Eastern Kingsnake

How many times in canine history has a dog been bitten directly on the nose by a snake? Our dog is certainly trying hard to increase the average. Today she discovered an Eastern Kingsnake in the pine needles under our euonymous bushes in the back yard. Here's a picture of one (not my own--I didn't get the camera in time.) Note to grandparents: it is not venomous. Note from wife: I am not a professional snake-identifier and thus could be wrong about this. Note from me: Wife was too scared to get proper view of the specimen and thus has no right to be criticizing husband's quite reliable form of judgment in this matter.

Mortgage Discrimination Part 2

There is more evidence of discrimination in setting mortgage lending rates. See here for the the Charlotte Observer report from September 2005. See here for the latest:

African-Americans and Latinos enter into high-priced, subprime mortgages more often than white borrowers with identical credit qualifications, according to a study by the Center for Responsible Lending.

The report, released Wednesday, examined 50,000 subprime loans using data collected under the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act and supplemented with the Loan Performance Subprime Asset-Backed Securities Database. The two sources were used to isolate borrowers' race and ethnicity from all other risk factors, the report's author said.

"For many types of loans, borrowers of color in our database were more than 30% more likely to receive a higher-rate loan than white borrowers, even after accounting for differences in risk," according to the report.

...According to the study, African-American borrowers were more likely to receive higher-rate home purchase and refinance loans than white borrowers with similar qualifications. Those with prepayment penalties on their subprime home loans were 6% to 34% more likely to receive a higher-rate loan than white borrowers.

Latino borrowers purchasing homes were 29% to 142% more likely to receive a higher-rate loan than non-Latino, white borrowers with similar qualifications, the study concluded.

Bocian and others say the findings disprove the lending industry's explanation for why minorities get more high-cost subprime mortgages, and they assert less-sophisticated borrowers are being steered to less-favorable loans.