Every morning on The Daily Kos (warning: this is a progressive blog post about politics), Barbara Morrill (aka BarbinMD) posts Your Abbreviated Pundit Round-Up. I look at it almost every morning, because it is funny, short, and almost always includes at least one comment about a previously unknown writer that I want to read.
In today’s post, Morrill includes a link to New York Times’ pundit Gail Collins’ column of March 5th entitled The Rant List, with the comment that “Gail Collins is fast becoming one of my favorite columnists.” Amen to that. Collins makes me laugh out loud almost once a column, and she’s not as snarky or personality focused as Maureen Dowd. In today’s column (and I recommend the entire read), she’s writing how we have to prioritize the things list of “life is unfair” items hitting the news reports on an hourly basis.
The paragraph that hits home for me is:
Given the competition, I can’t get all that worked up about defaulting homeowners who are looking to the government for a rescue. True, a lot of them got in over their heads betting that housing prices would rise forever. But when it comes to stupid financial decisions to vent about, I’m sticking with Alan Greenspan.
CNBC and others want us to get mad at the people who (stupidly, I admit) thought the housing market would only go up and up and up. But who was the biggest cheerleader for this housing market other than the former chairman of the Federal Reserve? Collins, as usual, hits the nail on the head while making us laugh at the same time.
More to come…
DJB