Mickey Kaus objects (sort of) to Daniel Indiviglio’s piece on the looming dip in mortgage rates. Indiviglio says the new lower rates will spur re-financing by moderately affluent types, increasing income inequality. My dumb question: Who’s left to re-fi?

The problem with re-financing these days is that your property has to appraise so that the new mortgage is now more than 80 percent of its value. That means that most houses bought in the last ten years are basically ineligible, since if you bought with 20 percent down in, say, 2006, your equity has probably shrunk quite a bit, even if you’ve been diligent in paying the mortgage every month. So if you want to re-finance, you have to be prepared to write the bank a fat check to get yourself back up to the 20 percent mark. Maybe that makes sense for certain people; but I suspect that for a lot of others it may not.

But the larger question is, who’s left to re-fi? Mortgage rates have been so low, for so long, that I suspect most of the people who have real, post-bubble equity in properties they bought long ago have already re-financed. How many of these folks are still sitting on loans with 9.5 percent juice and didn’t bother re-doing them 3 years ago?

From his review of Moneyball: The Movie:

When my son was ten, his baseball coach—inspired by Michael Lewis’s bestseller Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game—came up with a statistically brilliant team strategy: Don’t swing. Ever.

Because few ten-year-olds can throw more strikes than balls, his team won the pennant by letting the little boy on the mound walk them around the bases until he dissolved into tears and had to be replaced by another doomed lad.

The next spring, the parents got together and decided not to let that coach return.

Just so no one gets the wrong idea about where the Kindle Fire is pointed, Jeff Bezos includes this bit of oratory on the front page of Amazon.com:

There are two types of companies: those that work hard to charge customers more, and those that work hard to charge customers less. Both approaches can work. We are firmly in the second camp. . . .

We are building premium products and offering them at non-premium prices.

It’s like he’s trying to put Steve Jobs in the ground all by himself. And unless I’m missing something, Amazon also disappeared the iPad from its site today. You can still buy an iPad from Amazon, but they don’t seem to be fulfilled by Amazon itself which, unless I’m mistaken, they were yesterday. Also, when you go to the “Laptops, Tablets & Notebooks” page there’s a list of tablets by brand. Apple does not make the list. Below that is a window of “Best-Selling Tablets”: Amazon lists the ASUS Eee Pad Transformer, the Motorola XOOM, and the Samsung Galaxy. No iPad.

Finally, Amazon was able to do with today’s launch what Apple hasn’t done in a long time: Take everybody by almost total surprise (the leaks about the Kindle Fire didn’t appear until the last couple days) and then radically over-deliver (not just the Fire but the totally new Kindle line-up with much lower-than-anticipated price points).

I suspect that the Fire is going to cut the legs out from underneath the iPad.

Galley Friend J.T. sends along a link to an AICN review of the long-gestating Frank Miller book Holy Terror. It hurts:

Arrogant. Arrogant god-damn bastard. Sloppy, arrogant work by an arrogant bastard. Frank Miller. Always building himself up bigger, taller, like some mad gaggle of robots. Always climbing. Now falling. Enjoys repetition and small sentences. Originally a proposed Batman book, this is now…something else. Instead of Batman and Catwoman and Gotham City: The Fixer and Natalie Stack and god-damn Empire City. Cold. Wet. Noisy. Haughty. But all I read is failed Batman, failed Catwoman, Failed Gotham City.

Adds paint splatter like blood. Fingerprints and splatter to hide the rushed artwork. Like a cancerous cough, ink is sprayed everywhere.

I’ll take The Superficial for the win.

Over at the Gormogons, the Czar has a video of some fellows playing around at night with a shotgun, Dragon’s Breath ammunition, and a high-speed camera. It’s pretty great.

Galley Friend PMJ sends along a link to this Guardian story about the aborting of a twin. Here’s the key take-away:

“Things would have been different if we were 15 years younger or if we hadn’t had children already or if we were more financially secure,” she said later. “If I had conceived these twins naturally, I wouldn’t have reduced this pregnancy, because you feel like if there’s a natural order, then you don’t want to disturb it. But we created this child in such an artificial manner – in a test tube, choosing an egg donor, having the embryo placed in me – and somehow, making a decision about how many to carry seemed to be just another choice. The pregnancy was all so consumerish to begin with, and this became yet another thing we could control.”

Rick Perry had a pretty tough night; the worst moment of which was his attempt to paint Romney as a flip-flopper which meandered and faltered, eventually making Perry look tired, confused, and old. It was pretty grim. But I’m not sure it was more than a tactical victory for Romney, because Bachman keeps shrinking and Perry wasn’t structurally harmed. So the essential dynamic of the race remains.

(For the record, Romney had three–I counted!–moments where he genuinely seemed like a real human being and would have fooled even the most sophisticated Voight-Kampf test. Also, he had one truly great line: “I want everybody to be rich.” Pitch perfect.)

But here’s the problem with Romney: Perry landed one solid blow on him, the line about Romney removing a line on healthcare from the hardcover to the paperback edition. (How’s that for detailed oppo?) Romney’s response was to claim that this simply wasn’t true, implying that Perry was either confused or a liar.

Yet in the spin room immediately after the debate, a Romney aid quickly fessed up that actually, it was Romney who was wrong. Perry was right. The line he quoted had been deleted from one edition to the other. The problem for Romney is that for a guy who has such a command of everything else at the debate, it’s hard to believe that he was just confused on this point. It seems much more likely that he was bald-facedly lying.

Which wouldn’t, in itself, be a problem. All politicians lie. (Wouldn’t you like to see some evidentiary proof of Rick Santorum ever having stood at the Texas-Mexico border?) Except that part of the whole rap against Romney is that he’s been lying about everything since the day he first decided to seek elective office back in 1994. This latest little debate fib just feeds into the underlying problems with his trustworthiness as a candidate. So far as I can tell, nearly every Romney supporter in the conservative establishment makes their peace with the idea of being on Team Romney by thinking to themselves, “Well, he’s on our side now, so at least he’ll stay bought.” Unlike all those other times when he flipped.

And maybe he will. Maybe this time will be different.

Caveat: I feel compelled, again, to reiterate that I don’t have anything against Romney personally. In fact, I think one of the great mysteries about him is why his political persona seems so crazily divorced from his real character. Here’s a guy who has been married forever, seems to have a great family; and seems to engender nothing by admiration in those he encounters in life. (I know a bunch of people who’ve worked for him or around him; to a person, they all like him.) But he has this weird political persona where he acts like a snake when he runs for office. He’s the mirror-opposite of the typical politician. It’s a conundrum.

PS: Between the audience cheering over the death penalty a couple debates ago, and then cheering the idea of letting the hypothetical young guy with the deadly disease who chose not to buy insurance die (was that the same debate? I forget), and then last night booing the out-and-proud gay soldier, it’s enough to make you think Republican voters are kind of unserious and mean-spirited. Or at least make you really, really uncomfortable.