Skip to main content

About Those Loans Senator

US Sen. Chris Dodd, Kevin Rennie finds, is still dodging on his loans: “I took the Dodd challenge, and the senator won't like the result. Several days after news broke last month that Sen. Christopher J. Dodd and his wife received significantly reduced interest rates on more than $800,000 in mortgages from Countrywide Financial, Dodd taunted reporters to look at the rates. He claimed he got a deal available to any other borrower. He was wrong.”

The average rates at the time Dodd secured is jumbo loan from Countrywide was about 5 percent; the Dodds got a 4.5 percent loan from the troubled lender. “The 2003 loan on his D.C. property, purchased a few years before from his old friend, Rep. Rosa DeLauro, was for $506,000. That's a jumbo,' more than the maximum of a conventional loan, and records on those interest rates aren't widely available.”

“The chairman of the Senate Banking Committee could get the information if he thought it would confirm his loud claim that it's outrageous to think he got special treatment from Countrywide,” Rennie noted. “Though he said he'd release documents associated with the transactions to the public ‘at some point,’ Dodd continues to refuse to let his constituents see the secret details of two deals that will save him more than $70,000 over the life of the loans.”

At least one reader of the Courant tendered kudos to Rennie but wondered why the story had not been vigorously pursued by the paper.

UNCLE SAM IS BACK from North Oxford, MA wrote: “Kevin, thank you. Someone at the H.C. investigated this. QUESTION this is the hottest story around why would YOUR paper not investigate this? It has everything local and fed angles, huge bailout of the banks PLUS the angle that Milt mentioned that Fannie and Freddie have since 1989 made Sen. Dodd their NUMBER ONE contributor of campaign funds! AND NO STORY FORM (SIC) COLIN M. AND THE REST OF THE PAPER. WHY?”

Sadly true; the meager posts on Dodd’s receipt of favors from the financial industry he oversees as the powerful chairman of the banking committee do not compare to the avalanche of investigative reports and the celestial downpour of commentary and tis-tissing that swamped the Rowland administration after reporters had discovered the former governor had a hot-tub installed at his lakeside cabin by his favorite contractor. Compared to the funding Dodd has received from the financial community he regulates and the taxpayer money he is prepared to send off to the pecculators to bail them out of their idiocies, Rowland’s affair involved chump change.

But all this has left the reporting community yawning and snoring. And they wonder way no one reads their propaganda. Sad, very sad.

The absence of stories and commentary in the paper suggests that the story already has been sent to the morgue. It's enough to make you want to spank Fanny Mae's fanny -- and Dodd's too.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The PURA soap opera continues in Connecticut: Business eyeing the exit signs

The trouble at PURA and the two energy companies it oversees began – ages ago, it now seems – with the elevation of Marissa Gillett to the chairpersonship of Connecticut’s Public Utilities Regulation Authority.   Connecticut Commentary has previously weighed in on the controversy: PURA Pulls The Plug on November 20, 2019; The High Cost of Energy, Three Strikes and You’re Out? on December 21, 2024; PURA Head Butts the Economic Marketplace on January 3, 2025; Lamont Surprised at Suit Brought Against PURA on February 3, 2025; and Lamont’s Pillow Talk on February 22, 2025:   The melodrama full of pratfalls continues to unfold awkwardly.   It should come as no surprise that Gillett has changed the nature and practice of the state agency. She has targeted two of Connecticut’s energy facilitators – Eversource and Avangrid -- as having in the past overcharged the state for services rendered. Thanks to the Democrat controlled General Assembly, Connecticut is no l...

The Murphy Thingy

It’s the New York Post, and so there are pictures. One shows Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy canoodling with “Courier Newsroom publisher Tara McGowan, 39, last Monday by the bar at the Red Hen, located just one mile north of Capitol Hill.”   The canoodle occurred one day or night prior to Murphy’s well-advertised absence from President Donald Trump’s recent Joint Address to Congress.   Murphy has said attendance at what was essentially a “campaign rally” involving the whole U.S. Congress – though Democrat congresspersons signaled their displeasure at the event by stonily sitting on their hands during the applause lines – was inconsistent with his dignity as a significant part of the permanent opposition to Trump.   Reaching for his moral Glock Murphy recently told the Hartford Courant that Democrat Party opposition to President Donald Trump should be unrelenting and unforgiving: “I think people won’t trust you if you run a campaign saying that if Donald Trump is ...

Lamont Surprised at Suit Brought Against PURA

Marissa P. Gillett, the state's chief utility regulator, watches Gov. Ned Lamont field questions about a new approach to regulation in April 2023. Credit: MARK PAZNIOKAS / CTMIRROR.ORG Concerning a suit brought by Eversource and Avangrid, Connecticut’s energy delivery agents, against Connecticut’s Public Utility Regulatory Agency (PURA), Governor Ned Lamont surprised most of the state’s political watchers by affecting surprise.   “Look,” Lamont told a Hartford Courant reporter shortly after the suit was filed, “I think it is incredibly unhelpful,” Lamont said. “Everyone is getting mad at the umpires.   Eversource is not getting everything they want and they are bringing suit. It was a surprise to me. Nobody notified me. I think we have to do a better job of working together.”   Lamont’s claim is far less plausible than the legal claim made by Eversource and Avangrid. The contretemps between Connecticut’s energy distributors and Marissa Gillett , Gov. Ned Lamont’s ...