Miami Herald:

When California wildfires ruined their jewelry business, Tony Becker and his wife fell months behind on their mortgage payments and experienced firsthand the perils of subprime mortgages.

The couple wound up in a desperate, six-year fight to keep their modest, 1,500-square-foot San Jose home, a struggle that pushed them into bankruptcy.

The lender with whom they sparred, however, wasn't the one that had written their loans. It was an obscure subsidiary of Wall Street colossus Goldman Sachs Group.

[Welcome, OL readers. Since I've been banned from OL, I won't be able to keep posting links to single payer activism like this. Please feel free to stop by here. -- lambert]

Clever media strategy from Mobilization for Health Care For All, going for local coverage. That circumvents the "progressive" media blackout, as well as the blackouts by the administration, the FKDP, and our famously free press. Links:

Nice list of links:

Press Coverage from 10/28:
San Francisco Chronicle:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/chro...

South Florida Sun-Sentinel

Senate hopeful withdraws support of healthcare, trade bills

Rep. Kendrick Meek (D-Fla.) on Wednesday abruptly withdrew his support from a controversial trade bill and legislation to create a single-payer health insurance system.

The decision to remove himself as co-sponsor of the two bills suggests that Meek is moving to the political center. Meek is the clear front-runner for the Democratic nomination for former Sen. Mel Martinez’s (R-Fla.) old seat after Rep. Corrine Brown announced she would not challenge Meek for the Democratic nomination.

So who else is in the race? Or do we have a third party candidate?

Cappy McGarr in the Times, today:

Back in the 1990s, I was the founding chairman of Texas’ state-run purchasing alliance — an exchange, essentially — which ultimately failed. There are lessons to be learned from that experience, as well as the similar failures of other states to create useful exchanges.

Via KnoxViews ("Ideas so crazy they might work"):

So there's this guy in Florida running for the Democratic nomination for governor. He has a plan to eliminate property taxes, create a million new jobs, provide free health insurance and free college for all residents, and lots more.
His plan hinges around a proposal to create the Bank of the State of Florida, which will pay 6% for CDs and make mortgage loans at 2% and other loans including small business loans at 3% and make billions for the state. How is this possible, you ask? Using "fractional reserve banking" just like every other bank, except using the profits for the public good.

Grayson's from Florida, right? Somebody should ask him what he thinks about this.

Or, to ask the question in a more sophisticated way, who are the "strategic defaulters"? The LA Times asked that question:

Who is more likely to walk away from a house and a mortgage -- a person with super-prime credit scores or someone with lower scores?

The answer may surprise you -- especially if this was your narrative:

[OBAMA] In the past, if you found yourself in a situation like this, you could have sold your home and bought a smaller one with more affordable payments. Or you could have refinanced your home at a lower rate. But today, home values have fallen so sharply that even if you made a large down payment, the current value of your mortgage may still be higher than the current value of your house. So no bank will return your calls, and no sale will return your investment.

"You can't afford to leave and you can't afford to stay. So you cut back on luxuries. Then you cut back on necessities. You spend down your savings to keep up with your payments. Then you open the retirement fund. Then you use the credit cards. And when you've gone through everything you have, and done everything you can, you have no choice but to default on your loan. And so your home joins the nearly six million others in foreclosure or at risk of foreclosure across the country, including roughly 150,000 right here in Arizona.

Except that's not what is happening. At all.

[Just cross-posted to Kos. How about a recommendation? And welcome, Eschatonians, Paul Krugman, Digby, Andrew Tobias, and Sadly, No readers. And Avedon, you know I do.]

[And readers, if you want others to read this post, you can use the Digg or Reddit buttons below to recommend it.]

ONE CURRENT PERMATHREAD on Big Orange is that Krugman and Obama are feuding or having a vendetta. Which, when you take a step back, is bizarre. That movement conservatives and Villagers like stone Bush enabler William Kristol, like David Brooks, Broderella, and Andrew Sullivan are all good with Obama isn't even mentioned in passing by Obama's fan base. And yet those same enthusiasts spend inordinate amounts of time vilifying Paul Krugman, a true progressive who was there for us from the earliest dark days of the Bush regime.

Curious. What's really happening?  Read more…