want
To say and do whatever I please

(Instrumental interlude)

A-a-a-nd don't tell me what to do
Oh-h-h-h don't tell me what to say
And please, when I go out with you
Don't put me on display

I don't tell you what to say
Oh-h-h-h don't tell you what to do
So just let me be myself
That's all I ask of you

I'm young and I love to be young
(FADE)
I'm free and I love to be free
To live my life the way I want

The Secret

Today I encountered once again, comments about the book The Secret. A bestselling new age self-help book, the "secret" is about the supposed "law of attraction." This is the idea that whatever we desire, the universe will provide. Want wealth? Simply desire it and think positively, and wealth will be "naturally" attracted to us. Similarly, if you have negative thoughts about something, then the universe will send you that. Sadly, some people I once respected (like John Gray of Men Are From Mars, and Neal Donald Walsh) have signed onto this philosophy.

I first encountered this idea through a co-worker. As I sat with him one day, we talked, and he was really convinced that whatever he wanted, he would get. So I punched him. Not hard. But I really did punch him. And I asked, "so, did you want me to punch you?" After sitting there bewildered and half-wondering if he should run, he finally answered, "well, I guess somehow I did."

When there are no set of facts that can disprove a belief, it becomes true only "by definition" and fails to explain the real world. And sadly, when bad things happen to us, followers of this philosophy will be confounded because they have only themselves to blame. Were you raped? Well, you must have wanted to be. It just gets uglier and uglier.

So what's the real secret? For me, the real secret is that we have HOPE. Hope is my favorite word. And the reason for our hope lies in the birth of a boy named Jesus whom we celebrate tonight. I celebrate not because of blind faith or tradition, but because I really believe the testimony and evidence that this birth and this person really lived. And if so, we have all the hope we need.

¹¹

"Do not be afraid; for see—I am bringing you good news of great joy for all the people: to you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, who is the Messiah,¹²¹³ the Lord. This will be a sign for you: you will find a child wrapped in bands of cloth and lying in a manger.’ And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host, praising God and saying,
¹⁴‘Glory to God in the highest heaven,
and on earth peace among those whom he favours.’"

Magic Keeps Boy Alive

This is nice:

http://www.philly.com/philly/entertainment/20071223_Magic_boy.html

Here's the lede:

For nearly all his 19 years, Chad Juros has lived in the shadow of cancer and the light of magic. They have been the yin and yang of his existence.

As a young boy, he was diagnosed with leukemia and survived, getting through the chemotherapy, and the relapse, and the terrifying ill effects of brain radiation, through magic.

Pardon for Jena 6

Now, I have to admit that I haven't followed the Jena 6 thing very closely. I was out of town when the news went national and never really followed up.

The story, as I understand it, is that 6 17-yr old black teens ambushed 1 white teen, hit him from behind, knocked him out, and proceeded to kick and beat the shit out of him.

I believe that the 6 were initially tried as adults, which sparked the controversy about race and that's what made it all national news. Comparisons were made with the light treatment of other white teens who hung nooses on trees and were suspended, but never criminally charged.

So fine, some adult convictions were overturned, and I think some have been, and some still are, being retried as juveniles. So far as I know, only one person has actually served jail time.

But here is what I don't get: the Congressional black caucus is calling for a PARDON for the Jena 6! On the basis that "they and their families have suffered enough." What possible sense does that make? It's fine to say that these teens should not be tried as adults, but it's equally clear that they ganged up, ambushed, and beat another person. That doesn't deserve any punishment at all? Not only that, they should be pardoned?? Makes no sense.

Vladimir Putin is Time's Person of the Year 2007

Great story in Time Magazine.

Update: Romney calls the decision "disgusting". McCain says it should have been Gen. Petraeus. Their statements reveal their ignorance. Being Time Magazine's Person of the Year is not an honor or an endorsement (it has named Sadat, Andrapov, Khomeini, Hitler and Stalin in the past). It is a statement of the person who has had the most influence on the world during the year. Gen. Petraeus doesn't even come close (despite being named a runner up). And Romney's comments about Putin being ruthless are echoed in the Time Magazine article itself, revealing that he hasn't bothered to read it before trashing it. And my vote would have been Al Gore.

New Mileage Bill

Everybody's so happy about the new mileage bill because it increases the required average mileage from 25 miles to 35 miles. BUT, manufacturers don't have to do it until 2020! I hope that in 13 years, I won't be using gas in my car at all!

Capital Punishment

Executions in the U.S. dropped in 2007 to a 13-year low. That's a good thing. Texas once again led the nation, with 62% of nationwide executions. That statistic alone is enough to make Texas my least favorite state to live in.

New Jersey recently banned the death penalty. I think it's great, but it surprised me that it came from New Jersey, not exactly the progressive capital of the world!

Theology of Evolution & the New Atheism

Great article at Salon:

http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2007/12/18/john_haught/index1.html

I disagree with his view of the resurrection at the end.

Here is an excerpt:

Your forthcoming book, "God and the New Atheism," is a critique of Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris. You claim that they are pale imitations of great atheists like Nietzsche, Camus and Sartre. What are they missing?

The only thing new in the so-called new atheism is the sense that we should not tolerate faith because, by doing so, we open people's minds to any crazy idea -- including dangerous ideas like those that led to 9/11. In every other respect, this atheism is similar to the secular humanism of the modern period, which said that faith is incompatible with science, that religion and belief in God are bad for morality, and that theology should be purged from culture and academic life. These are not new ideas. But there were atheists in the past who were much more theologically educated than these. My chief objection to the new atheists is that they are almost completely ignorant of what's going on in the world of theology. They talk about the most fundamentalist and extremist versions of faith, and they hold these up as though they're the normative, central core of faith. And they miss so many things. They miss the moral core of Judaism and Christianity -- the theme of social justice, which takes those who are marginalized and brings them to the center of society. They give us an extreme caricature of faith and religion.

Isn't there a simple response to the materialist argument? You can say "purpose" is simply not a scientific idea. Instead, it's an idea for theologians and philosophers to debate. Do you accept that distinction?

I sure do. But that distinction is usually violated in scientific literature and in much discussion of evolution. From the beginning of the modern world, science decided quite rightly that it wasn't going to tackle such questions as purpose, value, meaning, importance, God, or even talk about intelligence or subjectivity. It was going to look for purely natural, causal, mechanical explanations of things. And science has every right to be that way. But that principle of scientific Puritanism is often violated by scientists who think that by dint of their scientific expertise, they are able to comment on such things as purpose. I consider that to be a great violation.

Who are these scientists who extrapolate about purpose from science?

A good example is the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Weinberg. In his book "Dreams of a Final Theory," he asks, will we find God once science gets down to what he calls the fundamental levels of reality? It's almost as if he assumes that science itself has the capacity and the power to comment on things like that. Similarly, Dawkins, in "The God Delusion," has stated that science has the right to deal with the question of God and other religious issues, and everything has to be settled according to the canons of the scientific method.

But Dawkins argues that a lot of claims made on behalf of God -- about how God created the world and interacts with people -- are ultimately questions about nature. Unless you say God has nothing to do with nature, those become scientific questions.

Well, I approach these issues by making a case for what I call "layered explanation." For example, if a pot of tea is boiling on the stove, and someone asks you why it's boiling, one answer is to say it's boiling because H2O molecules are moving around excitedly, making a transition from the liquid state to the gaseous state. And that's a very good answer. But you could also say it's boiling because my wife turned the gas on. Or you could say it's boiling because I want tea. Here you have three levels of explanation which are approaching phenomena from different points of view. This is how I see the relationship of theology to science. Of course I think theology is relevant to discussing the question, what is nature? What is the world? It would talk about it in terms of being a gift from the Creator, and having a promise built into it for the future. Science should not touch upon that level of understanding. But it doesn't contradict what evolutionary biology and the other sciences are telling us about nature. They're just different levels of understanding.

What do you say to the atheists who demand evidence or proof of the existence of a transcendent reality?

The hidden assumption behind such a statement is often that faith is belief without evidence. Therefore, since there's no scientific evidence for the divine, we should not believe in God. But that statement itself -- that evidence is necessary -- holds a further hidden premise that all evidence worth examining has to be scientific evidence. And beneath that assumption, there's the deeper worldview -- it's a kind of dogma -- that science is the only reliable way to truth. But that itself is a faith statement. It's a deep faith commitment because there's no way you can set up a series of scientific experiments to prove that science is the only reliable guide to truth. It's a creed.

Rumi

Today, like every other day, we wake up empty
and frightened. Don't open the door to the study
and begin reading. Take down a musical instrument.

Let the beauty we love be what we do.
There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.

~

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
there is a field. I'll meet you there.

When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase each other
doesn't make any sense.
-- Sufi poet & mystic Rumi

In the latest Speaking of Faith, Krista Tippett interviews an expert on Rumi and we hear another side of Islam that we in the West are not familiar with.

From the interview:
"Krista: In your writing, you ask, 'How is one to nurture this God buried like a treasure in one's being and let it permeate all of life?' How does your encounter with Rumi help you to answer that question?
Fatemah: The most important tool that [Rumi has given me] is hope. That is what we need to nurture in ourselves. And hope, the energy to move, the energy to never let go, is what Rumi has given me. Rumi writes, 'I am fire. If you have doubts about that, bring your hands forth.'"

Why I like Chris Dodd

The reason I like Chris Dodd isn't because I agree with all his positions. Although I agree with most of them. I like him because he is doing what no other candidate is doing -- he's taking ACTION. He's actually DOING SOMETHING. And that's something that McCain, Biden, Obama, Clinton, and Kucinich aren't doing.

Whether it is blocking a bad FISA bill, filibustering the Telecom Immunity bill, introducing a Carbon Tax to fight pollution, or voting against funding the Iraq War without a time table, he's actually used his position and influence to DO SOMETHING besides making promises. The others won't even stay in D.C. long enough to vote, much less take any action. It is one thing to bitch and whine about the Bush Administration. It is another to actually take action, and Dodd has been the only one doing it. That takes guts. It means not just having a policy position in words, but proving it in action. Nobody else will do it.

Our infuriating Senate

By now we know that in the Senate, any senator can put a "hold" on just about any legislation, keeping it from coming to the floor. The Republicans do it all the time. And it works. Except for when it's a democrat like Chris Dodd, who is fighting to keep telecom immunity out of a bill. Doing so means that telecoms can violate the law, invade our privacy, and assist the government in spying on its own people without a warrant, and, without being able to take them to court.

I really have no idea why majority leader Reid is ignoring Chris Dodd's hold and moving forward with this really bad legislation, but allows republicans to stop really good legislation. It makes no sense.

This article in Harper's Magazine gives the wider picture of what the stakes really are in this game.

http://harpers.org/archive/2007/12/hbc-90001937


By the way, support Chris Dodd's hold.

Update: Chris Dodd stood up and started talking and wouldn't stop. He objected to the typical motion to cut off debate. As a result, Reid took the bill off the table. Woo hoo! Leadership works.

Abstinence programs

I read an LJWorld article about how 14 states are refusing federal funding for sex education because the abstinence-only funding is ineffective. 2 more states are applying with the caveat that they will use the money for holistic sex ed, which makes them automatically ineligible for the funds. A study commissioned by Congress questions the effectiveness of the program and notes that a 14-year drop in teenage pregnancy has reversed since the abstinence-only program went into place.

As Dean and I talked about this article, we were reminded again of the movie The Golden Compass. In abstinence-only sex ed, we have yet another kind of magisterium trying to tell everybody else what information isn't good for them to have.

The Golden Compass

Last night Dean and I saw The Golden Compass. As fantasy movies go, it was pretty entertaining, although a bit confusing. Neither Dean nor I have read any of the books, so it took quite some time to catch up with the story and figure out what was going on.

The basic plot of the movie is that an all-powerful "Magisterium," a small group of people who are in complete control of civic [and religious?] life, in order to consolidate their power, have hatched a secret plan to sever every child from his or her soul, which in the movie, do not live within people, but are external animals. Psychically attached, neither can live properly without the other. A little girl goes on a quest to rescue the children that have "disappeared" to be used as experiments in their plan. Along the way there are arcane references to "Dust," parallel universes, and so on that don't yet make much sense. The title of the movie, refers to a mystical device given to the child that tells her the truth about any situation she thinks about. Although every fantasy movie has to have the "magic item," the compass plays a rather small role in the movie.

This movie is being boycotted by many conservative religious types (especially Catholics) because the books apparently have the aim of "killing God," and based on some book reviews I read that may not be too far from the book's aim. But that notion has not made it into the movie (at least not yet).

Rather the movie is a lot about external vs. internal authority, about whether it is okay to think for one's self, or whether it is better for others (particularly government and religious authorities) to tell you what to do and to think because it is "for your own good." It is ironic then, that religious groups are trying to tell people what to think when they tell them not to see this movie. As if adults (and children) will be so unduly influenced that they will stop listening to the Church and lose their faith. Hrrmph.

The author himself says this in an interview, "What I was mainly doing, I hope, was telling a story, but not a story like Tolkien’s. (To be honest I don’t much care for “The Lord of the Rings.”) As for the atheism, it doesn’t matter to me whether people believe in God or not, so I’m not promoting anything of that sort. What I do care about is whether people are cruel or whether they’re kind, whether they act for democracy or for tyranny, whether they believe in open-minded enquiry or in shutting the freedom of thought and expression. Good things have been done in the name of religion, and so have bad things; and both good things and bad things have been done with no religion at all. What I care about is the good, wherever it comes from."

Philosophically it seems to me that authority must be both internal and external, it is not an "either/or". Internal because we must come to our own understanding and convictions of the truth of things, and not believe them just because somebody told us so--not least because that somebody might either be evil or just wrong. External because we have an infinite variety of ways of fooling ourselves, and we need an external "checks and balance" to our own thinking. Our thinking must be communal -- we must take time to think and experience for ourselves, and then come together as local communities (and I include God/Scripture/history in that) and think and experience together. When the Church is at its best, it works this way. It is precisely the kind of "top-down" authoritarianism of the Golden Compass that we *ought* to repudiate as not being the best because, no matter what we might prefer to have, church authorities reflect the same human frailties that we all do, and sooner we admit that, the better off we will be.

Interestingly, I frequently meet people who are uncomfortable with the ambiguity and greyness of life that comes with realizing that both internal and external authorities can be wrong. They would rather that it be black and white. They would rather commit themselves fully to being firmly and completely wrong, than to live in that ambiguity. I wonder if that is where GWB is at.

A few things that irritated me today...

1. Bush vetoed SCHIP again
2. Democrats are going to cave to Bush and give him another $70,000,000,000.00 for the war.
3. Hillary took another cheap shot at Obama
4. Apparently waterboarding is a lot like swimming
5. A crappy comment about Satan and Jesus being brothers has entered political debate (theology has no business being in any 30-second sound bite or 2-paragraph news story...it's as stupid as trying to talk about the Trinity on a morning news show).
6. Who hates immigrants the most appears to be a winning strategy for Republicans

Middle of Nowhere

I accidently deleted this blog post.

Check out this great episode of NPR's This American Life.

http://www.thislife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?episode=253

Act I is depressing and needs prayer. Act II mirrors something that happened to me many years ago with US West and AT&T.

The teaser:

Stories from faraway, hard-to-get-to places, where all rules are off, nefarious things happen because no one's looking, and there's no one to appeal to.

Prologue.

Host Ira Glass talks with sailor and researcher Captain Charles Moore about a gigantic area in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, as far away from land as you can get, that is filling with plastic trash. There are five spots like this on the world's oceans. For more, check out Captain Moore's website. (3 minutes)

Act One. No Island Is an Island.

Nauru is a tiny island, population 12,000, a third of the size of Manhattan and far from anywhere: yet at the center of several of the decade's biggest global events. Contributing editor Jack Hitt tells the untold story of this dot in the middle of the Pacific and its involvement in the bankrupting of the Russian economy, global terrorism, North Korean defectors, the end of the world, and the late 1980s theatrical flop of a London musical based on the life of Leonardo da Vinci called Leonardo, A Portrait of Love. (30 minutes)

Act Two. On Hold, No One Can Hear You Scream.

This American Life senior producer Julie Snyder found herself in a ten-month battle with her phone company, MCI Worldcom, which had overcharged her $946.36. She spent hours on hold in a bureaucratic nowhere. No one seemed able to fix her problem, and there was no way she could make the company pay her back for all her lost time and aggravation. Finally, she enlists the aid of the national media—specifically, This American Life host Ira Glass.

You can register a complaint about a phone company at the Better Business Bureau or at the FCC. (22 minutes)

Ethics 101

Whenever I see a headline, like at CNN right now, that says "waterboarding saves lives," my eyes cross and I think part my mind goes insane. Anybody who justifies torture because it "saves lives" needs to go back to Ethics 101 -- to whit, Emmanuel Kant:

"So act as to treat humanity, whether in thine own person or in that of any other, in every case as an end withal, never as a means only."

Or more simply, "ends do not justify means" or "do unto others as you would have them do unto you." To treat another person merely as a means of achieving what we want is to disregard his or her humanity, to dehumanize, to treat them as a thing.

Even Abu Zabayda is a human being. And America should be ashamed that we waterboarded him.

Update. Here is the 4th poll I've seen CNN do on whether some form of torture is acceptable, and this is the 4th time in a row that America has got it wrong. We need to get the politicians and the military off the teevee and get some ethicists on!

Are there circumstances in which waterboarding of prisoners is acceptable?

Yes	55%	48125
No	45%	38924
Total Votes: 87049

Oh the weather outside is frightful...

...but the fire is so delightful.

This weekend it was so bitterly cold that Dean and I rarely went outside. Dean spent most of the last evening curled up by the fireplace reading a biography of Santa Claus.

I spent most of the weekend making Christmas gifts -- a couple of paintings. Earlier in the week I finished a polymer clay craft that I was making. I have one more gift to make tonight and I think I'll be done. I would include pictures of what they look like, but I don't want the family to see them ahead of time. So, you'll just have to wait.

Televangelist to Sen. Grassley: F-U!

Creflo Dollar gave Sen. Grassley a big F-you to his investigation into allegations of financial improprieties of Dollar and 5 other prominent televangelists. He says that if Grassley wants documents, he's going to have to subpoena them!

Here is how the AP is reporting how the others have responded (deadline was today):

# Kenneth and Gloria Copeland (Kenneth Copeland Ministries): Attorneys delivered material to Grassley's staff on Thursday.

# Benny Hinn (World Healing Center Church, Inc.): Grassley's staff is scheduled to meet with the ministry's attorneys on Friday.

# Eddie Long (New Birth Missionary Baptist Church Ministry): Representatives said publicly that the ministry will cooperate. Grassley has not received any material or had contact from the ministry.

# Joyce Meyer (Joyce Meyer Ministries): Grassley's staff received material from the organization on Tuesday and is reviewing it.

# Randy and Paula White (Without Walls International Church Today): Received initial contact from attorneys who said they will contact Grassley's staff shortly but has had no further response.

From Barbara Cawthorne Crafton

CANDLE STAND

I have set up my access to the Geranium Farm so that the first screen I see is the candles screen in the Vigils section. It is good to spend a little time there, reading through the prayers people have left. The sorrows and worries are serious: people just bereaved, people with cancer or heart trouble or a diagnosis not yet known. People out of work. People facing divorce. People heartbroken over a child who courts danger and doesn't even know it. Lost pets. Lost faith.

And the thanksgivings among the candles are exultant: clean CT scans, impending weddings, the births of babies. New jobs. New houses. Graduations, baptisms, ordinations, confirmations.

The whole of life is offered to God in prayer on that page. There are 400 virtual candles lit, give or take a few, at any given time. Once in a while I see a name I know, or think I do. Most of the names are not familiar to me: we are strangers, those people who left their prayer intentions there and I, who read them.

But I am always struck by how little it matters that I don't know them personally. Prayer is much more than a festival of my love for someone else. God is active in it -- mysteriously, of course, since it's God: God lives and moves in prayer and I haven't a clue how, or what will happen because I have prayed. I only know something will. Something will happen first in my life, because I have entered into prayer. And in the life of the one for whom I pray, in a way I will never know. And, because there is an ecology of prayer, a connectedness, something will happen in the world itself. The very world is changed because we pray.

None of which is much like ordering a pizza -- we don't pray for something and then wait to see it we get it before we know our prayer made a difference. The difference comes first. We wait only for our power to see it.
+
Visit http://www.geraniumfarm.org/candles.cfm to light a virtual candle. And then stay and enjoy the Farm. The Farm's bookstore is always open, and Christmas is coming.....hint...

Lawrence Freecycle

I'm becoming very fond of Lawrence Freecycle. This is an informal group of local people who are giving away (recycling) the things they don't want to each other instead of throwing it away and filling up dumpsters. There really are only 2 rules: whatever you give away has to be totally free, and you have to be willing to pick up whatever you want.


A lot of Lawrence Freecycle is children's clothing. But there is also furniture and all sorts of random things being traded. I have been able to give away several things that I've had in the basement that I've wanted to get rid of, but hadn't wanted to throw away, and found it too inconvenient to take to Goodwill, things like an office chair, stuffed animals, a christmas tree, and some old computer equipment. Yesterday, I picked up the first thing that someone has given me--a set of polymer clay books and a mold. I use polymer clay in some of my crafting and I'll be using it for some of the Christmas gifts I'm making.

The people I have met so far run the gamut of economic conditions, from upper middle class to lower class. One of the more surprising things about Lawrence Freecycle is that sometimes there are people who are really in need--people who have been thrown out of their homes and need furniture, bedding, or cookware, or people who need clothes for their little children, a single mother who can't afford a christmas tree this year. Often it isn't that person who is asking for help, but a friend of theirs asking on their behalf and very often people step up to help.

As Martha Stewart says, "It's a good thing."

For the Bible Tells Me So...

This looks interesting...

Mortgage Crisis

I find myself torn about what to do about the looming mortgage crisis. On the one hand, I am compassionate towards those who were suckered into a bad mortgage, the so-called subprime loans. Hundreds of thousands of people got into their first home because they finally could. The entire practice was carried out by banks who knew exactly what they were doing, and thought that they could get away with it. And it is terrible for families to be foreclosed on because their interest rates rise (as expected) and they can't afford the mortgage payment.

But I'm not so sure about the current plans to "bail out" these families by freezing the interest rate. Ultimately that means that a person's unwise decision is being rewarded, and families who bought more house than they could actually afford, are being rewarded.

We got our home on a fixed-rate mortgage at 5.5%. But suppose I had been suckered into a balloon mortgage and got a much bigger, more expensive house, at 2.5%? Interest rates rise to 6%, and now I can't afford my mortgage. Is it fair to freeze my interest rate at 2.5% for 5 or 7 years, and let me go on having this much bigger house at a steal of an interest rate that nobody else could ever have legitimately gotten? That doesn't seem right. Those families that made the bad decision are having their homes effectively subsidized by the ones who made good decisions.

And if the "bailout" extends the low interest rate for 1, 2, 5, or 7 years, whatever it is, what happens at the end? Another bailout?

It seems that any "freeze" on interest rates, must be accompanied by forced refinancing -- in other words, if you accept the interest rate freeze, then the homeowner accepts having their loan refinanced within 1 year. And if they can't afford the refinanced loan, then, it seems to me, they have to accept foreclosure -- they will have to sell their home and buy a smaller home that they can actually afford.

This does not change the fact that our communities desperately need housing reform. I have not lost sight of the fact that in a moral world, everybody would have a place to live.

Baker University Vespers

Last night Dean and I went to Baker University Vespers at First UMC in Baldwin. Very nice, as usual. They started with Personent Hodie and O Magnum Mysterium again, which makes for great entry music. I thought that the men were especially good this year, although it seemed like there were fewer of them this year than last.

Funny in a depressing sort of way...

http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2007/12/2/131531/273