I've posted about the housing and mortgage crisis, and the impending dangers, here and here, but there's one additional problem that I hadn't got my head around when I wrote those posts. That's the tranche problem, which is likely to lead to all kinds of perverse incentives and unforeseen difficulties.

Most public debates over the mortgage and housing mess have been running aground on the false-dilemma problem, framing the a problem with several possible solutions as a choice between only two options. At least one of the options in false dilemmas is always completely moonbat crazy, and frequently they both are. The false dilemma I've been hearing these days goes like this:

"We either have to give mortgage lenders a free hand, and forget about the legal details, or just let borrowers keep their houses for free without paying anything!"

So, the story about bad mortgages, by which I mean not simply ill-conceived loans on houses that have hemorrhaged value but loan transfers with forged or non-existent paperwork, is beginning to make it into the daily news. We're going to hear much more about it, I'm afraid.

Monmouth University has a new poll on the Delaware Senate and Congressional races, and it's painful for the Republicans, especially for Senate nominee Christine O'Donnell. The top line: Chris Coons is leading O'Donnell 57% to 38%. O'Donnell has a grisly 58% disapproval rating with only 31% favorable, and Delaware voters consider her unqualified for the Senate by a margin of 57% to 35%. That's pretty painful.

I've been blogging angrily about SUNY ALbany's foolish attempt to "globalize" by cutting French, Italian, and Russian from the curriculum.

If you, like me, consider this decision foolish and bad for the education of SUNY Albany's students, please consider signing this petition to restore those crucial languages to SUNY Albany. Thanks.

Earlier this week, I blogged about SUNY Albany's plan to fulfill its "world-wide" mission by cutting almost all of their European language programs and declaring its intention to fire the full-time tenured faculty who teach French, Russian, Italian, and the classics. At the same time, Albany cut its theater major.

 Mudflats has obtained e-mails revealing Todd Palin's anger at Joe Miller, the Republican Tea Partier nominee for Senate from Alaska. They also have e-mails detailing Miller's inside-the-campaign response:

I just found this in my inbox. This is what we're dealing with. Note the date and the complete misconstruction of what I said.

Holy cow.

University administrators in the United States currently have two diametrically opposed habits.

First, they love to proclaim that their university is becoming more "global." You hear this all the time.

Second, they tend to cut foreign languages from the curriculum.

So, for example:

Someone with an assault rifle shot up the University of Texas today. And then he killed himself. I'm pretty nauseated just writing that first sentence, considering UT's history. No one is dead but the gunman, who shot himself.

My profession has a lot of annual rituals, some obvious and some not, and one of them happened the week before last: the annual job list went live (and, in another annual ritual, came precariously close to crashing for the first afternoon).

So, despite the way the economy feels in your neighborhood, there's been an official statement that the recession ended last June. Yup. All over. That is a perfectly sound statement at the same time it doesn't mean what the rest of us mean by "end of the recession."

So, Saturday night the news was that Christine O'Donnell "dabbled into witchcraft" before becoming a hard-line evangelical Christian. And you know what? I wasn't surprised at all. Surely I wasn't surprised that a candidate like O'Donnell was attracted to the supernatural, since all of her politics are about magical thinking. I shrugged it off, and Sunday morning I went to church.

Who on Earth is crazy enough to burn the Koran? Until two weeks ago, my answer has always been "raging lunatics in Elizabethan drama." You know, stage characters from the age of Shakespeare, the kind of people who are prone to cutting off their own hands, biting off their tongues and spitting them on the stage, or baking their enemies in pies and serving them for dinner. The people who make Hamlet seem well-adjusted. Certainly, I didn't think of it as the kind of thing real people did.

We're always told that economics is a complicated science, which is true, but also that bottom-line practical economics is very simple. But the simple rules we've all learned seem to have landed us into an incomprehensible mess. Let me try to recap what's happened.

Obviously, every business needs to make a profit to survive. This is done by keeping costs lower than revenues. If you're selling something, you need to make more money selling it than you spend in making or buying the product and in paying your workers.

Since David's recent blog has attracted attention from some self-described Objectivists and Libertarians, let me say a few things to those new commenters.

It's clear that you feel that all taxes are illegitimate ("stolen money"), and do not believe in any social contract (a la John Locke) by which citizens preserve the maximum freedom possible for them by delegating their personal legislative rights to a freely chosen legislative authority. In short, you don't accept taxation with representation. We can argue the point, but many of you seem quite set in your convictions.

Hi, all. We have some new readers and new reader bloggers today, for a sad reason. Some people are coming here out of fear that Talking Points Memo may shut down its reader blogs.

Everybody here at Dagblog would like to see the TPMCafe stay open. Most of us met each other, as bloggers, at that page, and we would like to see it thrive.

But whatever the fate for TPMCafe, we would like you to know that you are all welcome here, and that we will always be glad to see you.

President Obama's response to crazy conspiracy narratives about him is predictable and cool. He doesn't want to wade into the nonsense, and in that much he's absolutely right: you can't argue people out of their irrational beliefs. And in general, Obama has put his faith in the public's preference for real-world results over conspiracy theories.

American politics these days doesn't make a lot of sense if you expect people to act with sensible self-interest in mind. The Democrats, who were elected with large majorities after the other party's policies led the country to disaster, are apparently afraid to argue for their own policies. The Republicans, after suffering a resounding defeat because their policies led to disaster, have handed their party over to an angry faction that wants to push those failed policies even further.

How many times have we heard the phrase War on Terror over the last nine years? How many times have the very people who are now frothing and screaming about the Cordoba House community center (the alleged "Ground Zero Mosque") also screamed the words "War on Terror," and frothed at anyone who they felt was not acting (and I do mean acting) seriously enough about that "War?"

The inevitable talking point about Perry v. Schwarzenegger, the case overturning Proposition 8, is that it's "judicial overreach." Reason snaps together the prefabricated argument here. For the last generation at least, the allegedly "conservative" position is that judges should not be allowed to "make law" or to defy the will of the voters by ensuring justice or allowing equal protection under the law.