[guest post by Dana]

I wouldn’t be surprised. It seems like something of which he would approve. And why not? Just maybe the ‘Peace Troubadour’ will have better luck bringing singing peace to the region than any strategy to come out of the White House thus far. After all, the president must realize by now that the JV team wasn’t pushed to surrender by his latest warning to them, so why not try singing them to peace, eh?

James Twyman, ‘Peace Troubadour,’ is embarking on ‘the most important and dangerous peace mission’ of his life—to the Israel-Syria border and beyond, wielding his classical guitar.

ISIS generally doesn’t respond well to music.

But that isn’t stopping James Twyman, an author and musician based in Portland, Oregon, from planning a trip to ISIS-held territory in Syria later this month to help bring peace to the region through the power of a musical-prayer concert.

“Performing the peace prayers in ISIS Controlled Syria will be the most important and dangerous peace mission of my life,” the self-described “Peace Troubadour” blogged last month.

“Every peace mission I’ve been on has been dangerous, but this journey is without question the most perilous, and in my opinion—the most important,” Twyman wrote. “People everywhere are concerned about the escalating violence in the Middle East, especially with the rise of ISIS, but they don’t feel empowered to be part of the solution. That is what we are about to change.”

…

“When people say I shouldn’t do this because it will make ISIS mad, I say, ‘If we’re thinking that way, then ISIS has already won,’” he concluded. “There is no way to know what will or will not work, but I don’t think there is anything wrong with having a positive attitude or bringing people together, particularly those who do believe in the power of prayer.”

Riiight. One can only imagine what ISIS would be like if they, you know, really got mad or something…

Anyway, keep thinking those happy thoughts, people, and stay positive! That ‘Peace Troubadour’ is ready to ride the ‘Peace Train’ right on down the line to, well, peace.

–Dana

The Washington Post announced this week that a new opportunity for home ownership is available to credit-worthy low-to-moderate-income borrowers through Fannie Mae’s new HomeReady mortgage program.

It’s a short notice in the Real Estate section of the paper, offering little detail, but you can read the HomeReady FAQs here, or you can cut to the chase and read an enlightening editorial at Investor’s Business Daily that pretty much tells you all you need to know about the “new” program:

Subprime 2.0: The White House is rolling out a new low-income mortgage program that for the first time lets lenders qualify borrowers by counting income from nonborrowers living in the household. What could go wrong?

The HomeReady program is offered through Fannie Mae, which is now controlled by Obama’s old Congressional Black Caucus pal Mel Watt. It replaces the bankrupted mortgage giant’s notorious old subprime program, MyCommunityMortgage.

In case renaming the subprime product fails to fool anybody, the affordable-housing geniuses in the administration have re-termed “subprime,” a dirty word since the mortgage bust, “alternative.”

So HomeReady isn’t a subprime mortgage program, you see, it’s an “alternative” mortgage program.

But it might was well be called DefaultReady, because it is just as risky as the subprime junk Fannie was peddling on the eve of the crisis.

At least before the crisis, your income had to be your own. But now, as a renter, you can get a conventional home loan backed by Fannie by claiming other people’s income. That’s right: You can use your apartment roommate’s paycheck to augment your qualifying income. Or your abuela.

What’s that quote, something about those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it? Yeah, that.

Read the whole thing.

–Dana