Making news around the world: An Ohio man has bulldozed his home rather than let a bank foreclose on it.

From WLWT Cincinatti:

Terry Hoskins said he’s been in a struggle with RiverHills Bank over his Clermont County home for nearly a decade, a struggle that was coming to an end as the bank began foreclosure proceedings on his $350,000 home. Hoskins says he owes $160,000 on the house. He says he spent a lot of money on attorneys and finally had enough. About two weeks ago he bulldozed the home 25 miles southeast of Cincinnati. “When I see I owe $160,000 on a home valued at $350,000, and someone decides they want to take it – no, I wasn’t going to stand for that, so I took it down,” Hoskins said.

Photo WLWT

Hoskins said the IRS placed liens on his carpet store and commercial property on state Route 125 after his brother, a one-time business partner, sued him. The bank claimed his home as collateral, Hoskins said, and went after both his residential and commercial properties. “The average homeowner that can’t afford an attorney or can fight as long as we have, they don’t stand a chance,” he said.

Hoskins said he’d gotten a $170,000 offer from someone to pay off the house, but the bank refused, saying they could get more from selling it in foreclosure. Hoskins told News 5′s Courtis Fuller that he issued the bank an ultimatum. “I’ll tear it down before I let you take it,” Hoskins told them.

And that’s exactly what Hoskins did.

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When Republican Scott Brown won the special election for Ted Kennedy’s old Senate seat last month, it through a giant monkeywrench into the Democrats’ plan to pass a comprehensive health care reform bill. Back then, we covered the responses of both the online Massachussetts Republican community Red Mass Group (elation) and the online Massachussetts Democratic community Blue Mass Group (despair).

Yesterday, Brown — and a handful of other Republicans — voted with Democrats to block a Republican filibuster on the Democratic jobs bill. From the Los Angeles Times:

So, with Brown contributing to half a political victory for the Democrats (the bill still has to pass the House), what do Massachussetts Republicans think of Brown now? Some comments on Red Mass Group:

Lets not let this happen with the GOV race. Lets put the most Conservative canidate in please. No more RINOs (Republican in Name Only)
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This has nothing to do with conservative vs. RINO. It’s about personality– I think Scott Brown bought into his created image of an independent politician who will transcend those nasty partisan politics; then, bought into the image created by overenthusiastic supporters as THE (Republican) ONE who could be president.

Remember that he is a politician, not a private sector guy. And still MUCH better than Coakley, so it was worth the effort.
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Brown is just another of the turncoats that New England puts out as RINOs (Snowe, Collins). I feel like a fool for having contributed. At least with Coakley, you knew what you’d get. I’m disappointed, but it’s a lesson worth learning… beware the wolf in sheep’s clothing.
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Yesterday, we told you about Ecocomics, a site devoted to examining economic principles represented in the storylines of comic books.

Today here is a post from that site: Economics Themed Superheroes (and supervillains), submitted by readers using Marvel’s Create Your Own Superhero tool.

Check out The Toxic Asset, Taxing Colossus, and Gold Standard.

Taxing Colossus

The Toxic Asset

Gold Standard

More superheroes/supervillains here.

The search technology blog PeteSearch has a fascinating post on the geographical connections of Facebook friends. The Pete in PeteSearch gathered data on 210 million public profiles on the ‘book and created an interactive map with lines drawn between areas that share a lot of friends. As Pete explains it, “For example, a lot of people in LA have friends in San Francisco, so there’s a line between them.”

The map has three tabs at the top, one each for connections between countries, U.S. states, and U.S. cities.

Some random results:

• California users have strong connections to the East Coast states of New York and Massachussetts, and to Washington D.C. But the state also has a line drawn to Texas and the state of Washington.
• Chicago users connect mostly to those in Los Angeles, New York, Milwaukee, St. Louis, and Atlanta.
• U.S. users in the aggregate connect mostly to other English speaking countries, but also to the Philippines and Indonesia.

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After months of delving into unemployment, real estate, health care, and financial markets, EconomyBeat finally gets to the heart of the matter with this post, asking the question:

Does Superman really need the rest of the Justice League?

The answer can be found in Ecocomics, where “economics and comic books collide.” The site is devoted to examining economic principles represented in comic books storylines.

On the question of Superman and the Justice League, we find the answer in a post called The Justice League and Comparative Advantage.

When you think about it, Superman doesn’t need the rest of the Justice League.

In conventional wisdom, every member of the Justice League has a particular strength. Green Lantern can handle weird and alien threats. Aquaman can talk to fish. The Flash can handle armies of lightly armed minions in a heartbeat. Wonder Woman usually takes point on mystical threats. And Batman is the World’s Greatest Detective.

If we consider each of those types of crime-fighting an output, we see that each member of the Justice League is a uniquely skilled producer of that output. Sure, Batman can beat up henchmen almost as well as the Flash can. But Flash can do it better. If Batman specializes in detective work, and Flash specializes in henchman-stomping, the two of them produce more Justice on net than if one tried to do both.

But what if we bring Superman into the equation?

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• Maybe we should try this here… – Zero rupee note fights corruption in India
• Colorado Springs – City of the future? – Severe budget problems in low-tax Colorado Springs sets off debate on the Web
• What have you had to give up? – sacrifices made during the Great Recession

• Food stamp use – a chart – participation in the program from 1969 to 2009, a record year

Another dark but clever cartoon starring our friend Smigly.

From the World Bank blog, a post about the Zero Rupee bank note, printed in India and distributed by an anti-corruption organization called 5th Pillar.

Imagine that you are an old lady from a poor household in a town in the outskirts of Chennai city, India. All you have wanted desperately for the last year and a half is to get a title in your name for the land you own, called patta. You need this land title to serve as a collateral for a bank loan you have been hoping to borrow to finance your granddaughter’s college education. But there has been a problem: the Revenue Department official responsible for giving out the patta has been asking you to pay a little fee for this service. That’s right, a bribe. But you are poor (you are officially assessed to be below the poverty line) and you do not have the money he wants. And the most absurd part about the scenario you find yourself in is that this is a public service that should be rendered to you free of charge in the first place. What would you do? You might conclude, as you have done for the last 1-1/2 years, that there isn’t much you can do…but wait, you just heard about a local NGO by the name of 5th Pillar and it just happened to give you a powerful ally: a zero rupee note.

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Click on an image to see it full size.

More photos here

Colorado Springs

From the Denver Post article:

This tax-averse city is about to learn what it looks and feels like when budget cuts slash services most Americans consider part of the urban fabric.

More than a third of the streetlights in Colorado Springs will go dark Monday. The police helicopters are for sale on the Internet. The city is dumping firefighting jobs, a vice team, burglary investigators, beat cops — dozens of police and fire positions will go unfilled.

The parks department removed trash cans last week, replacing them with signs urging users to pack out their own litter.

Neighbors are encouraged to bring their own lawn mowers to local green spaces, because parks workers will mow them only once every two weeks. If that.

Water cutbacks mean most parks will be dead, brown turf by July; the flower and fertilizer budget is zero.

City recreation centers, indoor and outdoor pools, and a handful of museums will close for good March 31 unless they find private funding to stay open. Buses no longer run on evenings and weekends. The city won’t pay for any street paving, relying instead on a regional authority that can meet only about 10 percent of the need…

Voters in November said an emphatic no to a tripling of property tax that would have restored $27.6 million to the city’s $212 million general fund budget. Fowler and many other residents say voters don’t trust city government to wisely spend a general tax increase and don’t believe the current cuts are the only way to balance a budget.

To sum up the two types of responses to this situation, schadenfreude on the left at the adversity of what some call a conservative laboratory experiment in municipal government gone awry, and defensiveness on the right at singling out anti-tax policies for the city’s problems.

To plunge right into the argument, listen to an extremely interesting debate between radio host and blogger David Sirota and libertarian Colorado Springs city councilman Sean Paige.

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