Huzzah! Flood Insurance gets through the Senate... until 9/30

KHOU has a blurb that the Senate has renewed the National Flood Insurance Program, through September 30. The House evidently worked on it last week.

We still need to find out 1) if His Nibs will sign it, and 2) whether there's all kindsa Pork attached to it. I'm betting for the Pork.

The Lesson:
For the record, flood insurance isn't really insurance -- it's a wealth transfer program, a subsidy to get people to live in flood areas. Who buys it? People in flood zones. Why do they buy it? Because they KNOW that it's going to be useful to them. People who don't live in flood zones don't buy it, unless they're forced to. Sound familiar?

No apologies from me. If govt wants me to live near water, and pay taxes, etc. they'll subsidize flood insurance. Otherwise, I'll live somewhere else.

For that matter, federally-guaranteed mortgages are a wealth transfer program too, but as with this, they've been deemed a good use of public dollars. We'll see how that ends up, too.

So this all happens again on 9/30, at the end of the hurricane season, almost.

Let's see what we have to do to get it passed next time. Re-elect the right folks?

Is Congress holding the Gulf Coast hostage?

Another aspect of this: What if flood insurance has to deal with oil in the water? If you get storm damage AND oil, you'll need to call both FEMA and BP, right?

Bed bugs! Who has bed bugs?

Evidently, Abercrombie & Fitch had to close a Hollister store in NYC because of bed bug infestation.

Temporarily, we hope. God forbid anyone has to go without the latest Twilight-compliant fashion statement crafted in fleece.

I mention this because I'd just bet that they didn't figure THIS into their risk management agenda for the year. Lost sales due to bugs. Wow.

Things are tough all over.

This just in: plane called back to gate & fumigated over maggots in overhead bin.

Some loser brought a container of meat onto the plane, and maggots fell out of it.

Now, this begs the obvious question:

How can a bag of wormy meat get by TSA when my shampoo cannot?

Do we need to find some contractors to provide maggot detectors for the low bid?

UPDATE:
The store is now open again after taking care of the bedbug problem. The world is once again safe for overpriced clothes.

At this moment, nobody has flood insurance

Given that Congress is still screwing around with other things, the National Flood Insurance Program isn't funded yet. I haven't seen anything correcting any of this, and you'd think that FEMA would make it prominent if indeed it's been fixed in June.

Hey, Big Deal time -- for those of us with June flood insurance premiums, Congress has still not approved or funded flood insurance as of 5/31. So there is NO flood insurance right now.

I may be reading it wrong, so don't take MY word for it:
http://www.fema.gov/pdf/nfip/w_10063.pdf

The NFIP homepage is here:
http://www.fema.gov/business/nfip/

Turns out it applies to EVERYONE.

Congress has time for everything EXCEPT real business at the beginning of hurricane season. This is unreal, like something out of a Roger Corman movie, only this time CONGRESS is the buncha zombies.

Hey, some folks may be in technical DEFAULT on their mortgages over this.

Yep, if your loan requires flood insurance, as so many do, you could be in default. In fact, any mortgage-backed securities based on loans with flood insurance just got riskier too. But since those are all FNMA- or FHLMC-based, nobody cares; we're going to bail all those out anyhow.

Props to My Lovely Wife (or Dr. Melissa Williams) for pointing this out. I thought she was kidding. She wasn't. This is just too much.

UPDATE:

Ilyce Glink, Chicagoland real estate guru extraordinaire, THE Glink of ThinkGlink, has a post on this from 5/28. No updates in sight, either.

SECOND UPDATE:
From Insurance Journal on 6/16/10. Wow, just wow.

Another Update:
Turns out this has been in the HouChron at least once. Forgive me for missing it, but I've never considered the Chron a real newspaper.

Kagan shows how politics influences science

Now this is a blog about business and business stuff, usually. I'm adding this reference because 1) the Supremes have a big say in how we live our lives, and 2) the whole "global warming" hoax has been defended over and over using "science."

If you don't want controversy, and to be really disgusted with politics, don't read further. Go someplace like here and pick a topic.

National Review Online has a great piece today about Elena Kagan's role in a critical industry group's report on the medical necessity of partial birth abortion. [The procedure itself is bad enough, but lying and asking others to lie about its efficacy is pretty despicable in my opinion.] Ms. Kagan basically told an industry organization, a scientific body, how to draft its opinion to make sure that the opinion's summary could be used to defend the White House's position. Her wording reversed the groups scientifically-derived opinion for politics. Shame on her, and I mean that.

Seems like our current Secretary of the Interior Mr. Salazar was doing the same thing with the 6-month ban on new deep well drilling in the Gulf. Looks like George Soros is poised to win on that one.

I'll say it again: John Lennon's "follow the money" quote was spot on. Ok, so the Yoko thing was hinky, but he generally had a good head on his shoulders. Thanks, John.

So "science" is being used here to shut down an industry, right here, right now.

When you add VP Gore and how he has misrepresented "science " to justify his theories, some of this "science" stuff starts to sound more like "religion" (belief without evidence, in this context). Heck, global warming even has martyrs now. "You can't say anything, or he won't be able to save the world."

Thank goodness the ban has been overturned. For now...

Dean Kagan, and I use that word loosely, can hold whatever opinions she'd like on the "slippery-slope" that is abortion rights in this country, but this is unethical, even if it was "her job." She "vas chust doink her chob." Which is what they said at Nuremberg.

The whole episode points out how politicians like to use "science" to justify their policy agendas just as long as science can be manipulated to their ends. Disgusting.

Tenuous grasp on Finance Reform, Sen. Byrd passes

With Senator Robert Byrd's (D; W by God V) passing, it looks like we could be back a few notches on the Frank/Dodd bill. The 2,000-page monster was hammered out a few days ago in the middle of the night, and there's stuff in there that NOBODY can understand, so maybe waiting is a good idea.

On another note, it isn't clear at this point whether the Hon. Mr. Byrd will be buried with his Grand Dragon hood or not. Glenn Beck (shame on him - not really) led with this earlier today. It's a pretty good question, I think, and it's what I thought when Melissa came in to tell me about his death. Maybe that's wrong, but I think that it matters that one was a ranking member of one's local KKK chapter.

Just as we didn't hear about the delegate from Chappiquidick when Steady Teddy passed, we aren't hearing about how Byrd got elected in WV in the first place. [It's pretty well documented that he was in the Klan way back when, described as some kind of social club or something. That's just what the guys at Nuremberg said. Sen. Byrd brought so much prosperity, er, pork to West Virginia.]

Back to the Finance Bill: The news is that Scott Brown (R;MA) (and others, evidently) have indicated that they are unlikely to vote for the bill now that reconciliation has revealed a House move to tax banks differently. Darn.

UPDATE: We have hard evidence from Scott Brown that he will not vote for the modified bill. Good for him. The man apparently has standards.

Finally, the Supremes ruled today on the gun ban in Chicago, indicating again that, yes, the amendments in the Constitution apply to everyone. Including the 2nd now, and now just the 1st, 5th (that was the other day), etc. Thomas Sowell has a good take on it here. [Hint: It's not about safety, it's about self-determination. Duh.]

BofA hiring ... in Default Management

Bloomberg is reporting today that Bank of America has upped its job rolls in response to the recovering economy. Or not. BofA is hiring lots of folks to work with mortgage customers in trouble.

The other banks are doing the same thing, and they'll talk about it today in front of Congress. Should be interesting.

I guess "default management" is the new euphemism for "collections." Sounds much cooler, doesn't it?

Remember Charles Murray?

Remember that guy? He wrote "The Bell Curve" a few years ago, and he's argued in the Wall Street Journal that we should move to a trade-school structure in this country.

Salon.com has an article today in The War Room about how Murray is complaining that he's underpaid as a writer (he isn't, really, but that's how it's spun). Some of the linkys are interesting, so I posted it here.

This is just part of the ongoing debate about the value of writing, books, gatekeepers, etc. that began with the Internet. Same arguments have flowed about MP3 downloads -- are people willing to buy an album to get 2 songs? Are people willing to pay for content, whether printed or musical or ebook or opinion columns?

Laura Miller's post at Salon yesterday brings up some good points, but it all comes back to access. Posting to a blog, or publishing a PDF, is cheap, and evidently some folks have all the time in the world on their hands -- hence, the Internet!

The world needs gatekeepers, whether those are college professors, book editors, record company executives, talent scouts, or the "good old boy (gal) network". It's more needed now that so much information can be posted so quickly -- the signal to noise ratio of the Internet is getting smaller every day.

Our common constraint is bandwidth.