This is really sad. This is going to hit even harder in big cities, where so many of the poor live in multi-unit buildings:

NEW YORK -- A new wave of foreclosures stands to hurt people who may have never taken out a mortgage: renters. In cities such as New York, Chicago and Los Angeles, where many investors are carrying upside-down mortgages on large rental buildings, some tenants are watching their homes fall apart along with the financing.

Janeia Sandiford, a 24-year-old GED student in New York, has two young children and a deteriorating apartment. When a leak over Sandiford's bathroom and kitchen caused the ceiling to flake off and then cave in, nobody came to fix it for a year, she said. She lacked heat most of last winter, and she has duct-taped her loose-fitting windows in place to cut down on drafts.

"I'm really worried about the kids," she said.

The real estate investment company Ocelot Capital Group bought the building where Sandiford lives and about two dozen others in the Bronx in 2006 and 2007. As the new owners struggled to keep up with payments, 10 of the buildings appeared on the city's list of most dilapidated rental properties in 2007 and 2008. Last winter, as Ocelot defaulted on its loans amid the deepening financial crisis, the buildings plummeted further into decline. Together, they racked up thousands of Code C violations --the most serious kind -- from housing inspectors.

Fannie Mae, which had bought much of the debt from the original lender, entered foreclosure proceedings for Sandiford's building early this spring. A state court appointed receivers.

In the meantime, the building on Manida Street has been beset by problems, according to tenants and their advocates, whose accounts were confirmed by the crumbling walls and damaged plumbing apparent on a tour of the property and its neighbor, also owned by Ocelot. Vandals stole the lock on the front door, giving squatters access to vacant apartments to sell drugs. Plumbing in the building was disrupted after the squatters broke through the walls and stole pipes to sell as scrap metal.

Similar conditions could crop up across the country this winter as foreclosures climb for large rental-unit buildings. In the first three quarters of 2009, 475 foreclosure proceedings were begun against multifamily rental or cooperative homes in the District, according to NeighborhoodInfo DC, a partnership between the Urban Institute and the D.C. Local Initiatives Support Corp. That figure already eclipses the 458 foreclosures for all of 2008.

Ben Stein was axed by the New York Times last year for ethics violations when he appeared in a commercial for a bait and switch credit report scam. The ad claimed that consumers could get a free credit report, but in reality, they had to pay to see the real numbers.

Well, the FTC is now getting into the act and going after similar companies with some catchy commercials intended to emulate those of a popular advertising campaign by a similar bait and switch scam:

AnnualCreditReport.com is the ONLY authorized source to get your free annual credit report under federal law. The Fair Credit Reporting Act guarantees you access to a free credit report from each of the three nationwide reporting agencies — Experian, Equifax, and TransUnion — every twelve months. The Federal Trade Commission has received complaints from consumers who thought they were ordering their free annual credit report, but instead paid hidden fees or agreed to unwanted services. Don’t be fooled by TV ads, email offers, or online search results. Go to the authorized source when you request your free report. Read on...

Ok, so the ad is a little hokey, but the message is clear. I'm all for steering people to better alternatives and pointing out hackery when I can.

via Sully:

"You're going to be up against people who have an opinion, a modem, and a bathrobe. All of my life, developing credentials to cover my field of work, and now I'm up against a guy named Vinny in an efficiency apartment in the Bronx who hasn't left the efficiency apartment in two years" -- Brian Williams, anchor of the "NBC Nightly News," speaking before New York University journalism students on the challenges traditional journalism faces from online media.

My name is not Vinny. My name is John Doe...Opps..sorry....So what's wrong with effciencey apartments? What a wanker...

ABC's The Blotter :

Respected Russian journalist Ivan Safronov, who reported on military affairs, mysteriously plunged to his death from the 5th floor of his apartment building Friday, making him the 14th journalist to die under questionable circumstances in Putin's Russia, according to statistics compiled by the Committee to Protect Journalists. [..]

Polikovskaya's killing, the 13th since Putin took office, led the Committee to Protect Journalists to declare Russia "the third deadliest country in the world for journalists" after Iraq and Algeria in their recent report, "Deadly News." All of the cases remain unsolved.

According to a report in this morning's Moscow Times, Safronov, who wrote for the Russian business newspaper "Kommersant," fell head first and fully clothed from a 5th floor window although he lived in an apartment on the 3rd floor of the building.

The Times reported the FSB -- the Federal Security Bureau, which is the successor agency to the KGB -- was unhappy with Safronov's reporting on sensitive weapons systems.

Safronov's death adds to the list of critics of the Putin regime and the FSB, who have died or been injured in strange circumstances in just the past six months

Investor's Business Daily thinks Putin couldn't be this thick, but even NewsMax (hardly a liberal publication) finds it hard to believe that all these people connected to critics of Putin's are meeting their end under strange circumstances.

WaPo:

After he was arrested in 2002, Jose Padilla was considered so dangerous that he was held without charges in a military prison for more than three years -- accused first of plotting a radiological "dirty bomb" attack and later of conspiring with al-Qaeda to blow up apartment buildings with natural gas.

But now, nearly a year after his abrupt transfer into a regular criminal court, the Justice Department's prosecution of the former Chicago gang member is running into trouble.

Republican-appointed federal judge in Miami has already dumped the most serious conspiracy count against Padilla, removing for now the possibility of a life sentence. The same judge has also disparaged the government's case as "light on facts," while defense lawyers have made detailed allegations that Padilla was illegally tortured, threatened and perhaps even drugged during his detention at a Navy brig in South Carolina. Read on...

Sydney Morning Herald :

A Russian journalist renowned for probing corruption and the brutality of Russia's military campaign in Chechnya has been gunned down and killed in the lobby of her apartment building.

Anna Politkovskaya, 48, who had chronicled nearly every major story in Russia in the past decade, was killed on Saturday. Her reports often clashed with official versions of such events as the hostage crisis at a theatre in Moscow in 2002 and the bloody end of a school siege in Beslan in 2004.

[..]She was a harsh critic of President Vladimir Putin's rule and was working on a story about torture in Chechnya, where a Kremlin-backed strongman has all but routed a separatist movement that sparked two bloody wars, but at a cost to Russia that has yet to be measured. The article was to be published Monday, according to her newspaper, Novaya Gazeta, one of the few independent media outlets in Russia. Read on...

In another great Cafferty moment-Jack connects the dots and wonders why the new lobbyist reformer that replaces a corrupt leader rents an apartment from a lobbyist?

Cafferty: These guys are either arrogant or stupid and neither of those is a good thing if you're going to be the House majority leader--am I missing something here? Where's the reform part? I wonder how long this guy is going to last.

Download | play -WMP Download | play -QT (rough transcript)

Wolf: You did hear Ed Henry say that it is a basement apartment which is not necessarily all that desirable---

Cafferty: Yea...and pigs fly upside down and the moon is made of green cheese and there's no quid pro quo from a lobbyist who is also your landlord. Do I look like I just fell out of the back of a vegetable truck to you?

Wolf: No, you look like Jack Cafferty...

I have to believe that Wolf is purposefully playing the straight man at the end. I mean he couldn't be serious, right?

I thought Wolf was playing the straight man earlier, but aparently he wasn't. He really, really wanted that basement-market value analogy driven home.
Download | play -WMP Download | play -QT

Digby:

"Did anyone catch Wolfie getting all nervous and twitchy when he thought that Cafferty hadn't been "fair and balanced" in reporting the response to his question aabout Boehner renting his apartment from a lobbyist? He was very agitated that Cafferty didn't report any emails that said it was ok if Boehner "paid fair market value and the apartment wasn't luxurious." The fact was that Cafferty did read an email that said exactly that (how odd) but Wolfe apparently didn't hear it. Unfortunately for Wolfie, his little fit made Cafferty mad and when pressed on the matter, Cafferty said that out of 700 or so emails he had received only half a dozen or so supporting Boehner. Oops...read on

I have a clip of Chris exposing Newt Gingrich from the other day that I was going to put up, but I have to take a time out on that one.

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Judd:

Chris: "You have one guy Tom DeLay who lives in some sort of 20th floor apartment way down on Route 95, nothing special at all--I mean really lives basically, like a regular middle class person. He doesn't live well at all."

As Tom DeLay became a king of campaign fund-raising, he lived like one, too. He visited cliff-top Caribbean resorts, golf courses designed by PGA champions and four-star restaurants, all courtesy of donors who bankrolled his political money empire. ...read on"

Words can't describe the major sucking sounds that Matthews is making as he removes Delay's foot from his mouth. Even Dick Morris would be proud of the technique that Matthews applies.

EarthQuake kills 3000

A huge earthquake triggered landslides, toppled an apartment building and flattened villages of mud-brick homes Saturday, killing thousands across a mountainous swath touching Pakistan, India and Afghanistan...read on