ACLU to sue Morgan Stanley for making "predatory" loans to black people.

The NYT reports:

[T]he lawsuit claims, the bank went beyond the traditional role of an investment bank by requiring that the mortgage company churn out the wildly profitable loans that came with “dangerous” characteristics....

Rubbie McCoy, one of the five named plaintiffs in the lawsuit, took out a loan from New Century in 2006 with an adjustable rate starting at 12.14 percent, which could not fall below 10.75 percent. It came with “excessive fees and costs,” the suit said.

Ms. McCoy, a single mother, said she could not afford the payments, but the broker told her to “fudge” her income, the suit says. Now, she is fighting to save the Detroit home that she shares with her four children.

“Having a house was a way to keep my kids grounded,” Ms. McCoy said....

BuzzFeed's Andrew Kaczynski is at it again, providing yummy tidbits for lefties.

I'm not linking to BuzzFeed — no links for you! — but to Memeorandum.

Repeating the old marshmallow test — the one about kids' capacity for delaying gratification.

And changing the results by exposing the kids — pre-temptation — to untrustworthy/trustworthy adults.

“Being able to delay gratification — in this case to wait 15 difficult minutes to earn a second marshmallow — not only reflects a child’s capacity for self-control, it also reflects their belief about the practicality of waiting,” says Celeste Kidd, a doctoral candidate in brain and cognitive sciences at the University of Rochester and lead author on the study.” Delaying gratification is only the rational choice if the child believes a second marshmallow is likely to be delivered after a reasonably short delay.”

You can imagine the social policy the researchers would like to support. The ability to delay gratification is tied to future economic success (according to the old study), and if the capacity for delaying gratification is purely a matter of character, it seems to justify different economic results. One can feel good about being a big old conservative, who favors equal opportunity and scoffs at equalizing the results. You want differential outcomes, because they are deserved and they are incentives.

But if we find out that a child raised around unreliable adults will adapt by taking the rewards that are available in the present and that this child has shown good aptitude in refraining from delaying gratification, our conservatism won't feel so comfortable anymore and we're amenable to arguments about equalizing outcomes.

The NYT kept the Libya hearing off the front page because "It’s three weeks before the election and it’s a politicized thing..."

Why, yes, it is a politicized thing, isn't it? Oh... you didn't mean your coverage of the news, did you? The NYT managing editor Dean Baquet was explaining to the NYT public editor why the decision was made to go with the 6 stories they did put on the front page...

... one on affirmative action at universities, one on Lance Armstrong’s drug allegations, two related to the presidential election, one on taped phone calls at JPMorgan Chase, and one on a Tennessee woman who died of meningitis.

Baquet said: “I didn’t think there was anything significantly new in it.” And: “There were six better stories."

They put the story on page 3.

To be fair: The NYT put the original news of the Watergate break-in on an inside page. Was it page 18? Sorry, I'm not finding that fact as easily as I think I should. I did come up with the information that when Deep Throat/Mark Felt wanted to communicate with the Washington Post, Bob "Woodward’s home-delivered New York Times would arrive with an inked circle on Page 20."

So the myth of the inside pages of the New York Times looms large in the annals of presidential scandal.

Is the Libya scandal as big as Watergate? The substance of it may be much worse than Watergate, and the Obama administration seems not to have heeded the old Watergate lesson that it's the cover-up that gets you, but if Obama loses the election, that will limit the dimension of the scandal. If he wins the election — especially if it's very close or contested in some way — Republicans may work themselves into a frenzy going after Obama. Remember that Richard Nixon was reelected after the Watergate scandal broke. The break-in was 5 months before the election, and the first stories had come out. The next 2 years were hell for Nixon, and he was drummed out of office. And Nixon had won by a landslide.

At the Cognac Café...

... you can talk about anything, including the upcoming "town hall" debate. The photograph, above, was taken during the 2008 Town Hall debate. See? That's Obama on the left and McCain on the right, seen through a cognac glass. I went back to my old post "Live-blogging the big 'town hall' debate" because I wanted to get a feeling for how good Obama was in that setting. I heard Laura Ingram on TV today saying: "The town hall format is much friendlier to Barack Obama, he's good in that format." And I had some doubts about that. I think Mitt Romney might do better than Obama at interacting with the people. After all, he's had decades of ministering to individuals within his religious calling. I think he knows how to do that. By contrast, Obama tends to relate to big audiences, where he's in a spotlight, orating. Does he seem warm when talking to one individual?

"Can I give it to my monkey?"

This is the essence of what Andrew Sullivan presents under the heading "Hathos Alert."

"For Andy Warhol to be openly gay... and at the same time intentionally celibate seems to represent a certain peace about the man..."

"... an intellectual separation of the sinless same-sex attraction and the sinful homosexual action, and an effort at communion with the teachings of the Catholic Church."

If it is sinful from the Catholic perspective, it is only sinful in that he may have lead others astray, those who did not know of his intentional celibacy.

But all this would be a view of the man, struggling for the good, failing and succeeding as only sinners can, not of the caricature our Gays vs. Hate world is comfortable with. It’s a pity, as an understanding of Warhol’s Catholicism lends a unique — and ignored — insight into his art.

No comment from me. Presented for what it's worth.

Here's a book: "The Religious Art of Andy Warhol."

ADDED: From Andy's diary:

“Yesterday, I was watching a game show, Blockbusters with Bill Cullen, and it was two black guys, a warden and his cousin, against a white girl and the category was “Letters” and the question was: “Andy Warhol is a ‘V.’” And (laughs) she got the answer right, she said “Virgin.””

After the Benghazi attack: "We're going through a mission accomplished moment."

Here's Bob Woodward, today on "Fox News Sunday," talking about the what the Obama administration has said about the Benghazi attacks:

WOODWARD: There are lots of unanswered questions. And I love documents, and they released some documents in this, and if you go and look at the original request for more security, they say our policy, our goal here is to shift from an emergency footing to normalize the security relationship.

Now, this is in March, six, seven months ago. Anyone looking at that what say, wait a minute, read the document in which they say, oh, the situation is incredibly unstable. Well, why are you trying to normalize your security in a situation that's visibly unstable? You even acknowledge that.

So you've got a bad policy. And anyone looking at that would say, wait a minute; we are screwed up; we can't normalize here.

"Global warming stopped 16 years ago, reveals Met Office report quietly released..."

"[T]he ‘plateau’ or ‘pause’ in global warming has now lasted for about the same time as the previous period when temperatures rose, 1980 to 1996. Before that, temperatures had been stable or declining for about 40 years."

Instapundit threatens to link-starve BuzzFeed.

"The Buzzfeed folks should also be concerned that folks on the right will be less willing to link them in the future, if they’re perceived — as I believe they increasingly are — as lefty agitprop shills."

They put "feed" in their name. Links are the food.

UPDATE: Instapundit objects to my paraphrasing.

Live: the jump from space.

Live feed! (Scary!)

ADDED: Some background here.

AND: I'm not sure I want to watch. I don't want to see a man die. I found it painful to look at photographs, after the fact, of Derek Jeter suffering a broken ankle.

UPDATE: Whew!

AND: He didn't break the record for the longest time in free-fall (although he broke the record for the highest manned balloon flight). 

Arlen Specter has died.

He was 82.

ADDED: He played an important role in Supreme Court nominations:

"But people love badgers."

"This is not a campaign against some kind of airborne creepy-crawly, spreading disease as it feeds on the blood of poor, innocent cows. This is Old Brock they are trying to kill, the black-and-white gentleman of the forest, who adds dignity and substance to children’s bedtime stories, from The Wind In The Willows to Fantastic Mr Fox."

I know The Wind In The Willows and Fantastic Mr Fox, but who's Old Brock?

"'Old Brock,' as the badger is affectionately known to country folk, is a familiar part of Britain’s rural scene."

Shameful, lowly race-baiting... but who's doing it?

So somebody got a picture of the back of a man — no face, no name — in a T-shirt that says — on the back — "Put the White Back in the White House." BuzzFeed posts the photo with the information that it's a "Getty Images" photo. So we don't even get the name of the photographer. We're told "The Getty Images photo was taken at a Romney/Ryan campaign event in Lancaster, Ohio on Friday." We can't see much of the context. Who's around this guy?

Why put this picture up? Well, obviously, it gets hits for BuzzFeed, which doesn't need any more motivation than that. It does need the utter lack of ethics and decency it takes to throw something this unfair into the public debate. The BuzzFeed staffer who did this post is Andrew Kaczynski, whom we've seen before. (He was behind "Paul Ryan Gets Testy and Walks Out of Interview.") Presumably, he's doing his job of attracting links, and I'm exacerbating the dynamic by linking. But I'm doing this because I have recently criticized Romney supporters for injecting race into presidential politics.

I said it was a mistake for Rush Limbaugh and others to play that Obamaphone lady over and over. Even with no mention of race, I thought the recording was used — with deniability — to stir up racial feelings. My post — "Just How Racist Is the 'Obama Phone' Video?" — got very strong pushback from commenters. People did not want to acknowledge that race had been injected at all. I participated in the comments at first. For example:

Look, those of you who don't see the racial problem are already probably going to vote for Romney. For Romney to win, he has to influence people in the middle who are sensitive to this kind of racial ugliness. You may say my sensitivity is set to[o] high, but I'm saying that I believe the people with my level of sensitivity are much more likely to determine the outcome of the election.

But my commenters fought on, passionately, which showed, I think, how deeply they — like me —  object to racial material. The objection took different forms. I was saying don't use powerful material when it will feel racial to some people, and they were resisting seeing it as racial. Within our disagreement, there was an intense agreement: We object to racial material.

Back to that T-shirt. Who should be condemned here? There's that bald-headed, no name guy. I assume he is a Romney opponent. The reasons for that assumption are oozingly obvious. (Here, Robert Stacy McCain spells them out for you.) He deserves condemnation, whether he's for or against Romney. The photographer deserves condemnation if he has thrown this crap into the public space without giving us a name, a shot of the man's face, or even a broader shot of the people around him. We are deprived of the context we need to think about whether other people at the rally saw it, approved, laughed, shunned him, confronted him.

But Buzzfeed and all the Romney opponents who chose to link to Buzzfeed should be ashamed. They lowered themselves. They saw an opportunity go racial and they took it. Here's Caroline Bankoff at New York Magazine:

This photo of the not-so-subtle look, taken at Friday's campaign rally in Lancaster, Ohio, doesn't really require further description. 

It sure as hell does require further description! Who was that bald man? How long was that shirt-back displayed? Is this a false-flag effort to smear Romney? And why don't you care? Just go ahead and stir up racial fears and ugliness, Caroline Bankoff. Shame on you and everyone else who slavered at the opportunity to serve up this racial obscenity.

"We’re all big Derek Jeter fans since we were younger, watching the World Series and everything, from ‘96 to the recent one."

Said the Tigers’ Delmon Young.

“We all grew up, backyard baseball, wanting to win the World Series either against the Yankees or getting through the Yankees to get to the World Series, especially with Derek Jeter as the catalyst. Unfortunately, it happened. We’d love to see him out playing with us and playing against him, because it is really fun playing the Yankees, especially when Derek Jeter is healthy.”

"You don't drink coffee, you have coffee... Have is a big word."

"You have sex. You have surgery. You have second thoughts."

What do you have? What have you done?