Things I Don't Get

BP has set up a $20 billion fund to compensate those who have suffered losses from the Gulf oil disaster, and are now saying that the fund must be the recourse of first resort. Lawsuits may not be filed, they maintain, until claims have first been made to that fund. The liberal media is horrified, but why? It seems perfectly logical to me that BP would require that the fund they established be the first recourse, given that they set it up for the specific purpose of avoiding the need to file lawsuits.

And why would a person suffering such a loss not apply to the fund for compensation, but go to the expense and trouble of filing a lawsuit instead?

A homeowner in San Diego was unable to maintain the payments on her home. She had bought the home in 1998 for $280,000 and in 2007 borrowed an additional $589,000 in order to “finance a divorce and pay off debts.” The bank claims that they “tried to get the homeowner current” but due to privacy laws cannot reveal the details, and confirm that foreclosure is now in process. The homeowner contacted her U. S. Representative to help her avoid “losing her home.” Why should a Member of Congress interfere in a defaulted mortgage?

If the homeowner had bought a home which declined in value below the price she paid I might have some sympathy; the negative equity would not represent “real money” on her account. (Although it would certainly be “real money” paid by the lender and received by whoever sold the house.) In this case, though, the negative equity is cash which she received in hand and rendered to others for goods and services received. Why should she obtain any consideration of forgiveness on that debt?

And why in hell is the mainstream media making a big deal of this?

New claims for unemployment dropped by 3000 last week, prompting prognostications of economic recovery and boosting the stock market. Why? Claims were still at 450,000, so the drop was a whopping 0.6% and left the level stratospherically above what would reflect an increase in employment. Sort of like Titanic’s damage control telling the Captain, “Good news, we won’t sink in eighteen minutes after all, it’s going to take nineteen minutes.” Gee, thanks.

The San Diego County Board of Supervisors has some kind of weird fetish about marijuana, along with a rather odd sense of its own authority.

Some years ago California passed a law legalizing the medical use of pot. Part of that law was a requirement that each county implement a system of issuing medical pot permission cards, which was something of a farce since anyone with even so much as a common cold can get one of them. Our supervisors were horrified at the idea of marijuana being used for any reason in our fair county and refused to implement such a card issuance system. It wound up with a lawsuit being filed to force San Diego County to comply with the state law.

Now there is a proposition on the ballot in the upcoming election that would legalize the recreational use of marijuana in the state, and our Supervisors have issued a resolution condemning the proposition, notwithstanding the fact that it is illegal for them to take positions on pending legislation. A couple of them have gone so far as to say that if pot is legalized in the state they will pass a law making it illegal in the county. That would be a nice trick, since they tried that with the medical marijuana law and failed.

San Diego is pretty conservative, politically speaking, but the Board of Supervisors’ frantic opposition to marijuana is just plain weird.