Not One of the Boys?
            New Orleans               There are some things I understand, and some that just elude me.  Maybe you get it and can help.
            Ok, I get it.  Times are tough.  We’re almost in a full-tilt depression.  The real estate market is deader than a doornail, so of course Mrs. Blagojevich would have been looking for some help getting a job.  Maybe should have taken a course in how to not curse during the interview, but, hey, she is definitely going to need a job, so layoff already.
            But, Sheila Baird, the head of the Federal Deposit Insurance Commission, seems to have been elbowed out of the boys club in DC because she kept insisting, we now read, that homeowners should have some help preventing foreclosures from the bank bailout.  She made it a condition of a couple of the deals and, darned, if she doesn’t keep nagging about it.  Hank Paulson and the boys at Treasury seem to be saying, hey, Sheila, tough it up — be a guy — let a couple of hundred thousand more homeowners fall in front of the bus, what’s wrong, you can’t help administer big time pain?  Doesn’t Sheila Bair understand that Hank and the guys all knew the folks on Wall Street they are bailing out really well?  They were buddies and business partners for years.  They were not some running noses home owners in Phoenix or Modesto or Tampa for cry eye. 
            Senator Dodd from Connecticut seems to be saying plainly that Hank Paulson just flat out lied to him on the bailout.  Seems Hank promised Chris that he would help the homeowners and now wants to renege.  But Hank feels qualified to teach Sheila a lesson.   Take them all back to school, sister!
            Hank probably likes the GMAC trick better.  Threaten to go bankrupt to squeeze your bondholders and let you become a bank holding company so you can feed at Hank’s trough with the bailout bucks.  Since GMAC’s mortgage companies were also slooooowwww on the modification programs and hardly best-in-class, I can only hope for their borrowers that eventually Sheila reads the same article and has something to say about all of this.
            President-elect Obama, let’s keep Sheila around a bit in 2009 to see if we can organize a new club, ok?