Facts That Globe Reporters Can't Seem to Report

This morning the Boston Globe carried a front page story by Kimberly Blalnton about rising interest rates on variable rate mortgages. In classic Globe form the story is complete with a typical poster child – a single mother named Sana Masoud who owns a duplex in Brighton that she bought for $712,000 in 2004.

The facts the Globe story does not report are:

• Their poster-child purchased the property in 2004 from her relatives who were realtors.
• The property was never worth anything near $712,000 she "paid", but somehow the poster-child landed $660,000 of credit in 2 mortgages, obtaining the property with virtually 100% leverage.
  
• The realtor-relatives sold the house to her for 60% more then they paid for it, only 4 years before (but of course the profit was realized via the large mortgage loans).
• Realtors could find this information very quickly but the Kim Blanton or the Globe could not or did not ask.
  

Here is the real background, courtesy of a couple of bloggers:

Boston realtor and blogger John A Keith adds some additional facts:

Well, there’s a little bit more to this story.This owner had leveraged her investment property to the hilt, from the very beginning.

Let’s do the math. Ms Masoud purchased her two-family property in 2004 for $712,000. Her first mortgage loan was for $569,600 (information courtesy of the Suffolk Deeds Registry of Deeds). I see that the owner took out a second loan at the same time; in 2004, she borrowed $100,000, and in 2006 she paid it back and took out another loan, taking out $103,200;

Keith’s conclusion:

Her problem is exacerbated by the higher interest rate, but not caused by it. She already had a problem. Ms Masoud, you need to sell your property. Now.

But the comments made by readers of Keith’s post are the really amazing part:

Comment by confused

Cutting and pasting a letter to Kim Blanton from another site. [couldn’t find it –ed.]

Dear Ms. Blanton - I suggest that you check Masslandrecords.com before writing an article like the one that appeared today in the Globe.

Sana Masoud purchased the 2 family for $712,000 (!!!!! on $63,000 per year - really?) from Amira and Maisa Masoud. I don’t think it is a big stretch to surmise that these people are either her parents or other relatives. Again - 2 -family in Brighton for $712K? Massland Records also reveals that Amira and Maisa Masoud bought the property just 4 years before “selling” it to Sana Masoud for $437,800 (7/25/00 Book 25165, Page 116) (I’m no math wiz but that looks like a 60% profit). I’m going to be a little cynical here and guess that Sana Masoud and her family may have shared in some of the money that came from the bank (old fashioned fraud maybe?)

I am surprised that you didn’t mention whether you asked Ms. Masoud how on earth she qualified for a $596,000 1st mortgage and a $100,000 second (she refinanced the second late in 2006 - it’s now at $102,000 - again information easily found at Masslandrecords.com ) on $63,000 a year. It is a shame that lenders and mortgage brokers (who quickly make their huge commissions and dump these loans on what appear these days to be pretty reckless investors) give these loans out to people who clearly cannot afford them but I also think some digging is necessary before painting these buyers as victims.

I googled Maisa Masoud and learned he (also according to google) is a real estate agent.

Comment by Ken

Hi John,

The One-Year Treasury Constant Maturity rate is 4.11 as of 9/27 according to Bankrate. My post from HBB…

Everybody loves the Massachusetts Registry of Deeds , I researched the house as well. A few tidbits on the property. It was never worth anywhere close to 712k. It’s in a borderline neighborhood 2 blocks from a housing project, one block from a sketchy Store24 and right next to a main thoroughfare. Presently a two family one street away is listed on Zip at 579k (after three price reductions) and has a Zillow dream estimated value of 518k. Weirdest thing is that I lived in the house during my college years, the guy who sold it in ‘99 was my landlord…..

The New Governor is Different

Deval Patrick criticizes former Governor Mitt Romney in a Boston Globe story today (“Patrick blasts Romney for medical aid stance”). Deval says of Mitt:

"He's a nice fellow, but a shameless candidate."

Our new Governor seems just the opposite.

Casino Deval Part 7: Hungry for Pie

All our politicians now covet the clichéd “seat at the table” where casino decisions will be made. Today 6 DAs got into the act. Also note these delicious quotes from the front page casino story in today’s Boston Globe:

"I have some misgivings about a casino in any city, because I think the whole point is to create a resort destination, and I don't think there is a city in Massachusetts that has enough space for that kind of facility …."

– Deval Patrick

"We are still interested in seeing a full entertainment destination location in our city, more specifically at Suffolk Downs. Jobs and economic development in that area depend on it."

– Spokeswoman for Boston Mayor Tom Menino

Doesn’t this have a familiar ring? Before there is an official proposal from the Governor to legalize casinos in Massachusetts, our pols are already circling like sharks to get access to this fresh meat.

Just wait until they have an actual proposal “on the table” to fight over.

But no worries, folks. Led by Deval, “together we can” find a way for our pols to divvy up this new opportunity for tax revenue and patronage. That’s what Deval meant during his campaign, isn’t it?

The L-word

An AP story in today’s Boston Globe covers a recent speech by Gorbachev. I have no quarrel with the story or its importance, except for the use of the word “liberal” as an umbrella term for those opposed to Putin. This is as inaccurate as it is commonplace:

His remarks, less guarded than usual, came amid growing concern among Russia's marginalized liberals that Putin's government is recasting Stalin's legacy to justify its own increasingly tight control.

Since the mainstream media insists on labeling Putin’s opponents as “liberals” and Putin as a “conservative”, I offer what might be the definition found in the reporter's usage guide:

Liberal – 1) A Russian who favors market forces, private ownership of enterprises, reduced government interference in business, and decentralized political power. 2) An American who opposes all these things.

This illustrates the level of devaluation of such labels have reached in our discourse. They should be avoided.

Sketchy Headlines

Sensing pro-Hillary bias, an Obama blogger writes of the Boston Globe's coverage:

This is the second sketchy, inaccurate Clinton-Obama headline the Boston Globe has run this week...It doesn’t appear that objective, accurate reporting is high on their priority list right now.

Uhhh, no.

It was on 111 across

If you missed this story in the Boston Globe Magazine, please take a clue and read it.

Enjoy.

Casino Deval Part 6: Incremental Addiction

From a front-page story on today’s Boston Globe:

Studies estimate that at least 3 percent of US adults have a compulsion to gamble so severe that it can lead to obsession, lying, illegal acts, and failed relationships…4.4 percent of people living within 50 miles of a casino reported serious wagering problems in their lifetimes. That compared with 2.1 percent of those living 51 to 250 miles from a casino…

No worries, though. Deval’s plan has taken precautions against this already, as we read:

In an interview, Dr. JudyAnn Bigby, the Massachusetts secretary of health and human services, said that as part of Patrick's proposal, casinos would have to post signs warning patrons about the addictive propensity of wagering and train employees to spot troubled gamblers and direct them to addiction treatment. The governor's plan also pledges a 2.5 percent cut of casino pretax revenues, an estimated $51 million a year, to pay for education campaigns and expand addiction treatment.

Would Massachusetts use employees of tobacco companies as recruiters for tobacco addiction programs?

Phew! I'm lucky that blogging is not habit-forming.

Don't Tell Harvard!

A story in the tabloid Daily Mail led me to the web page of Professor Timothy Bates of the University of Edinburgh, which reports:

We have also worked on sex differences in ability (appearing in [the journal] Intelligence), finding an absence of mean differences, but quite a large excess of males in both the very low and the very high extremes of the normal distribution of ability.

Which reminds us of these words from the speech by former Harvard President Larry Summers that prompted a feminist putsch against him:

Because if my reading of the data is right –it's something people can argue about –that there are some systematic differences in variability in different populations, then whatever the set of attributes are that are precisely defined to correlate with being an aeronautical engineer at MIT or being a chemist at Berkeley, those are probably different in their standard deviations as well.

In Scotland Professor Bates is far enough away from Cambridge, Massachusetts to be safe from the Harvard faculty’s version of the Spanish Inquisition.

Casino Deval Part 5: "Billy Galvin Also Makes Headlines"

“Some” makes another appearance on a front page headline in the Boston Globe. As usual, the story under the headline is a stretch. This story should have been labeled “Billy Galvin Can Also Make Headlines".

Secretary of State Billy Galvin must be getting envious of state Treasurer Timmy Cahill grabbing all the recent headlines and publicity on gambling. This story is really about state pols elbowing each other for the media limelight. It is about as important as a playground fight at parochial school, which it resembles.

The Globe headline intones ominously that “Some may have violated Mass. Law”. What exactly is the alleged violation of law? Some of these lobbyists had not informed Billy Galvin’s office that they were lobbying, or that they were lobbying about gambling. The Globe reports:

Anyone who lobbies for a fee, or hires a lobbyist, must sign up with the state, he said, and each client or area of interest must be listed separately when the lobbyist registers.

Yesterday Billy’s office sent out 29 letters saying "tut-tut" to those who had supposedly violated lobbying laws. To be fair, of course, Billy included the Massachusetts Catholic conference and the Samaritans of Greater Boston in his mailing. They hadn’t told Billy’s office that they were lobbying about gambling. Shocking.

Our pols may have caught gambling fever, but they are forever vigilant about the evils of lobbying.

Count on it.

Campaign Finance Follies

Here is the beginning of an article appearing in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal (subscription required):

When Hillary Rodham Clinton held an intimate fund-raising event at her Washington home in late March, Pamela Layton donated $4,600, the maximum allowed by law, to Mrs. Clinton's presidential campaign But the 37-year-old Ms. Layton says she and her husband were reimbursed by her husband's boss for the donations. "It wasn't personal money. It was all corporate money," Mrs. Layton said outside her home here. "I don't even like Hillary. I'm a Republican."

The boss is William Danielczyk, founder of a Washington-area private-equity firm and a major fund-raising "bundler" for Mrs. Clinton. Mrs. Layton's gift was one of more than a dozen donations that night from people with Republican ties or no history of political giving. Mr. Danielczyk and his family, employees and friends donated a total of $120,000 to Mrs. Clinton in the days around the fund-raiser.

This absurd charade is necessary because donations are limited to relatively small amounts by campaign finance reform laws. These laws and regulations have been made by people who are obsessed with “getting big money out of politics”, as if this isn’t equivalent to repealing the laws of physics. Mr. Danielczyk wants to donate large sums to Hillary and will find a way around the unnatural level allowed, as will other bigger donors.

Our law should not stand in the way of Mr. Danielczyk’s desire to give. It should merely require that candidates provide a timely, accurate, and public accounting of donations.

Here is a snippet of Frost in honor of the naive futility of McCain-Feingold.

The Flood

Blood has been harder to dam back than water.
Just when we think we have it impounded safe
Behind new barrier walls (and let it chafe!),
It breaks away in some new kind of slaughter.
We choose to say it is let loose by the devil;
But power of blood itself releases blood.
It goes by might of being such a flood
Held high at so unnatural a level.
It will have outlet, brave and not so brave.
Weapons of war and implements of peace
Are but the points at which it finds release.
And now it is once more the tidal wave
That when it has swept by leaves summits stained.
Oh, blood will out. It cannot be contained.

 Robert Frost

Two Birds With One Stone

Wretchard at Belmont Club notes an editorial in the Harvard Crimson that criticizes the cowardly treatment of Larry Summers by the faculty and administration of UC Santa Cruz:

Academia's rough handling of Larry Summers stands in stark contrast to the deferential, even fearful treatment accorded to Ward LeRoy Churchill, who even after being shown to be third-rate fraud continued to be defended on the grounds of "academic freedom".

The silver lining here is that the Crimson gets in a shot ostensibly aimed at the UC faculty and without mentioning the Harvard faculty, whose behavior toward the same person was even more cowardly and intolerant.

Not Fake, but Inaccurate

More on Dan Rather’s lawsuit in today’s Boston Globe:

In his lawsuit, Rather maintains that the story was true, but that if any aspect of the broadcast was not accurate, he was not responsible for the errors.

So the news report about documents that the New York Times headline described as “Fake, but Accurate” may turn on its head in court and be called “Not Fake, but Inaccurate”.

I so hope this suit goes to trial.

Casino Deval Part 4: Stacking the Deck

Deval Patrick, now just beginning to propose the criteria for casino site selection, apparently cannot resist the urge to also manage the outcome of the process. According to the Boston Globe:

Patrick - who has designated three areas of the state for proposed resort casinos, including Southeastern Massachusetts - is leaning toward placing a casino in New Bedford. The administration says a casino could help revitalize the old whaling city and fishing port and believes it would complement a planned $1.4 billion commuter rail line that would connect New Bedford and Boston… The Patrick administration declined comment on any sites. Kofi Jones, spokeswoman for Economic Development Secretary Daniel O'Connell, said the administration has not determined the criteria for selecting casino licensees. "We are still developing the criteria, but some of the factors that will be considered are sustainable and smart-growth principles and access to transportation," Jones said.

No mention of the impossible task to create a huge destination resort complete with golf courses in downtown New Bedford, or of how little a resort located elsewhere in the city would help its struggling downtown.

Perhaps There Is Justice on Earth

Dan Rather is suing CBS for $70M over his dismissal in the Ra^therGate affair.

Not since 1941 when Hitler attacked Stalin have two such despicable foes squared off in a battle to the death.

May the two parties experience a long, revelatory, expensive, and bitter court trial, and may the last man standing be mortally wounded.

Hat tip: Captain Ed

Casino Deval Part 3: Steve Bailey Pukes

Boston Globe business columnist Steve Bailey sounds off in disgust at the sight of Deval Patrick selling casino gambling as a benefit to the public:

If any industry other than gambling were going to be required to set aside 2.5 percent of its gross revenues just to care for the victims it leaves behind, we would send it packing…To pay for the human collateral damage in the name of economic policy, the governor has proposed a "best in class" program to support gambling prevention and addiction services. (That's like the tobacco companies not wanting your kids to smoke.) Patrick would take 2.5 percent of the casinos' estimated $2 billion in revenue - or $50 million a year - to deal with things like an increase in domestic violence that come with gambling. That is roughly equal to what the Department of Public Health gets for both its early intervention and women, infants and children's nutrition programs combined. Does being number one in rehabbing our losers allow us to sleep better at night?

This sort of self- justification is exactly how addicts behave isn’t it, Steve? Our one-party government is addicted to outsized revenue growth, yet without imposing new taxes. That is why this blog called your colleagues on the Globe editorial board state revenue whores.

"Blogged to Death" by the First Amendment

Author Steve Almond bloviates about newspapers and blogs in today’s Boston Globe Op Ed page in a column entitled “Blogged to Death”:

IT'S ALWAYS kind of embarrassing to see an elderly relative shaking her booty on the dance floor at a wedding reception. That's a little how I felt when I discovered that The New York Times - the Old Gray Lady of the fourth estate - now has 33 blogs….There's nothing surprising in all this. Blogs are cheap and easy. They're like those cable TV shows with all the talking heads shouting at one another. All you need is the means to broadcast and an opinionator. (The Times, naturally, has a blog called The Opinionator.) There's no real overhead, no editor, and more often than not, no reflection….blogging does have a tendency to elicit the worst in people. How could it not? It's a medium that basically allows everyone to become an instant pundit. Forget research or reasoned analysis or nuance. Forget job qualifications. Heck, forget the byline. In the blog game, it's all about making the sort of witty snap judgments that will draw the most site traffic (read: ad revenue).

Is that damnable first amendment and the practice of free speech getting under your skin, Steve? It can bring out the worst in people? Then take a vacation from it in North Korea. But be sure to bring your own food.

Not to mention, of course, that sometimes bloggers may note political fashion statements that are reported as fact in newspapers like the New York Times.

UPDATE: The Boston Globe byline for Steve Almond say only “Steve Almond is author of the new essay collection "(Not That You Asked)." But Wikipedia has more details:

He spent seven years as a newspaper reporter…He has been writing fiction for the last eight years [Maybe the last 15 years? – Ed]. …He served as adjunct professor in creative writing at Boston College for five years until publishing an open letter of resignation in the Boston Globe on May 12, 2006, in which he explained that his resignation was intended to protest the selection of Condoleezza Rice as the college's 2006 commencement guest speaker.

Casino Deval Part 2: More Cowbell for Casinos

The Boston Globe provides “more cowbell” for casinos today. There are overwhelmingly positive headlines and coverage of Deval Patrick’s casino gambling proposal in today’s Globe. Amid all this carefully planned propaganda barrage, astute readers should note the one aspect of the plan that is not mentioned anywhere.

There is no mention of the regressivity of this new source of state revenue – it hits hardest on households that are poor and uneducated. The majority of casino revenue is derived from the “grind market”, which consists of low-stakes, day-tripping casino visitors. There is no mention or consideration of how this form of revenue squares with liberal values – perhaps because it is directly opposed to them.

Now for the Globe’s hoopla coverage:

In the lead story “Governor predicts a jackpot” by Andrea Estes and Frank Phillips, we get a profile of the “advocates” for casinos:

His long-awaited decision was praised by advocates for casino gambling, including the potential bidders for the licenses, the labor unions that represent hotel and resort workers, trade unions, some municipal officials, and the state's tourism officials.

We’re gob-smacked by that.

And the big windfall for Massachusetts property owners:

He proposed a property tax credit that would range from $150 to $400 a year for qualified property owners and average about $215. Property owners who pay 2.5 percent or more of their income on property taxes would qualify for the credit. The average property tax bill in the state was $3,962 in the last fiscal year.

Casino revenue sharing represents a 5% cut in property taxes. Less, of course, whatever revenues your city or town government decides to preemptively extract from this. This size of tax cut will hardly change your life.

Here is the biggest laugh. A quote from Deval:

"We will regulate casinos vigilantly, professionally, and independent of politics," Patrick said.

Is there a single extant example of professional, vigilant and politics-free regulation anywhere in Massachusetts?

Another positive headline is “Market will support multiple-casino plan, state officials say” where reporter Sean P. Murphy writes on the auction license process:

The Patrick plan envisions giving an Indian tribe an advantage in the bidding, but details of how that advantage would be granted were not spelled out in the governor's proposals yesterday.

Yes. A racial set-aside within a revenue maximizing auction is a logical contradiction. No worries. It’s just one among many.

In “Debate on opening casinos in Massachusetts reflects new attitude” by reporter Peter J Howe, the reporter notes the success of Scottsdale Arizona, which has a new Indian casino. I’ve been there. It is a small gambling ghetto within Scottsdale’s plush borders:

"The reality is that there are negative consequences that come as a result of casino gaming - there are shattered lives everywhere from problem gambling - but the community of Scottsdale has not felt that much," he said. "That said, if you ever put it to a vote whether we'd have casinos in our downtown, outside the native areas, I'm certain that it would go down in political flames."

Correct. But most of these social costs do not accrue to Scottsdale. Scottsdale is very upscale. Most of the people who contribute to the city’s casino windfall can’t afford to live there.

We hear from State Cheerleader Treasurer Tim Cahill on the Globe’s Op Ed page piece entitled “Massachusetts' fortune is with gaming”:

Since the introduction of "The Game" in 1972, the lottery has returned over $15.3 billion to cities and towns, with more than $3.5 billion coming in just the past four years. The much needed revenue has been committed to education, infrastructure, and public safety, money that would otherwise have been raised through ever-increasing property taxes.

Did the lottery revitalize the funding for public education, as promised? How is it that our infrastructure a still a mess? Has public safety been improved? Did our taxes ever fall? Cahill doesn’t mention these questions, of course. What the lottery revenue has actually done is help preserve our bloated and patronage-laced status quo for 35 years.

Finally from the Globe’s editorial “Ground rules for gambling”:

The administration is promising the most rigorous and transparent regulatory structure in the nation. But the public can't be expected to sign on until still more details are known about the structure itself.

Citizens of Massachusetts are understandably skeptical about the possibility of rigorous and transparent regulatory structures. We only have experienced bloated patronage organizations.

Right now, one can glean as much, maybe more, about Patrick's proposal to require renewable energy at a new casino than about certain aspects of the state's bedrock regulatory structure.

That says a lot about his priorities.

Patrick has faith that destination casinos will offer entertainment and services consistent with the administration's values.

Exactly which values are these? Expanding public sector spending through highly regressive form of revenue? The Globe of course does not elaborate.

Shut up and deal.

Casino Deval

“Together we can” has become Casino Deval. "Let's reach for that" has become grasping for slot machines and roulette wheels.

The Boston Globe begins its lead editorial today this way:

GOVERNOR PATRICK knows slot machines and table games are not the stuff of human ideals that he talked about in his campaign.

To say the very least. Neither is Patrick’s decision any form of creative political leadership. Rather, it shares the faulty logic that moves compulsive gamblers to their weekly and monthly trips to the casinos – ignorance of the laws of probability.

However Governor Patrick (like the Globe editorial board) has no problem repudiating his ideals in order to support what is apparently his highest value – an expanded yet unreformed Massachusetts public sector.

"This is the last true revenue source, absent taxes," said Senator Michael W. Morrissey, a Democrat from Quincy. "We've done some creative things, but this is really the last frontier of revenues."

Better journalists would have asked Senator Morrissey for a few examples of the legislature’s creativity in controlling public spending.

Sunday’s Globe has a story by Frank Phillips with some details of the Governor’s plan as well as this fine “but paragraph”

In making his decision to endorse casino resorts, Patrick will be going against many of his close political allies and a good chunk of his Democratic base, including liberals who see gambling as a regressive tax that takes money from those in the lower income brackets to ease the financial burdens of the more affluent. Those critics, including House leaders, say the financial gains are illusory. They say expanded gambling would create social problems and will hook state political leaders and Beacon Hill budget writers on gambling revenues, while providing few long-term economic benefits. They also say that expanding gambling with Las Vegas-like resorts will change the historic and cultural character of Massachusetts forever.

But a recent study said that there is $1.5 billion in annual unmet market demand for gambling. A line of pent-up casino proposals bears out the assertion that market forces favor gambling.

Market forces favor gambling, folks. This is merely the market responding to an unmet need!

There is also unmet market demand for businesses trading in heroin, stolen cars, cocaine, marijuana, and underage girls. However our law forbids such businesses because we judge that their social costs outweigh their benefits.

That is the central question concerning casino gambling. Clearly the additional state revenue will be contributed primarily by the poorest and least educated citizens. How illiberal must an idea be before liberals in Massachusetts reject it?

Keeping the Market Out of the Insurance Market

Get ready for the latest version of “managed competition”!

Boston Globe reporter Bruce Mohl writes a priceless story today on auto insurance in Massachusetts. This article should be required reading for all students in a first semester course in microeconomics. It illustrates the futility of regulatory attempts to keep market forces from influencing our ersatz market for auto insurance. The story could be headlined “Keeping the Market out of the insurance market”:

Insurance Commissioner Nonnie S. Burnes, concerned about higher prices for drivers who are less affluent or less educated, has proposed rules for auto insurance competition that would bar companies from using such socioeconomic factors as income, education, occupation, and homeownership in deciding how much drivers should pay for coverage or whether to insure them. She has also proposed a one-year ban on the use of a driver's credit history in setting rates, but not in deciding whom to insure.

Thank you, Nanny State Nonnie! But wait! The ugly head of market competition emerges from yet another mole-hole!

Many companies appear to be using proxies for those factors today. Under the existing auto insurance system, where Massachusetts regulators set all the rates, companies are allowed to offer discounts on the state-set rates to members of groups or associations. Many of these groups fit targeted education, occupation, and income levels insurers believe have lower loss experience.

Horrors! Please rescue us, oh wise Commissars of Insurance!

And our always confident Massachusetts Division of Insurance gives the proletariat this statement of assurance in today's Pravda Globe:

"As we move to give drivers more choice and lower premiums through managed competition, we expect these discounts may become less and less relevant as a competitive environment creates lower costs for a greater number of people"

Not only are these regulators able to simultaneously set so many business policies and also set rates at the market-clearing prices, they confidently predict that the appeal of discounts will soon wither away in our worker’s paradise. Such discounts must be mere vestiges of bourgeois capitalism!

And a spokesperson for an incumbent insurance company, the big fish in this small pond of regulation that has driven away their larger national competitors replies:

"Whatever the system is, we will compete under the rules of the system"

Indeed they will, though they are the only ones who can tolerate the stifling regulatory environment.

So let’s continue down the road to managed competition. We can’t wait for our regulators to drive prices down while they simultaneously drive up “fairness”.

What a Commonwealth! What a Party!

All hail the Great Leader, Comrade Deval and his loyal comrade in the Ministry of Insurance, Commissar Nanny State Nonnie!

"Extraneous Factors"? -- not for car insurance!

Remember the oh-so-snotty Boston Globe editorial last March about Massachusetts auto insurance reform? It arrogantly dismissed common auto insurance company pricing practices:

Massachusetts needs no part of national insurers who use credit scores, occupation, home ownership, and other extraneous factors to dump drivers into assigned risk pools where they are forced to pay outlandish "dirty rates."

Research released since that time shows that with respect to pricing auto insurance, credit scores are not “extraneous factors”. Rather, they are accurate predictors of the cost of insurance claims by any individual, regardless of race or income. This week’s Forbes magazine reports on a recent study of auto insurance by the Federal Trade Commission:

But a recent report by the Federal Trade Commission, which studied some 2 million customer records, found that people with credit scores in the lowest decile, or 10%, generated twice the claim costs of those in the highest decile. This relationship held even when researchers looked only at white customers, or conversely, within ZIP codes identified as low-income neighborhoods.

The FTC report was issued in July (you can find all 242 pages here). Its executive summary states:

Credit-based insurance scores are effective predictors of risk under automobile policies. They are predictive of the number of claims consumers file and the total cost of those claims. The use of scores is therefore likely to make the price of insurance better match the risk of loss posed by the consumer. Thus, on average, higher-risk consumers will pay higher premiums and lower-risk consumers will pay lower premiums...

Tests also showed that scores predict insurance risk within racial and ethnic minority groups (e.g., Hispanics with lower scores have higher estimated risk than Hispanics with higher scores). This within-group effect of scores is inconsistent with the theory that scores are solely a proxy for race and ethnicity.

The Globe covered the release of this report in a very accurate story by Bruce Mohl on July 25, which I missed (vacation, you know) and a far poorer column by WaPo columnist Michelle Singletary on August 2.

The end of Singletary’s column reads:

After assessing all the research and data from the industry and after hearing 200 comments from the public, the FTC still couldn't determine the correlation between low credit scores and the increased likelihood that someone will file an auto insurance claim. If you don't know why, then how do you know the practice is fair?

Sorry, that is incorrect. The measured correlation is documented in the report. Ms. Singletary is, of course, confusing statistical correlation with causation. Somehow this elementary stats mistake also slipped past the editors at both the WaPo and the Globe. This confusion is common among ardent though statistically ignorant do-gooders who are quick to use the f-word (the 4-letter word that ends in “a-i-r”) and who insist on arbitrary or undefined measures of “fairness’.

But the FTC report stated its definition in the executive summary that “the use of scores is therefore likely to make the price of insurance better match the risk of loss posed by the consumer”.

Conveniently, Ms. Singletary did not specify her personal criteria for judging the “fairness” of this practice, but instead somehow blamed the researchers for not being omniscient.

Words Left Unreported

It is interesting to contrast the coverage given in our local papers of yesterday’s 9/11 memorial ceremony at the State House in Boston, particularly regarding the quotes from the Governor.

The Boston Globe story:

"We meet to honor the lives of the 206 sons and daughters of our community who were lost six years ago," Patrick said, speaking on the State House lawn. "Our tribute is for each of them, and our condolences are with each of you."

The Herald story:

“We miss them not because they are gone, but because they were here,” said Gov. Deval Patrick before lowering the flag on the State House lawn. “Our tribute is for each of them and our condolences are with each of you.”

The Herald editorial:

“Among many other things, 9/11 was a failure of human understanding,” Patrick said. “It was a mean and nasty and bitter attack on the United States. But it was also a failure of human beings to understand each other, to learn to love each other.”

The Herald goes on to ask:

Governor, “mean and nasty” are terms better suited for a political campaign or a junkyard dog. Not for the worst terrorist attack ever on American soil…Unfortunately, the governor’s fuzzy recollection of that terrifying day seems to be in keeping with a certain “blame us” mentality that so many of his supporters embrace, along with a failure to acknowledge the continuing threat of evil that Americans face.

Remember now, that news stories are supposedly for reporting news, but somehow both our dailies omitted this syrupy, flower-child-like comment by the Governor. Jules Crittenden asks for suggestions as to what kind of hat the tabloid Herald should photoshop onto the Governor’s picture. Tie-dyed, probably.

New revenue sought, but what about new ideas?

A front page article in today’s Boston Globe covers hearings of the Joint Transportation Committee on Beacon Hill. The hearings discussed funding options for repairs to Massachusetts transportation infrastructure. The article does mention that privatization options are being considered by the Patrick administration, which the Herald noted yesterday. As is so often the case in the Globe, article ended with the most interesting quote and left important questions unasked:

MBTA officials estimate that they would have to spend at least $550 million a year for the next 20 years to achieve a systemwide[sic] "state of good repair," [MBTA General Manager] Grabauskas said at the hearing. Instead, the MBTA spends about $450 million to $470 million a year to maintain its infrastructure, he said.

"One of the depressing aspects of my job is to realize that even spending half a billion dollars a year . . . we're barely keeping pace to keep the level of maintenance that we have today," Grabauskas said at the hearing. ". . . I need to continue to spend just to maintain the level of, in some cases, disrepair that we have today."

Then a curious journalist might have asked:

• How does the MBTA measure the effectiveness of its maintenance expenditures?
• How does that effectiveness compare with similar organizations in the public and private sectors?
• How do MBTA maintenance practices compare with these other organizations?
• How does the priority of spending over $1 billion to extend the commuter rail network to Fall River compare with adding more parking at existing rail stations, additional maintenance, or more frequent rail service?

Providing more revenue to the same transportation agencies for maintenance so that they can simply do more of what they are already doing is not an innovative approach to this chronic problem. We already spend lavishly for public sector transportation services, and doubtless will need to spend more. But can we spend more wisely rather than just throwing “new revenue streams” at what may be dysfunctional, unproductive, and high-cost public sector agencies performing outdated work processes?

The Globe article is headlined “New revenue sought for roads, bridges”. What about new ideas and new processes for roads and bridges? These are at least as important as new revenue to everyone who tries to think beyond the status quo.

Globe Scooped Again by the Herald

The Boston Herald today reports that Governor Deval Patrick:

...is seeking to hire a financial company to analyze the impact of privatizing transportation facilities as part of a broader review of the state’s massive, $19 billion transportation funding deficit, according to state documents. If approved, a deal to privatize could mean leasing the Massachusetts Turnpike, Tobin Bridge or Big Dig tunnels to for-profit companies that would pay billions of dollars for the right to collect tolls from motorists for their use.

There is no report on these “state documents” in the Boston Globe.

Is the Herald story wrong or has the Globe been out-done in reporting about its own favorite candidate? Time will tell.

This is an out-of-the-box idea for a liberal Democrat to consider. Well done, Governor.

Such a move could finance Deval's enormous plans for increased state spending. Of course if he wants to really be revolutionary, he could consider privatizing the MBTA as well.

Opportunity for a Sister Soulja Moment

On the Boston Globe Op Ed page, Peter D. Feaver writes an essay entitled “MoveOn’s McCarthy moment” about MoveOn.org’s preemptive political attack on General Petraeus in the NY Times:

Precisely because it is so vicious, so public, and so deliberate, the attack on Petraeus cannot be ignored by either side in the Iraq debate. Supporters of the war are duty-bound, like Joseph Welch, to rise and ask of war opponents, "Have you left no sense of decency?" Antiwar members of Congress, like Senator McCarthy's allies, are obliged to answer.

Don’t hold your breath.

This is a defining moment for the antiwar faction. They can continue on the path on to which they have veered, repeating some of the worst mistakes in American history. Or they can make a clean break with the past, police their own ranks, and promote a healthy, critical, public debate about the best way forward in Iraq.

This is not 1968 all over again. MoveOn.org is not the reincarnation of the party’s anti-war campaign against LBJ. MoveOn is the reincarnation of Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, but this time as a very well-funded part of the party’s power structure.

The Bush administration and Karl Rove have made their bed with Focus on the Family and have been widely criticized as “Christianist” by libertarian conservatives. The Democratic opposition has made their bed with MoveOn.org, and no Democrat (save Lieberman) has publicly criticized them.

Which group is more likely to help carry Ohio in the 2008 election?

Feaver is right. This is an opportunity for a Sister Soulja moment. Will any Democratic candidate dare to seize it?

One Guy Named Haldeman that the Globe Believes

There is far more to the story of the weekend seizure of power by the Dartmouth Board of Directors than you will find in the Globe's emaciated story which simply repeats board chairman Haldeman's disingenuous arithmetic. Power Line has the complete story along with a variety of links to other coverage:

Unable to achieve its desired results through democratic outcomes, the board has imposed by brute force what it could not win by consent. On its behalf board chairman Ed Haldeman is engaged in a Soviet-style public relations offensive.

An offensive which the Globe helps to advance by printing only Haldeman's canned statements and not his answers to any embarrassing questions. Did they even ask any?

Attacking A Sacred Cow

David D'Alessandro attacks a sacred cow in his Boston Globe column today –United Way fundraising. He notes the way large companies apply quotas and pressure on their executives who faithfully transfer that pressure to their subordinates. He concludes:

Giving should come from the heart - not from the coldness of a corporation's required programs.

Yes, but it won’t when even “progressive” politicians like Deval Patrick play exactly the same games for their own benefit.

Beam Nauseated by Darfur Chic

Alex Beam gets nauseous from “Darfur Chic”, after attending a Darfur traveling photo show, lecture and celebrity concert at Boston’s Institute for Contemporary Art. He turns his nausea into a good column in today’s Boston Globe:

If the ongoing conflict in the Sudan isn't the most pressing international crisis, it is certainly the most precious. Earlier this year, the Sundance festival was atwitter with tales of the Darfur documentary, "The Devil Came on Horseback." The movement has the obligatory "I Care" wristband, this one green, with the words "Not on Our Watch." The Save Darfur campaign sells car ribbon magnets and of course those lawn signs you see in better communities everywhere.

Noting the frequent comparisons of Darfur to the Nazi Holocaust, but the unmentioned corollary that the Holocaust was ended by the largest and bloodiest war in history, Beam concludes by asking:

So which nation wants to sacrifice the lives of its young people to overthrow the al-Bashir government in the Sudan? None, of course. Until then, we'll make do with wristbands and fashion shows.

Sad, but very true.

Thousand Dead in Japan Quake: Hub Man Missing

Is there any reason this half-baked story is in the Globe today (except for sucking up to some local pols)?

The Globe did not get a comment from the Department of Homeland Security, though they did try.

Give the editors some credit, though. It's not on the front page.

Old Media Ways

Evan Thomas writes a review in Newsweek of KC Johnson’s new book about the Duke Rape Case, “Until Proven Innocent”:

By and large, the press did not let the facts get in the way of a good race-class-sex-violence morality play. Thanks in part to the reporting and guidance of [co-author Stuart Taylor], a NEWSWEEK contributing editor, NEWSWEEK was the first major publication to pick apart the prosecution's case, in an article on June 29, 2006. But the magazine also put mug shots of two of the wrongly charged players on its cover on May 1 and, in the cover story I wrote, clucked at doting parents who do not want to see that their sons could turn into "thugs."

Better late than never. The Paper of Record was still carrying a torch for Mike Nifong months later.

And in the best style of “Old Media”, the Newsweek review does not mention that KC Johnson is a blogger or that his blog became the definitive reference about this case – for journalists as well.

The Greatest Battle

Andrew Nagorski, formerly Newsweek’s Moscow correspondent has a new book entitled “The Greatest Battle” about the battle for Moscow between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union in 1941-42. He writes about it in Newsweek this week. It’s worth reading, unlike most stories there:

Any honest account of the battle for Moscow would undermine the Soviet story line of "The Great Patriotic War." Those sanitized versions, now reinforced in the era of President Vladimir Putin, portray Joseph Stalin as a military genius and his people as heroically united against the German invader…But it was Stalin's blunders, incompetence and brutality that made it possible for German troops to approach the outskirts of Moscow—and to kill or capture so many Soviet troops along the way.

Readers of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn or Winston Churchill know this, even though those two authors saw the war from wholly different perspectives.

Globe Wins Award for "Bogus Trend Story of the Week"

Since we were just speaking of “journalism of real distinction” (see the post below) we should note that on Tuesday Jack Shafer of Slate awarded the Boston Globe the coveted “Bogus Trend Story of the Week”. Read the whole thing. Shafer doesn’t just poke fun at the Globe story. He gives it a well-deserved shredding.

The award was for a story headlined “Vicious attacks by girl cliques seen increasing” with the subhead “Despite police statistics, violence causing worries”. You read that right – despite the statistics. The worriers reported were limited to 2 social workers (not to mention 1 crusading reporter). The fact that police statistics contradicted the story didn’t stop its progress through the Globe’s highly objective and professional editorial gauntlet. How I wish unwashed bloggers could be so well edited!

When a conflict occurs between 2 interviewees identified as "street workers, and youth advocates" and Boston police department statistics, to whom does the Globe give higher credibility? The usual suspects. The question is why. If the Globe had a serious Ombudsman (and they don’t have even a figurative one anymore), it would be a good assignment for him to report on the genesis of bogus stories like this one, which appear in the paper far too often. My suspicion is that some agency wanted a funding boost for a certain program and to help make their case they snookered the Globe into reporting an ominous trend. But the facts of the matter will remain hidden behind the Globe’s opaque journalistic process. These stories indicate a very broken work process.

BTW Globe reporter Maria Cramer pens a sweet “but paragraph” to explain why girl-on-girl assaults are rising even though statistics show them decreasing:

But some say the lower numbers may also reflect the fear and embarrassment girls feel about reporting attacks.

But some say that belief in a reality contradicted by all quantitative measures may also reflect the horse manure reported as fact without fear or embarrassment by media organs like the Globe.

Thanks to Slate for adding some small measure of embarrassment.

Hat tip: Media Nation

Big Whoop

Starting Wednesday the Boston Globe added a sidebar on the left of the front page with pointers to content inside the paper (see below). The nifty new sidebar is called “In the News”. Some folks may think a new sidebar is big, but I doubt it will slow the downward trend in Globe circulation. The Boston Phoenix has scooped a letter to the Globe staff from editors Marty Baron and Caleb Solomon explaining the changes:

The digest can give an abbreviated presence on the front page to an important story that’s been out all day, or incremental news on a big, ongoing story. Positions for full stories on Page One will become even more of a showcase for journalism of real distinction.

You mean like this?

A Familiar Journalistic Genre

A weekend profile in the Guardian of Eric Hobsbawm prompts Tory MP Michael Gove to write in the Times of London:

There’s a special sort of piece that appears only in The Guardian (or The New York Times) that deserves to be recognised as a journalistic genre in its own right. They masquerade as balanced and judicious profiles of individuals. But in fact they are vigorous defences, or at least pleas in mitigation, for people who cannot be allowed to be seen as guilty of any great sin because they’re On The Left.

We do indeed see that genre on this side of the Atlantic. My nominees for figures who are often written about this way would be the Rosenbergs, Alger Hiss, Fidel Castro and (bow your head, please) St. Robert F. Kennedy.

Not to mention Karl Marx.

Trying to Rehabilitate Sandy Berger

Today’s Boston Globe Op Ed page includes a column co-authored by Samuel R. Berger (“US must reassert global leadership”). The Globe’s byline reads:

Samuel R. Berger was national security adviser from 1997 to 2000.

This is true. However the byline does not mention what the Globe itself reported about Berger less than 2 years ago…at his sentencing:

"…Berger admitted to sneaking classified documents out of the National Archives in his suit, later destroying some of them in his office and then lying about it.”

The classified documents pertained to the Clinton administration’s response (or lack of response) to the threat of Al Qaeda while Berger “was national security adviser”. Berger was only permitted access to the archived documents so that he could give accurate testimony before the 9/11 commission.

Was writing Op Ed pieces part of the terms of Berger’s probation, which was scheduled to end this week? And how perverse it is for the Globe Op Ed page to participate in the attempted rehabilitation of someone who has shown himself to be as completely without honor as Sandy Berger.

Ah, but it does bring back those memories of “the most ethical administration in history”.

The Sincerest Form of Flattery

The Massachusetts Democratic party has premiered a new anti-Romney website. The Boston Globe reports:

Party officials and political specialists say they know of no other effort to consolidate such a wide range of detailed information about a single candidate.

Funny, I recall one other website from a few years ago. Less “wide ranging” perhaps, but focused and influential.

Tin Ear on Censorship

In Tuesday’s Boston Globe Columnist Michael Gerson (“A tin ear on religion”) notes the Democratic political attack ads aimed at Louisiana Republican Bobby Jindal. The ads are designed to alienate Protestants from the Catholic Jindal:

This is the whole basis for the Democratic attack - that Jindal holds an orthodox view of his own faith and rejects the Protestant Reformation.…And speaking for a moment as a Protestant: How does it insult us that Roman Catholics believe in . . . Roman Catholicism? We had gathered that much.

This Democratic ad is not merely a tin-eared political blunder; it reveals a secular, liberal attitude: that strong religious beliefs are themselves a kind of scandal; that a vigorous defense of Roman Catholicism is somehow a gaffe. This is a strange, distorted view of pluralism, which once meant civility, respect, and common enterprise among people with strongly held and differing convictions. In the liberal view, pluralism means a public square purged of intolerance - defined as the belief in exclusive truth-claims and absolute right and wrong.

Gerson is correct. The sole progressive world view does regard all religion as a gaffe. However the Islamic religion is treated as an exception. Muslims demands that certain of their conventions become universal norms are accepted in some circles without being enacted through legislation. Progressive newspapers have led the way in moving toward this new order. They now silently acquiesce and cower at the prospect of offending Islam, even on the comics pages.

Globe Magazine Covers Middle-class Flight

The Boston Globe Magazine has a cover story this week about middle class parents of Boston schoolchildren and the pressures on them to leave the city:

They were both big believers in public school education until they sent their son, Paolo, to kindergarten at the Ohrenberger School in West Roxbury. "My hair stands on end when I think about that year," Cora says. "The incredible sea of children coming from unprepared households" left the school spending too much time on discipline, she says. "I couldn't do anything for 21 of those kids, but I wasn't going to sit there and not do anything about my son." The Roslindale couple pulled him out to attend the Kingsley Montessori School in the Back Bay, with its $18,200 tuition. Now they're considering leaving the area altogether.

Fifteen hundred dollars a month in elementary school tuition bills can get a lot of folks to consider leaving town. And there is a snippet of 2^nd person evidence on the mayor:

Boston Redevelopment Authority spokeswoman Susan Elsbree defends Mayor Tom Menino's record. "I have sat at a lot of meetings where he says, ‘I want those family units,' " she says. "He is always talking about how we need to give families reasons to stay."

Sure. Just add few more units of family housing to a big condo complex. That is how to fix things. How typical of bureaucratic blindness, Yuzhonnah.

Two outcomes will provide all the reasons to stay these folks need. First reduce their risk of suffering from crime and violence. Second, give all their children an opportunity for an education that will stretch them – not identical educations for all, but appropriate educations for all. If city government did just those two things, the family housing unit counts would take care of themselves.

But doing the first requires improving criminal justice so that criminals are imprisoned away from the streets and the perceived outcome of crime becomes itself a deterrent. The second requires that we stop treating all schoolchildren the same, which is probably as illegal as it is wise. Boston lacks the political will to do either, and has for decades. Hence suburban flight, which is simply many people deciding that leaving the city is the best thing to do for their children.

Note: Two of the elementary schools cited as models in this article (the Hurley and Haley schools) were the villains in a Globe hack-piece 10 months ago, which reported in its headline that “As parents raise funds, standards, some fear impact on diversity”. Another of those “some” Boston Globe headlines.

Banned in Boston Again

Here is the 2nd of 2 consecutive Opus comic strips that were censored by the Boston Globe without offering any explanation, save the written protest of reader Larry Campbell that was printed in the letters section:

I OBJECT to your decision not to print last Sunday's Opus comic strip, in which one of the characters tries on radical Islam as the "hot new fad."

I can only guess at your motives, since you chose to substitute an earlier strip without any explanation to your readers. However, none of the motives that I can imagine is praiseworthy. The excuse that some people might find the strip offensive won't wash. Much great humor is offensive to someone. If you tried to omit all offensiveness, you'd have a tiny and insipid comics section.

James Carroll: "Marxism has yet to be really tried"

James Carroll’s Labor Day column in the Boston Globe epitomizes the type of thinking that is charitably called sophomoric:

Yet the discrediting of the vision of Karl Marx by the 20th-century communisms that claimed him does not vitiate the original vision. Echoing what Mahatma Gandhi once said of Christianity, Marxism has yet to be really tried.

James, if you believe the 60 million dead in the Soviet Union and the tens of millions of uncounted dead in China are not enough to “vitiate the original vision” maybe you should spend a few weeks in the ruins of their concentration camps or among their unmarked graves and contemplate what these millions of dead might say to someone living in later times and in freedom who proposed giving the system that destroyed them another roll of the dice.

A system that one who spent decades in Stalin’s Gulag called:

“A primitive, superficial economic theory, it declared that only the worker creates value and failed to take into account the contribution of either organizers, engineers, transportation or marketing systems. It was mistaken when if forecast that the proletariat would be endlessly oppressed and would never achieve anything in a bourgeois democracy – if only we could shower people with as much food, clothing and leisure as they have gained under capitalism! It missed the point when it asserted that the prosperity of the European countries depended on their colonies – it was only after they had shaken the colonies off they they began to accomplish their “economic miracles”. It was mistaken through and through in its prediction that socialist could never come to power except through armed uprising. It miscalculated in thinking that the first uprising would take place in the advanced industrial countries – quite the reverse. And the picture of how the whole world would rapidly be overtaken by revolutions and how states would soon wither away was sheer delusion, sheer ignorance of human nature.”

Globe Headline Written by Deval?

The Sunday Boston Globe’s lead headline perfectly echoes Deval Patrick’s campaign theme . “Property tax bills soar as services fall”.

What constitutes soaring? A 4.2% increase. That’s unhappy, but only slightly more than the rate of inflation.

The sub-headline is another shocker; “Levies increase despite decline in home values”. Did Globe reporters expect governments to actually reduce their spending in response to falling home prices? Or did they expect that in our final stages of socialist development the state should be “withering away”? Or is this another part of the campaign for casinos?

Choosing A Gender at the Bathroom Door

At Boston’s artsy Emerson College, many bathrooms are now converted to gender neutrality. The Globe story with this report quotes a feminsist solo performance artist who is now a scholar-in-residence at Emerson. Her scholarship, according to Emerson’s website, consists of “writing about DIY aesthetics in feminist and queer performance communities”. The article also quotes one of her star pupils. While the gender-neutral rest rooms can be identified with symbolic rather than lettered signs, the Globe article illustrates that finding correct words to describe gender at Emerson can be a challenge:

Students said they wanted to make people feel more comfortable by not having to choose a gender at the bathroom door. "A harassment experience doesn't have to be physical," said Rik Haber, a 2007 graduate of Emerson identified as gender-queer, a term for those who identity their gender outside of male or female. "It is about feeling comfortable going to the bathroom." Haber was one of the students who campaigned for the facilities before graduating. Elizabeth Whitney, a scholar in residence at Emerson, identifies herself as femme, a term that describes gender identity outside the binary male or female. Whitney has helped students raise awareness on the gender-neutral bathrooms through advocacy and the material she taught. "I have felt unsafe in Emerson's bathrooms because I have seen people subjected to gender-policing," Whitney said. She and her partner, she recalled, entered a women's restroom, and her partner received odd looks from the women inside. The people in the restroom checked the sign on the door to make sure they were in a women's restroom. "We are so socialized about gender norms that some people do it without realizing they are doing it," she said of gender discrimination.

So while war rages in Africa and the Middle East, and thousands of women in Darfur are traumatized by the severest form of “gender policing” known as rape, and thousands more women each year are trafficked by organized crime cartels, at Emerson Ms. Whitney and her partner are now safe from the trauma of odd looks during their performances in the loo.