Rare Victory For Renters in Iowa

A recently delivered opinion of the Iowa Supreme Court does a bit to redress the power inequity between landlords and tenants that's worth a nod.

We here in the Dougloid Towers are not unsympathetic to the problems of tenants, as we grew up in apartments, and lived in apartments and rental properties until fairly recently. It's worth remarking that the single best reason for owning your own place is that you can drive by the landlord's crib as many times as you like making obscene gestures and pig type oinking and grunting. "F**k 'em if they can't take a joke!" as my old crew chief Wayne Hawkins used to say.

In War Eagle Village Apartments v. Plummer, no. 07-1217 (Nov. 20, 2009), a tenant was short on the rent and the landlord instituted an eviction proceeding. The landlord followed the procedure, sending a certified letter to the tenant which she never received, and a hearing was had a week later-at which point a default judgment and a writ of removal were issued.

Plummer appealed, contending that the statutory scheme embodied in Iowa Code in Iowa Code section 562A.29A was a violation of due process. The Supreme Court agreed, holding that the scheme established was insufficient to give a person notice and an opportunity to be heard.

The Court states, "There is no set of facts under which the FED statutory notice scheme could be found to provide adequate notice. When receipt in time to meaningfully respond is unlikely, a statutory scheme that deems service complete upon mailing if the notice is by its very terms not reasonably calculated to give adequate notice to tenants that a hearing on their eviction has been scheduled. Given the statutory requirement that a hearing be held no later than seven days fron the order scheduling a hearing, Iowa Code section 562A.29A(2) is unconstitutional on its face."

image courtesy of the Independent.

Channeling Sputnik

From Radio and TV News, Feb, 1958.

The first announcement by Radio Moscow indicated that there were two transmitters in the satellite (launched October 4, 1957-ed.), one operating at 20.005 mhz and the other at 40.002 mhz. The pulse of each signal was 0.3 seconds, followed by a pause of similar length during which the other signals were transmitted. On Oct. 8 the signals were not received for several hours. Later, signals resumed but became continuous. The transmitter was specified to be 1 watt. U.S. Monitors agreed that the signals were modulated with telemetry data.Appropriate instruments within the satellite reported on atmospheric pressure and density. Also, information on micrometeorite bombardment was probably transmitted.

First U.S. radio reception of the satellite's signals was reported by RCA Communications, Inc. at Riverhead, L.I. The observation occurred at 8:07 p.m. EDT October 4, the day of the launching. At 8:15 the signal was strongest from the south. First reception at the Naval Research Laboratoryin Washington, D.C. was at 8:30 p.m. By October 6, six of ten Minitrack stations had been converted from 108 mhz-the frequency to be used by U.S. satellites-to 20 and 40 mhz to track the USSR satellite.

Radio reception was soon general and reports of continuous monitoring were received from Antarctic IGY (International Geophysical Year-ed.) stations including the South Pole-which is in a position to hear the satellite on virtually every passage-as well as from IGY drifting station A, an ice floe located about 500 miles from the North Pole.

Reports from the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station indicated that the satellite's radio signals cut in abruptly but faded out gradually and that there were numerous variations in signal strength, duration and pulse rate.

The USSR was reported to be encouraging amateur assistance, offering special cards to hams reporting receipt of the satellite's radio signals.

Radio Moscow announced on October 26 that the satellite's radio had used up its power and had stopped working. On the same day, the Naval Research Laboratory reported that no signals had been received by Minitrack stations since 5:50 p.m. EDT, October 25, and that no other information had been relayed to NRL from other receiver sources since 7:10 p.m. EDT October 25.

Thus, after 3 weeks of continuous operation, space's first radio transmitter had gone dead.

Editor's note.

This was big stuff when I was a kid. We all watched with bated breath as the Navy launched Vanguard TV3 on December 6, 1957 , which got about ten feet off the deck and exploded in a spectacular fireball. There is a fascinating history of the Vanguard program by Constance Green and Milton Lomask located here, and it's well worth reading-not the least important part is the foreword by the Lone Eagle, Charles Lindbergh.

In 1958 the Army strapped its first Explorer 1 satellite to the nose of a Juno 1 rocket , followed thereafter by the first successful Vanguard launch of what Premier Khrushchev snidely referred to as a grapefruit, weighing only a few pounds. TV4, equipped with solar cells, transmitted until 1964 and is still happily tooling along in earth orbit today, 51 years later.

As technology goes, about all Sputnik 1 did was thumb its nose at Uncle Sugar for three weeks, until its tiresome bleat "I'm here! I'm here!" went dead. Shortly thereafter, Sputnik 1 burned up in earth's atmosphere on January 4, 1958.

New London Confidential

I think we're all familiar with the Supreme Court's infamous Kelo v. City of New London decision, in which the Supreme Court held that as long as a taking of private property bore an (arguably) rational relationship to a legitimate governmental purpose, eminent domain could be used to kick people out in the street in the name of government making nice to their corporate masters.

A subject of a book (The Little Pink House, written by Jeff Benedict) is the story of one of the litigants, a paramedic named Susette Kelo, and her efforts to save her home-which ultimately proved unsuccessful. The images are of the Pfizer research center-shore looks nice, don't it?-the vacant lot where Susette Kelo's home once stood, an aerial view of where the Fort Trumbull neighborhood used to be, and Susette Kelo in front of the home taken from her.

The stated reason for the condemnation was that surely pharmaceutical giant Pfizer would make better use of the land than the owners of the homes had, why, they'd even build a wonderful research center and there'd be a high toned hotel, rich folks' condos, and no more of these rundown homes and their pesky landowners clogging up that delicious waterfront property.

Parenthetically, the dissents of Justices O'Connor and Thomas are worth sober consideration.

It's something that today's generation of anti Obama conspiracy theorists, Birthers, Tenthers, gun toting cranks, Palinidiots and tea baggers seem to have forgotten all about-yet the decision remains as a vivid reminder of how onerous the abuse of governmental power can be. It's to these folk's discredit-here's a real story of economic imperialism and government trampling property rights, and they wouldn't even have had to make anything up about Evil Negro Barack.

Justice Thomas:

The consequences of today’s decision are not difficult to predict, and promise to be harmful. So-called “urban renewal” programs provide some compensation for the properties they take, but no compensation is possible for the subjective value of these lands to the individuals displaced and the indignity inflicted by uprooting them from their homes. Allowing the government to take property solely for public purposes is bad enough, but extending the concept of public purpose to encompass any economically beneficial goal guarantees that these losses will fall disproportionately on poor communities. Those communities are not only systematically less likely to put their lands to the highest and best social use, but are also the least politically powerful. If ever there were justification for intrusive judicial review of constitutional provisions that protect “discrete and insular minorities,” surely that principle would apply with great force to the powerless groups and individuals the Public Use Clause protects. The deferential standard this Court has adopted for the Public Use Clause is therefore deeply perverse. It encourages “those citizens with disproportionate influence and power in the political process, including large corporations and development firms” to victimize the weak.

"But Sparky!" you say, "W-w-what's all this have to do with this 12th of November, 2009?"

Quite simple, little feller. It was announced a couple of days ago that those wonderful folks at Pfizer, having gobbled up Wyeth Pharmaceuticals, will close the New London research facility and plans to shed nearly 20,000 of those high paying jobs for which Kelo and others were turfed out of their houses.

Thanks, Pfizer.

Memo to Dick Pound: Is it Dopers You Want?

Der Spiegel informs us today that German cops have discovered that Jan Ullrich, retired former cyclist and Tour de France winner, made at least 24 trips to the home of Doctor Eumianto Fuentes, a/k/a Doctor Steroid. Ullrich also paid Herr Doktor 80,000 Euros for the privilege.







So OK, Dickie-are you going to petition for Ullrich's 1997 victory to be expunged?

Gonna hunt up some old bottles of pee to test? How about some more flatulent statements?

Hmmmmph.

One Night In The Hangar: How One Huckbolt Saved Six Jobs When The Boss Wasn't Looking

One night in the hangar, way back past the statute of limitations the crew was installing the wing planks on an ex-Federal Express Falcon 20 freighter. It was part of a five or was it ten? year tank and plank inspection. The planks had been treated and recoated, the 12 hour 1422 sealer had been applied, the planks were in place and installation of the securing screws had started.

The lower wing planks are secured with screws going into nutplates-lots of screws, several hundred at least. Six of us had stayed over to finish the job, and the customer was due the next day.

One plank had gone pretty well, and midway through the second one of the guys looked at Jose, the crew chief and said "We've got a problem here."

One screw had galled itself and stripped out the nutplate, and it couldn't be retapped. It meant removing the wing plank again, ordering a nutplate, and taking a gamble that it wouldn't happen again on another of the many hundreds of nutplates.

Then Jose said "I've got an idea." He pulled a small depth gauge out of his shirt pocket and took a quick depth measurement.

He went to the tool crib and came back with a drill and bit, a microstop countersink, a countersink type huckbolt, and a pneumatic puller. He said "Watch this shit."

Carefully countersinking and slightly enlarging the previously metric hole he test fitted the huckbolt and said to the rest of us "Are you guys ready? Remember, NOBODY knows anything."

Jose dipped the huckbolt in a pot of 1422 sealer, inserted it in the hole, applied the pneumatic puller and.......and.........and........

A diversion. When installing huckbolts or any other type of blind fastener you listen for the noise when the stem separates. A nice kaPOW! tells you the rivet pulled and clinched. A dull thud tells you you'll have to start removing it and rethinking your strategy.

Jose pulled the trigger and kaPOW! the stem broke as cleanly as the picture in the instruction manual.

He smiled and said "Button her up. Somebody put a click patch over that thing. There's some Coronas in the fridge."

Exeunt.

The picture was stolen from some Chinese company or other. They steal our IP, so who cares?

Ford County Confidential

There's an interesting and timely decision (Landmark National Bank v. Kesler) out of the Kansas Supreme Court that's worth a look for what it says about servicing agents and nominees where the underlying mortgage has been chopped, sliced, diced, pureed and sold off as some sort of financial smoothie to gullible 'investors'.

The ubiquitous notices of foreclosure in the papers may soon have foreclosure petitions recast to remove MERS as plaintiff because of this decision, and one of my spies in a downtown law firm tells me this is, in fact, the case.

Kesler owned real estate in Ford County, Kansas secured by two mortgages-a $50,000 first with Landmark and a $ 93,100 second with Millennia Mortgage Co., both mortgages having been recorded in Ford County. Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems (MERS) was named as the nominee and Millennia as the creditor in the second mortgage, and Sovereign was a putative assignee of the Millennia second mortgage. (MERS functions as an electronic mortgage tracking system).

Kesler filed for bankruptcy in April, 2006, and Landmark filed a petition to foreclose its mortgage, naming Kesler and Millennia but not MERS or Sovereign. In the absence of answers the trial court entered a default judgment, and the property was sold at a sheriff's sale.Landmark filed a motion to confirm the sale on November 14, 2006.

Contemporaneously Sovereign filed a motion to set aside the default judgment and an answer asserting an interest as Millennia's assignee. It was said that MERS was a necessary party and because MERS did not receive service, Sovereign did not receive notice. MERS also filed a motion to set aside the default and a motion to intervene.

The trial court found that MERS was not a real party in interest; therefore Landmark was not required to name MERS as a party in its foreclosure petition. The court also found that MERS was only an agent or representative of Millennia. Sovereign had also failed to register its mortgage with the Ford County Registrar of Deeds, thus depriving itself of the right to intervene after judgment.

On appeal, the Kansas Supreme Court determined that the trial court was obliged to consider whether MERS would have had a meritorious defense if it had been named as a defendant and whether the outcome at a trial would have been different.

Because MERS was a nominee, its legal status depended on its relationship to its principal, Sovereign. The Court described that relationship to be that of a straw man. It had no stake in the outcome of the action as it did not function as a lender to Kesler and was in no sense an economic beneficiary. MERS did not demonstrate, and did not attempt to demonstrate that it possessed any interest in the mortgage beyond the bare designation as a mortgagor. It did not lend money or receive payment from the borrower, and it suffered no monetary loss as a consequence of the underlying litigation.

The Nitwit's Fandango

South Carolina's GOP pols are completely off their rockers lately.

First there's the embarrassment of a soon to be former governor Mark Sanford who can't seem to keep his dick in his pants or tell the truth but thinks that neither of those things ought to disqualify him from the governor's mansion.

Tonight something different happened when a hitherto unknown GOP Representative from the Palmetto State, Joe Wilson, shouted at the president "you lie!" during his speech tonight. I guess he thought he was at a town hall meeting, Klan shindig, or something like that, kinda forgot where he was and who he's supposed to be representing.

What was stunning, too, was, the rapidity with which Wilson got in the cafeteria line for an extra large helping of crow, served up just the way he likes it.

Of course, we fully expect that, in a line stolen from Hamas recently, the usual suspects will declare victory on the airwaves tomorrow.

Be that as it may, it's worth noting that this sort of stuff renders the effectivity of these two nitwits at something less than zero, and I'm quite sure that a lot of people in South Carolina are asking themselves how in hell they got elected and why they're still getting paid.

They're an embarrassment.

Of course our Steve King is no slouch himself for opining that if Barack Obama got elected the terrorists would be dancing in the streets, or the Senile Senator hisself for indulging in a little town hall theater lately, stealing his lines of course from Sarah Palin.

On that note, I wonder why anyone thinks he's capable of or willing to negotiate anything at this point.

I guess the Dems have been out of power so long that they forgot what it's like to use that damned majority.

The message from every Democrat to the GOP and its adherents should be "Push, pull, or get the hell out of the way." My next stop is over at the party website where I am going to offer my services in any capacity for any candidate who runs against Grassley.

Here's the rendition of the staged episode from the Times:

"Mr. Wilson seemed rattled in the wake of his comment, and quickly left the chamber at the end of the speech.

His office later issued an apology, saying: “This evening I let my emotions get the best of me when listening to the president’s remarks regarding the coverage of illegal immigrants in the health care bill. While I disagree with the president’s statement, my comments were inappropriate and regrettable. I extend sincere apologies to the president for this lack of civility.”

Mr. Wilson also phoned the White House and reached Mr. Emanuel, who accepted an apology on behalf of the president."