THIS MODERN WORLD

Geez. The Bush folks sure are pissed about Amnesty International’s use of the word “gulag”, huh? Perhaps Amnesty should just clarify things a bit by eschewing comparisons to the Soviet Union and making it clear that when they say “gulags”, they simply meant “secret prisons in which innocent people have been tortured to death”.

On a serious note, it’s clear what’s going on here. The Bushies are focusing in on a single word and are going to hit back at Amnesty International until they say something even vaguely conciliatory. At that point, they’ll declare victory. (“Haven’t you heard? Our rape rooms aren’t ‘gulags’.”) Nevermind the details of the report. The use of hyperbole^[1] will render the actual charges obsolete. We’ve seen it happen over and over again.

The fact that this particular AI report was almost dead (in news cycle terms, anyways) until the President decided to abuse the word “absurd” is the biggest irony here. Rumsfeld is giving a press conference right now because the President’s poor attempt to make the question go away only made things worse. The obvious quote here is “thou doth protest too much” because it’s true. These guys wouldn’t be complaining this loudly if it hadn’t gotten under their skin.

Amnesty International obviously hit a nerve and the Bush Administration is going to keep hitting back until there’s a moment of weakness that they can take advantage of. The key here is not to get tripped up in a semantic debate. Innocent people are being abused right now due to our President’s decision that the Geneva Conventions don’t apply to our new wars. Don’t let a petty argument over word choice allow the President to deflect attention from the fact that he’s a human rights abuser.

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^{1 :Which in this case isn’t hyperbole at all, but whatever….}

Old news around here. Does this site have the smartest readers in the world or what?

…to bloggers who like to talk about how blogging will someday replace the mainstream media:

Stop talking about it in the fucking mainstream media.

Put up or shut up, you know?

This quote from former New York Times public editor Daniel Okrent pretty much says all you need to know about modern newsrooms :

“I also believe that columnists are entitled by their mandate to engage in the unfair use of statistics, the misleading representation of opposing positions, and the conscious withholding of contrary data.”

Regardless of whether you think this applies to Krugman or not, this is a stunning admission that I’d imagine is pretty standard for the gatekeepers in publishing and television news. Why else would hacks like Sean Hannity or Bob Novak remain employed if it weren’t for the fact that the people in charge of protecting the integrity of their news organizations had decided that pundits in lofty positions are entitled to mislead the public.

From the Washington Post (via Steve Gilliard):

More than a third of the mortgages written in the Washington area this year are a risky new kind of loan that lets borrowers pay back only the interest, delaying for years repayment of any loan principal. Economists warn that the new loans are essentially a gamble that home prices will continue to rise at a brisk pace, allowing the borrower to either sell the home at a profit or refinance before the principal payments come due.

The loans are attractive because their initial monthly payments are tantalizingly low — about $1,367 a month for a $320,000 mortgage, compared with about $1,842 a month for a traditional 30-year, fixed-rate loan. If home prices fall, though, borrowers could lose big.

“It’s a game of musical chairs,” said Allen J. Fishbein, director of housing and credit policy at the Consumer Federation of America. “Somebody is going to have the chair pulled out from under them when they find prices have leveled out and they try to sell, only to find they can’t sell for what they paid for it.”

About 54 percent of home buyers in the District purchased their homes using interest-only loans so far this year, according to LoanPerformance, a San Francisco-based company that tracks loan originations nationwide. About one-third of buyers in Maryland and Virginia are buying with interest-only loans.

Just five years ago, only about 2 percent of home-purchase loans in the Washington area involved interest-only terms.

And that last is the key point here. In five years, interest-only loans have gone from 2% to more than a third of mortgages in the Washington area. And as Jack Hitt pointed out to me a few weeks back (before the blog became a group endeavor and I invited him on board), it’s even worse in California, where the rate has jumped from 2% of mortgages in 2001 to 48% today.

This is really not good news.