Revenge of the Mortgage Bailout Poster Girl
Our May 29 edition contained an editorial, “Democrats’ Mortgage Bailout Poster Child,” which explored Long Beach Democratic Rep. Laura Richardson’s spectacular record of defaulting on home loans, including one in Sacramento. Richardson has two other houses in Southern California that have fallen into default six times over the last 13 months.

Now it appears that she may have bullied one of the lenders she stiffed, Washington Mutual Inc., into rescinding the foreclosure sale of her three-bedroom, one-and-one-half-bath Curtis Park home to local investor James York. York bought the house at a May auction for $388,000 after Richardson stopped making mortgage payments. She purchased the house in January 2007 for $535,000, just after her election to the Assembly. Ever the spendthrift, she financed it with a subprime, adjustable rate mortgage that started at 8.8 percent but could reset as high as 14 percent. York has filed a lawsuit against the congresswoman seeking to have the property returned to him in addition to punitive damages and costs. He believes, with good reason, that Washington Mutual’s trustee rescinded the sale solely because Richardson is a congresswoman.

Unless justice prevails, the deadbeat lawmaker will be the beneficiary of York’s improvements to the house. According to the lawsuit, York had made substantial repairs to the property, including painting, landscaping, and restoring the floors.

Richardson earns $170,000 per year as a member of Congress. One of her first votes in Congress was in support of the “Mortgage Forgiveness Debt Relief Act of 2007.” Now enacted into law, it allows borrowers like Richardson to escape taxation on foreclosed mortgage debts.

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Attack of the Killer Tomatoes
Last week the U.S. Food and Drug Administration halted the importation of Mexican tomatoes in the wake of a raw tomato-linked salmonella outbreak that has sickened nearly 200 Americans. Mexico supplies 80 percent of America’s tomatoes. Mexican growers and government representatives are furious about the embargo and fear that it may damage Mexico’s $1 billion tomato industry. They argue that Mexican tomatoes are even safer than those grown in the U.S. because they are inspected twice, once by Mexican officials and then again at the border. Why don’t we find that reassuring? Because Mexican growers are known to irrigate their crops with sewer water. And because about 120,000 Mexicans were stricken by salmonella last year, three times more than were afflicted by the disease stateside.

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Union Goons on the Prowl
On June 5, UC Berkeley campus cops had to escort university Chancellor Robert Birgeneau out the back door of a meeting place to protect him from 350 angry protestors affiliated with the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees. Birgeneau had gone to the meeting to answer questions about “job classification changes and his larger vision for the university.” Instead, he was set upon by screaming campus union members who are negotiating two new employment contracts that expired last year. They shouted down the organizers of the meeting before they could even introduce Birgeneau, who has no role in the negotiations. In the private sector, we fire employees who behave like that. But in the public sector, public tantrums can often lead to higher wages. Go figure.

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Bass’ Gaffe Grieves Obama
Last week Assembly Speaker Karen Bass, who is a member of what the Obama campaign calls its “National Outreach Advisory Team,” implied to the media that Sen. Obama might not be main-stream enough to win the election. She recommended that he consider picking as a running mate “somebody who is a little more to the center than he is. I think that would be helpful to the ticket.” We agree but doubt that Obama does. We suspect that Speaker Bass won’t be asked to serve as the senator’s mouthpiece again.