Monday, October 26, 2009 Midday

It’s been reported that Ross Kari, the new chief financial officer of Freddie Mac, the government-controlled mortgage finance company, was offered a salary and signing bonus package totaling about $5.5 million. A spokesman for the Federal Housing Finance Agency says that pay was approved because it’s comparable to what others in the financial services industry make. Unless, of course, you work for a company that took a lot of government bailout money. I guess Freddie Mac isn’t considered to be one of those. After all, in Washington, what’s a paltry $51 billion between friends?

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President Obama is poised to sign a $680 billion Defense Appropriations bill that has a section that Congress tacked onto it, making hate crimes against homosexuals a federal offense. Now, no reasonable person would ever suggest that anyone who harms another human being, whether it’s over his sexual orientation or for any other reason, shouldn’t face the full force of the law. But America was founded on equal protection under the law, not on designating special victim groups that deserve more protection than others, or of giving someone extra punishment based on what a prosecutor can convince a jury he was thinking. There’s an Orwellian term for that: “thought crimes.” Already, a very similar bill in Canada has been twisted by regulators to declare certain Bible verses as hate speech. Pastors feel under threat of arrest if they just read the Bible from the pulpit.

I have just one question, while it’s still legal to ask it: If the legislators who championed this bill truly believe it is just, necessary and constitutional, then why not make it a separate bill and debate it openly, instead of trying to sneak it into law, hidden inside a completely unrelated military appropriations bill?

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Finally, the Dallas Morning News reports that Willis Willis of Grand Prairie may be both the luckiest and unluckiest man in Texas. He’s a 67-year-old maintenance man, father of four, works hard to make ends meet. But he kept his hopes up by buying a few lottery tickets every week at a local convenience store. A few months ago, he handed some in to Pankaj Joshi, the clerk Willis had been friendly with for years. Joshi told him that one ticket had won $2. But he didn’t mention that another ticket was worth one million dollars. Joshi quit his job, saying he was going to move back to Nepal, and apparently cashed in the ticket and disappeared. Authorities are trying to track him down. So far, they’ve seized about $365,000 from his bank accounts. But Willis hasn’t seen a penny. He’s still working, waiting patiently, and still playing the lottery…but at a different store.