Monthly Archives: April 2007

Home ownership is a wonderful thing — if you can afford it. Given the lax lending standards the prevailed during the housing bubble, however, a lot of people wound up with houses they couldn’t afford. It’s not just the known expenses like principle and interest payments that kill you, it’s the unanticipated expenses — the rising tax rates, the termite infestations, the fallen branches, the broken furnace, the leaky roof, the broken furnace — that breaks the bank.

Now that housing prices are falling, and people are finding it harder to borrow against their equity to raise cash, foreclosure rates are climbing. Dennis Gartman, a Suffolk resident and author of the Gartman Letter newsletter, has been warning of the consequences of the real estate bubble for quite some time. A friend forwarded this quote from a recent commentary — with scary numbers of foreclosure rates in Hampton Roads — by e-mail:

Last year, even we began to be concerned about real estate prices that were too strong, and were more and more concerned about the over-extended nature of late home buyers who seemed intent upon buying in panic, pushing bids right past the offers on homes that were badly built. Those homes now are a burden, not a joy; they are held by buyers incapable of paying for them, with loans made under circumstances that only a decade or so ago would have been considered ludicrous and “un-bankerly” in nature. But made they were, and now collapsing they are.

We note that here in usually protected, conservative, laid-back southern Virginia the numbers of “seriously troubled loans” on homes are rising at a frightening pace. In Chesapeake, a quintessential suburb, near the Atlantic Ocean and nestled against the N. Carolina border, with quick access to the Outer Banks, foreclosures are up 46% [year over year]. In Norfolk, the navy’s home, and a place that has enjoyed inordinately strong economic growth for years, foreclosures are up 45% vs. a year ago. In Virginia Beach, hard upon the Atlantic Ocean and also facing north into the Chesapeake Bay, they are up 54%… and across Virginia generally foreclosures are up 49%. Thankfully, here in “surprising” Suffolk, foreclosures are actually down [year over year]; but that may only be because of the very small number this year and last and because Suffolk is the fastest growing city in Virginia due to the huge amount of land and the still small population.

“The point here is that even in Virginia the problem of foreclosures is now hard upon us, and that is in an environment where unemployment is at its lowest level in history. What then shall happen when unemployment begins to rise… even slightly. “

The April 30, 2007, edition of Bacon’s Rebellion has been published. You can view it in its entirety here. Don’t miss an issue — sign up for a free subscription here.

This week’s features include:

Missing the Point
A Heritage Foundation paper attacking the Journey Through Hallowed Ground as a tool of Virginia’s landed elite is unsupported by the facts. Worse, it slights the Journey’s important contributions.
by James A. Bacon

Feed the Creative Temperament
Rural areas should chase more talent, fewer jobs.
by Doug Koelemay

Recent Clippings
Overshadowed by the horror at Virginia Tech, the MainStream Media contributed some solid reporting last week about taxes and the environment. All the stories lacked was an overarching context.
by EM Risse

Liberate the Liquor Business
More money for roads, more choice for consumers, more focused enforcement of drinking laws — what’s not to like about the privatization of state ABC stores?
by Geoff Segal

Healing the Hokie Nation
The massacre at Virginia Tech was a horror, but tragedy and evil confronts us daily in lesser numbers. The answer is Christian lovingkindness.
by James Atticus Bowden

Footing the Bill
Fairfax County has promised to make good any cost overruns in the Rail-to-Dulles project. Supervisors should warn taxpayers that they could wind up footing the bill.
by Phil Rodokanakis

What’s Eating Middle America?
Illegal immigration tops the list. The United States will have illegals as long as a strong economy inspires foreigners to sneak across the border. The only “solution” — recession — is not one we really want.
by Norman Leahy

Ever wish you get do the same financial background checks on candidates for local office as you can for statewide candidates? To pick an example, wouldn’t it be cool to know how much money Gerald E. Connolly, chairman of the Fairfax County board of supervisors, has raised in the current campaign cycle and where his money came from?

Well, now you can! (For nine localities, at least.) The Virginia Public Access Project has taken the first step, says Executive Director David Poole, towards “filling the black hole that is local campaign finance disclosure.”

So, go here to see that Connolly has raised almost as much money as all other candidates for the Fairfax BOS combined. He has out-raised his two competitors for the at-large seat by $853,000 to… $12,000. As for where the money comes from — no surprise, here — more than one-third comes from the real estate/construction industry.

Many thanks to VPAP, and the people who fund it, for making this information available.

On Tuesday I declared the ethics flap involving Sens. Kenneth Stolle, R-Virginia Beach, and Thomas Norment Jr., R-James City, to be “Case closed.” Perhaps I was premature. David Nixon, the Roanoke attorney who charged the two veteran politicians of conflict of interest, now levels similar accusations against two members of the ethics panel that absolved them.

According to a prepared statement issued by Nixon’s office:

In an addendum to the ethics complaints filed in February, Nixon requested that two panel members who had given donations to Stolle or to the political action committee for Norment and Stolle recuse themselves. Former Senators Wiley Mitchell and Robert Calhoun refused. Mitchell donated directly to Senator Stolle just five months ago, and he has contributed twice prior to that (Source: http://www.vpap.org/). In 2005, the record shows he also donated to Virginians for Responsible Government, which according to VPAP is a political action committee set up “to provide support for the so-called ‘Gang of Five’ Republican Senators – Chichester, Norment, Stosch, Stolle, Wampler…” Calhoun also gave to the same PAC in 2002.

Both Mitchell and Calhoun also represent clients with a stake in the outcome of eminent domain legislation, the issue in which Nixon claims Norment and Stolle were conflicted. During the hearing Nixon provided additional information documenting the alleged conflicts, which I have appended to the “comments” section of this post. Continues the prepared statement:

“The procedure established in the General Assembly Conflicts of Interest Act was set up by the Senate to police itself. The ethics panel refused to open the hearing to the public and they refused to give any explanation of why they exonerated the two Senators,” said Nixon. “Ethics hearings especially should be carried out in the light of day and under the scrutiny of the public and the press. The blatant irony of an ethics panel hearing and its ruling being closed to the public seems… well, unethical. If the Senators did nothing wrong, then why won’t the panel tell us how they arrived at that conclusion based on the evidence?” Nixon queried.

An editorial writer at the Virginian-Pilot is sympathic to Nixon’s new allegations. Writes the pundit:

The ethics advisory panel consists of three former senators and one former college president, all of whom have long-term relationships to one degree or another with the senators under scrutiny. All the current members are admirable, accomplished people, but an ethics advisory panel ought not to consist of folks who could legitimately be accused of being cronies. …

Here in a nutshell is what’s wrong with ethics regulation in Virginia government. It’s so inbred, so devoid of accountability, that even if a right action is taken, it smells.

Taking conflicts of interest seriously is what sets Virginia apart from New Jersey, Chicago, Lousiana and other entrepots of dealing in political favors. The blogosphere needs to shine some sunlight on these kinds of relationships.

There has been an undercurrent through the coverage of the Virginia Tech killings regarding what, exactly, is the appropriate response for those who were not directly affected by the events.

The Wall Street Journal’s Dan Henninger called it the “numbing down” of America, where the mass of people have become “hollowed out” by the seemingly endless parade of tragedies, large and small. Over the weekend, Peggy Noonan wrote of the “emptiness of phrases used by the media and by political figures, and how pro forma and lifeless and cold they are.”

Then, there is Christopher Hitchens, who takes a far harder, some would say callous, look at the emotional display after the shootings:

It was my friend Adolph Reed who first pointed out this tendency to what he called “vicarious identification.” At the time of the murder of Lisa Steinberg in New York in 1987, he was struck by the tendency of crowds to show up for funerals of people they didn’t know, often throwing teddy bears over the railings and in other ways showing that (as well as needing to get a life) they in some bizarre way seemed to need to get a death. The hysteria that followed a traffic accident in Paris involving a disco princess—surely the most hyped non-event of all time—seemed to suggest an even wider surrender to the overwhelming need to emote: The less at stake, the greater the grieving.

And surrender may be the keyword here. What, for instance, is this dismal rush to lower the national colors all the damned time? At times of real crisis and genuine emergency, such as the assault on our society that was mounted almost six years ago, some emotion could be pardoned. But even then, the signs of sickliness and foolishness were incipient (as in Billy Graham’s disgusting sermon at the National Cathedral where he spoke of the victims being “called into eternity”). If we did this every time, the flag would spend its entire time drooping. One should express a decent sympathy for the families and friends of the murdered, a decent sympathy that ought to be accompanied by a decent reticence. Because Virginia Tech—alas for poor humanity—was a calamity with no implications beyond itself. In the meantime, and in expectation of rather stiffer challenges to our composure, we might practice nailing the colors to the mast rather than engaging in a permanent dress rehearsal for masochism and the lachrymose.

Provacative, yes (it is his stock in trade). But is there a grain of truth here?

Via Slate comes a facsimile of the papers which called for the hospitalization of Cho Seung-Hui as he “present[ed] an imminent danger to self or others as a result of mental illness, or is so seriously mentally ill as to be substantially unable to care for self and is incapable of volunteering or unwilling to volunteer for treatment.”

I’m agnostic on gun control — I see the merits of both points of view. So, I don’t necessarily embrace the point of view of Pierre LeMieux with the Independent Institute, but I find it worthy of discussion. In an essay published yesterday, he argues:

Contrast the horrific Virginia Tech shootings with the January 2002 killings at Virginia’s Appalachian Law School. Within minutes of shooting three people in the dean’s office, disgruntled student Peter Odighizuwa was stopped by two students who had retrieved handguns from their cars. They disarmed the killer and turned him over to the police.

In other words, in society of armed citizens, a crazed killer might manage to kill two or three people, but somebody would take him out before the body count reached 32. I’m not sure if that scenario would have worked at Virginia Tech — Cho had shrewdly chained the doors to Norris Hall shut. Students would not have been able to run out to their cars. But Lemieux’s larger point is worth contemplating.

In a similar vein of the guns-don’t-kill-people, people-kill-people argument, it has been noted that the male citizens of Switzerland are required to serve in the military and required to keep weapons stored in their houses, but the Swiss have a low homicide rate. Which leads me to ask, is the high homicide rate in the United States due to our easy access to guns, or is it due to something perverse about our culture — perhaps the increasingly pervasive attitude that everyone should display or vent their emotions rather than rein them in… or the cult of victimization that encourages people to lash out at others rather than look within… or, as noted by Norm Leahy yesterday (“Cockburn’s Chemicals“), the ubiquitious prescription of anti-depressant drugs?

Finally, I would ask, if misfits like Cho Seung-Hui had been cut off from access to guns, would that have stopped them from killing people? All we have to do is look to the Middle East to find an alternative model for committing mass murder: car bombs and suicide bombs. Bomb-making instructions can be found on the Internet. How long will it be before some whack job decides to exact his vengeance with a bomb? Timothy McVeigh pulled it off and the death toll was far higher than in Blacksburg.

Again, I’m not arguing a particular point of view here. I’m just asking questions. My suspicion is that there simply are no easy answers.