ELK GROVE VILLAGE, Ill. — The foreclosure crisis is hitting yet another American locale: the self-storage center.
As they lose their homes, people are turning to these humble cinderblock and sheet-metal boxes to store their stuff. But some people cannot keep up with their storage bills any better than they could handle their mortgage payments, and storage companies are auctioning off their property for a pittance.
A cottage industry has developed to profit from these lost and abandoned items. The other day in this Chicago suburb, Stephanie Donahou and her son Marcus had only a moment to decide whether to bid on a unit in default. They could see a couch, a sewing machine, a fish tank, a washer and dryer, lots of Christmas wrapping paper, a television and other trappings of daily life.
Just echoing Amanda, I think very often that when you discuss lifestyle choices you've made people assume that there's a level of sanctimony and moral superiority about those choices. You know, I've Made The Right And Good Choices instead of I'm just trying to make the right choices for me. People can be like that but quite often it just isn't the case. I don't own a car because I don't need one and don't like driving. I don't look down on people who buy SUVs, except those assholes who think that a green light plus their giant vehicle penis gives them the right to make a turn into the pedestrian crosswalk without paying attention to the existence of pedestrians. They're useful for some people and even if they're just toys or conspicuous consumption, who cares? I have toys too.
All that is different from criticizing bad policies which encourage people to consume more gas or zoning regulations and government established land use patterns which create incentives which lead people to behave certain ways that are less than ideal in the bigger picture.
...adding I'm not knocking the virtues of personal conservation, just saying that for most of us there probably isn't much room to get all judgmental. SUVs have become a symbol, but how many more jet trips do I get to take every year because I don't have one?
Like BooMan, I read this dispatch from another universe about Jenna's wedding with some puzzlement. To their - and the media's - credit, the Bush twins have been mostly out of the national press for the past 8 years. They didn't "grow up" in the White House, they went off to college. There is no mass public interest in them because there hasn't been sustained coverage of them.
Again, that's not any kind of criticism of them, but let's not pretend they're America's Sweethearts when they just aren't.
Just kidding. Anyway, just so people know where I stand on this, it really never mattered much to me who won this nomination, at least once Kodos faded. I leaned various ways at various times, and I became more and more annoyed at the Clinton campaign over time. Obama did a bunch of things that annoyed me too, but not as much recently. I'm sure Hillary Clinton would be a decent president. "Electability" arguments for either of them aren't very persuasive, though smart people on both sides are pretty convinced that their candidate will win and the other will flame out spectacularly.
At this point, however, Obama's won. There's no nomination path for her which doesn't involve rewriting the rules in a way which would never be seen as legitimate, or a massive shift in superdelegates which would likewise be problematic, and even those paths range from unlikely to impossible. I don't think Clinton has to drop out. She can continue to campaign through to the last contest if she wants (she doesn't need my permission to do so), though hopefully this article is correct and the, uh, emphasis of the campaign shifts away from Obama's supposed lack of appeal to real Americans.
One wishes we could've rewound things to about March 4 and had a more substantive campaign, instead of the identity politics-based Freak Show campaign we've had since then. It isn't all the candidates' fault, of course, as you go to campaign with the media you have and not the media you want. But I've never bought into the excuse that there aren't enough policy differences between the two candidates for that conversation to matter.
We decided to pretend we were sitting in a rowhouse living room in the city's Fairmount neighborhood.
That in itself was a stretch, first because we were assembled that April 23 afternoon in the spacious community room of PNC Bank's Market Street headquarters, and second, well, I once owned a city rowhouse, and you couldn't get 80 or so people into it even if you stacked them.
I do own a city rowhouse, and I could easily fit 80 people into it.
One of the things I "get" is that appearances can be deceiving.
Some suburbanites might not easily understand what has made John and Flossie Gallagher stay in their Harper Street rowhouse for more than 40 years. Or why 30-year resident Pat Hill spends a good part of her time tending the corner garden oasis she and other volunteers rescued from "dump" status.
They might understand why the Gallaghers and Hill have stuck it out, but it would be harder to comprehend why Suzi Nash or Kendra Gaeta or Matt Wanamaker or Evelyn Sheared - all of whom are young enough to be my children - would choose to live in a rowhouse neighborhood where nonresidents think it's OK to relieve themselves wherever they choose.
...
City living isn't easy. It never has been.
I think it's pretty easy. Obviously some neighborhoods are more problematic than others, but still.
DENVER — With the price of gas approaching $4 a gallon, more commuters are abandoning their cars and taking the train or bus instead.
Mass transit systems around the country are seeing standing-room-only crowds on bus lines where seats were once easy to come by. Parking lots at many bus and light rail stations are suddenly overflowing, with commuters in some towns risking a ticket or tow by parking on nearby grassy areas and in vacant lots.
“In almost every transit system I talk to, we’re seeing very high rates of growth the last few months,” said William W. Millar, president of the American Public Transportation Association.
One of the pictures that is in the piece really struck me and it was Barack Obama speaking and there were a number of young African-American hotel workers who had gathered on the floor and with their cell phones were taking pictures of Barack Obama.
I mean even the (giggle) people working in hotel rooms are sort of inspired by his candidacy and want to get a picture of him.
Less than a year after taking office, Garrison is struggling to hold on to his job and contain a scandal, after the university granted an unearned degree to a longtime friend, the daughter of the West Virginia governor. On Monday, the Faculty Senate voted 77 to 19 in favor of a resolution of no-confidence in Garrison and demanded his resignation.
...
The report, released April 23, did not cite evidence that Garrison directly interfered with decision-making but said the presence of some of his top staff members at the meeting where administrators decided to issue the degree created "palpable" pressure.
It concluded that the business school gave Bresch credit for classes she didn't take and assigned grades "simply pulled from thin air." The degree, an executive master's of business administration, was rescinded.
Less than a year after taking office, Garrison is struggling to hold on to his job and contain a scandal, after the university granted an unearned degree to a longtime friend, the daughter of the West Virginia governor. On Monday, the Faculty Senate voted 77 to 19 in favor of a resolution of no-confidence in Garrison and demanded his resignation.
...
he report, released April 23, did not cite evidence that Garrison directly interfered with decision-making but said the presence of some of his top staff members at the meeting where administrators decided to issue the degree created "palpable" pressure.
It concluded that the business school gave Bresch credit for classes she didn't take and assigned grades "simply pulled from thin air." The degree, an executive master's of business administration, was rescinded.
While I said this in comments, I just want to write on the front page that at this point in the campaign it should go without saying that every candidate has their asshole supporters, and generally neither the candidate nor their non-asshole supporters should be judged by them. Anti-Clinton assholes (again, not anti-Clinton people, but anti-Clinton assholes) frequently throw a bit of misogyny into the mix, while apparently Obama supporters are naive idiots.
And, look, it's the internets. I'm not sure why people should be surprised that people are assholes or take it so personally, though we perhaps don't expect so much misogyny from those on "our side" so that can be a bit hurtful.
As someone who was honestly relatively neutral for a lot of this race, I've thought the assholes were pretty evenly distributed, though we're getting into the sore winner/sore loser period which changes things a bit. Still it's important to remember that the outcome of the Internet Asshole Olympics really shouldn't have much bearing on who you vote for either now or in November.
One thing I'm looking forwarded to is not being bombarded by transparently stupid arguments about how performance in a state primary has some meaningful mapping to performance in the general election. The latest is the Clinton campaign suggesting that West Virginia is an important "test" because Democrats since Wilson have only become president if they've manged to win there. I assume that's true, but that's about winning that state's electoral college votes in the general election and not about getting primary voters to vote for you. And as Mark Penn helpfully reminds me, Jimmy Carter did not win the West Virginia primary.
I imagine over the past month or so people in the Clinton campaign have been marveling at their ability to manipulate the freak show, to introduce stupid narratives and bogus arguments into our discourse. And they have been amazingly good at it. I'd even admire it if they actually managed to, you know, win the elections instead of just making our discourse stupider.
I'm not sure why so many online Clinton supporters seem to be lashing out angrily at Obama supporters, instead of at the people who ran Clinton's campaign. If they'd just done things a little bit differently in February they'd have won this.
About 2.3% of prime loans were 60 days' past due in February, the highest level in at least a decade, according to data from FirstAmerican CoreLogic LoanPerformance. That's up from 1.4% a year ago.
Some economists, such as Brian Bethune of Global Insight and Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, say they think delinquencies on prime loans have likely risen further since then.
This reflects, I believe, an incredibly damaging mindset that's been crippling the Democratic Party for years and the prospect of excising this mindset is the single most appealing thing about the prospect of Obama being the nominee. Clinton's "street cred" on national security consists, of course, of being massively wrong on the most important national security issue of her career. Paradoxically, a lot of folks find her massive wrongness on this hugely important issue reassuring because they and their friends were also wrong and they view having made the right call to be a suspicious quality. After all, the Iraq War may have led to thousands of U.S. deaths, tens of thousands of U.S. casualties, hundreds of thousands of Iraqi deaths, and millions of Iraqi refugees all at a cost of over $1 trillion and in ways that's damaged the strategic position of the United States, but war opponents were all a bunch of hippies.
THE TROUBLED real- estate market has taken its toll on the city's noble experiment in public-private housing that made neighbors of rich and poor in East Falls.
Eleven townhouses at Hilltop at Falls Ridge, privately built luxury units adjacent to a subsidized development built by the Philadelphia Housing Authority, are being auctioned next month.
Units that ranged in price from the mid $300,000s to the low $700,000s will be auctioned for minimum bids of $125,000 to $250,000, respectively.
While it was billed as "combining the best of urban and suburban living" or something like that, I'd say it did more combining of the worst than the best.
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