http://www.bloomberg.com/…

The Federal Reserve intends to hire a veteran lobbyist as it seeks to counter skepticism in Congress about the central bank’s growing power over the U.S. financial system, people familiar with the matter said.

Linda Robertson currently handles government, community and public affairs at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, and headed the Washington lobbying office of Enron Corp., the energy trading company that collapsed in 2002 after an accounting scandal. She was also an adviser to all three of the Clinton administration’s Treasury secretaries.

Robertson would help the Fed manage relations with lawmakers seeking greater oversight of a central bank that has used emergency powers to prevent Wall Street’s demise. While she wasn’t tied to Enron’s fraud, her association with the firm may raise questions, analysts said.

“Some members of Congress think there are votes in attacking the Fed” after it “unnecessarily and unwisely entangled monetary policy with fiscal policy,” said former St. Louis Fed President William Poole. “The Fed is going to have a tricky time of unwinding what has been done” and will need to “keep in touch with members of Congress more thoroughly,” said Poole, now senior fellow with the Cato Institute in Washington.

They may not mention Paul but it was his presidential campaign and now his HR1207 which is putting some fire under the Fed’s feet.

Turns out:

Donna Hanks initially purchased her home (315 South Ellwood, Baltimore, MD 21224) on 7/06/2001 for $87,000. She re-fi’d in 2005 for $270,000, went into bankruptcy in 2006, and this was the 2nd foreclosure. The $300 a month was actually the $340 a month she agreed to re-pay as she was over $10,000 behind in her payments. The house was sold in July 08 and they couldn’t get her out until September 08 after not paying anything for over a year.

Homesteading involves abandoned or never utilized property. This house is obviously owned by at least the bank and a two minute phone call could have revealed it was now sold to a new owner. That house was never hers. It was the banks. It’s unlikely she was even close to having more than 50% of the principle paid.

Groups like ACORN and those who support them helped create this housing bubble by using government to ban so called discrimination in lending, redlining, pushing for the CRA and low interest rates.

That term predatory lending bugs me big time. Why isn’t it predatory borrowing? The government was incentivizing if not forcing banks to lend. No one forced the lendees to borrow. No one forced them to ignore the contract or keep them from having a lawyer look over the mortgage.

If you can’t afford to own, rent. If you want to homestead there is plenty of unutilized land out west.

From our friend Manuel Lora:

The state scores again:

Baltimore police will no longer release the names of officers who kill or injure people, changing a long-standing practice that the department believes put officers at risk.The decision is prompting criticism from several Baltimore leaders, who said withholding officers’ names will only endanger an already tenuous relationship between the police and the community. Baltimore police shot 21 people last year, 13 of them fatally – the same number killed by police in 2007, when 31 people were shot. Those numbers are up from 2006, when 15 were shot and five killed.

I can’t imagine why the relationship between the cops and the community is so bad!

Re: from Bill Anderson

Manuel’s post also raises the larger question about the nature of police and government. The article also points out that Baltimore’s mayor, Sheila Dixon, is not objecting to this new policy:

A spokesman for Mayor Sheila Dixon said she will not interfere with the department’s decision.

Not surprisingly, the police union is all in favor of this farce:

The police union applauded the policy change. Robert F. Cherry, president of the Baltimore police union and a former homicide detective, said the department vigorously investigates shootings that involve officers.”If anything, the investigation is more intensive than for the average citizen,” Cherry said. “The only thing the department is doing differently is choosing not to release their name. … I’m surprised we haven’t gone to this earlier.”

My experience in working on the infamous Duke Lacrosse Case tells me that police do not aggressively investigate themselves, and that police are held to much lower standards than are ordinary citizens.

For example, the infamous police shooting in San Francisco has the police urging “caution” and no “rush to judgment,” yet if an ordinary citizen were to shoot an unarmed person in the back at such a close range, the police and press would be denouncing the “execution-style murder” and vowing justice. Instead, we hear the usual claptrap from the authorities.

All of this raises the larger question for me. If a police department is subject to the authority of government, and if government simply is an extension of “the will of the people,” as “Progressives” are fond of telling us, then why do police departments act as a law unto themselves?

The obvious answer is that not only do police officers intimidate everyone else, given they have a license to kill, but they also control a large number of votes and government unions today are major factors in determining elections. All in the name of “progress,” of course.

Sort of like how they don’t release standard operating procedures or the names of officers who break them? Even when the infraction is just using a cell phone?

http://www.nytimes.com/…

Hoping to curb the increase in the number of young people who smoke small, inexpensive cigars, Baltimore plans to bar shops from the common practice of breaking open packages to sell them individually.

Baltimore would be the first city to impose such a regulation, said Dr. Joshua M. Sharfstein, the city’s health commissioner.

The city has put the proposal out for public comment until July 1 and expects to impose the ban, possibly with revisions, soon after, Dr. Sharfstein said. Under the city code, the commissioner has the power to regulate health hazards without legislation.

A ban on selling tobacco products to minors has had limited effect, Dr. Sharfstein said, and studies have shown that higher prices have a larger deterrent effect on youth smoking.

“This isn’t going to work but we’ll do it anyway.”

It’s frightening that the health commissioner has so much power.