Good Monday morning to you all. We are still in the middle of a cool spell here which is supposed to end Thursday when we should get back into the fifties. I didn't do much yesterday--very lazy Sunday. And didn't see much to comment on. See what happens today.

A number of bloggers (but very few of the talking heads in the mainstream media) have remarked on the interesting fact that none of the big fish in the mortgage scandal at the heart of the economic meltdown have served jail time or even suffered serious financial hits from fines for their bad behavior. But some one has been convicted and jailed according to this NY Times story. But I also notice that the brokers who facilitated the 'fraud' haven't been prosecuted and one got a reduced sentence by testifying that the 'culprit's' signature was genuine (though handwriting experts cast doubt on that). Sad that the broker gets half the sentence of the so-called fraudster when he was at least as guilty of the fraud. But a story the appeared, all too briefly, on our local news leads me to wonder. A lawyer with a Chicago law firm has confessed to removing the signature page on a mortgage and adding pages with new fees and taxes before reattaching the signatures. I wonder if the Feds will charge the signer with fraud also.

I love this Chicago Sun-Times op ed that asks a serious, but mostly ignored, question: If the Social Security recipients are not getting a raise because there has been no inflation for the past two years, why are the premiums for Medicare going up? The author asks similar questions on the questions of rising property tax rates in the face of falling property valuations and the rising tuition costs at public colleges and universities while, again, there has been no inflation. I just love the way the various figures are massaged into meaninglessness so that ordinary people get shafted.

James Kunstler at Clusterfuck Nation has a good post this morning. I agree with him on Obama. I voted for Obama last time around but won't next. If any Democrat appears to challenge him I will vote for that candidate in the primaries. If Obama is the Democratic candidate I will not vote for him no matter what. I won't vote Republican either.