The Binary Circumstance

While denying that that he’s doing what he’s doing, a George W. Bush trademark, the president is coming up with ways to bailout banks and speculators in the current housing market.

Both Bernanke and Bush emphasized that their actions were not aimed at bailing out investors who had made bad decisions.

“It’s not the government’s job to bail out speculators or those who made the decision to buy a home they knew they could never afford,” Bush said in the Rose Garden. “Yet there are many American homeowners who could get through this difficult time with a little flexibility from their lenders or a little help from their government.”

[…]

Bush’s proposals unveiled Friday are designed to help combat those defaults. They would make it easier for borrowers now holding adjustable rate mortgages that are resetting to higher monthly payments to refinance those loans using the resources of the Federal Housing Administration. The FHA is a Depression-era agency created to help low and moderate-income Americans afford homes.

Under the Bush proposal, which FHA officials said would take effect immediately, an estimated 60,000 homeowners who have fallen behind on payments because their mortgages have reset would be able to refinance with FHA-insured loans. That marks a significant change because FHA does not now insure refinanced loans from borrowers who are currently delinquent.

“This means that many families who are struggling now will be able to refinance their loans, meet their monthly payments and keep their homes,” Bush said.

To qualify for the new program, being called FHA Secure, a borrower will have to prove the original loan was being repaid until it reset to a higher rate and they must have 3 percent equity in the home. The FHA does not supply the mortgage loan but it guarantees loans extended by banks and other lenders.

An FHA guarantee is a taxpayer guarantee. If a mortgage holder on an FHA loan defaults, the taxpayers will foot the bill.

There are plenty of speculators who will fit the requirements for the refinancing and loan guarantees. That will be a bailout for them as well as the banks and mortgage companies that made them loans.

After initially pleading guilty to charges stemming from a men’s room sting, conservative (and Christian) Republican Senator Larry Craig of Idaho, is telling a different story after his guilty plea was uncovered.

From Yahoo News:

BOISE, Idaho - A defiant Sen. Larry Craig denied any wrongdoing Tuesday despite his guilty plea this summer in a men’s room police sting, emphatically adding, “I am not gay. I never have been gay.”

Craig, a third-term senator from Idaho, proclaimed his innocence as well as his sexuality less than an hour after Senate leaders from his own Republican Party called for an ethics committee review of his case.

“This is a serious matter,” they said in Washington in a written statement that offered neither support nor criticism of the conservative senator. Issued in the names of Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the party leader, and several others, the statement said they were examining “other aspects of the case to determine if additional action is required.”

Craig, his wife, Suzanne, at his side, took no questions in a brief appearance in the capital city of the state he has represented in Congress for more than two decades in the House and then the Senate.

He had “overreacted and made a poor decision” when he was apprehended by an undercover police officer in a men’s room at the Minneapolis airport and later pleaded guilty.

Here’s another report.

Home prices dropped 3.2% in the second quarter, the steepest decline since S&P started keeping records.

NEW YORK (AP) — U.S. home prices fell 3.2 percent in the second quarter, the steepest rate of decline since Standard & Poor’s began its nationwide housing index in 1987, the research group said Tuesday.

The decline in home prices around the nation shows no evidence of a market recovery anytime soon, one of the architects of the index said.

MacroMarkets LLC Chief Economist Robert Shiller said the declining residential real estate market “shows no signs of slowing down.”

The report came a day after the National Association of Realtors said sales of existing homes dropped for a fifth straight month in July while the number of unsold homes shot up to a record level.

The S&P/Case-Schiller quarterly index tracks price trends among existing single-family homes across the nation compared with a year earlier .

A separate index that covers 20 U.S. cities fell 3.5 percent in June from a year earlier. A 10-city index fell 4.1 percent from a year earlier.

I saw a report on television this morning, however, that said that Seattle housing prices increased during the same period.

Once upon a time about 600 years ago in France, it was possible to have legal same sex-unions.

Same-sex civil unions, while seemingly new and radical, appear to have existed 600 years ago in late medieval France, a professor writes in the September issue of the Journal of Modern History.

The term affrerement, or “brotherment,” referred to a certain type of legal contract that provided a marriage-like foundation for non-nuclear households of many types, according to Allan Tulchin, an assistant professor of history at Shippensburg University in Pennsylvania.

The model for the arrangement was that of biological brothers who inherited the family home on an equal basis from their parents and continued to live together, Tulchin wrote.

But in cases where the affreres were single, unrelated men, the contracts provide “considerable evidence that the affreres were using affrerements to formalize same-sex loving relationships,” he wrote.

“I suspect that some of these relationships were sexual, while others may not have been. It is impossible to prove either way and probably also somewhat irrelevant to understanding their way of thinking,” Tulchin wrote. “They loved each other, and the community accepted that.”