CBS Turns To Prostitution To Push Liberal Agenda?

It's difficult to conclude if this from CBS is due to a ratings slump, or meant to push the liberal policy of bailing out investors, while highlighting current financial problems in the real estate industry. If you read below the headlines, the story is a sham.

(CBS) NEW ROCHELLE The downturn in the housing market appears to have driven two Westchester homeowners to desperate and illegal measures.

New Rochelle Police raided a 3-bedroom home on North Avenue Friday night arresting four alleged prostitutes and the homeowners.

Richard Werner and Heather Mezzenga are charged with promoting prostitution. The two are both mortgage brokers who moved out of the house roughly two years ago so they could begin renovating a home on Mountain Road in Pleasantville.

The couple claims to have tried to sell the property at bargain basement prices. When, last week? The reality is, such a home would most likely have easily sold with such a maneuver two years ago when they moved into another property. Apparently they didn't sell it when they could have, perhaps there just wasn't enough profit in doing that. So, they held onto it and moved into another home. That isn't misfortune, it's a gamble.

The American tax payers should not be put in a position to have to bail out real estate speculators whose investments went bad. They knew the risks and took them, just as they knew the risks of opening up a brothel. Without weighing in on the soundness of policing prostitution, putting these two perps forward as victims is a sham.

They were making money coming and going and apparently trying to make more coming, again. Too bad. They gambled and lost. Now CBS is prostituting itself by playing them up as victims. Unfortunately, the news media, particularly CBS, seems to become more a part of the world's oldest profession everyday.

Comments

[TheSpartan]

Will you have as big a problem when the gov't bails out the mortgage industry?

[Dan Riehl]

when the gov't bails out the mortgage industry?

yes, I'm against bail outs, corporate, or otherwise

[IslamoLlama]

Funny.
More so after the giant hand-job Katie Couric gave the White House with her Iraq "reporting". It continues to amaze me how the right-wing likes to beat up its would-be allies as quickly as it fumbles attacks on its enemies.

[Cindi]

It's called being objective dipshit. Try it sometime.

[bloodrage bob]

i don't think the story is as much about the housing market, as it is about the store-bought sex angle. the media *loves* whores. they love anything related to the nookie biz - strippers, brothels, "sex workers" ...

the media'll give you a story about them. nevada is the only 'prostitution legal' state in the country, has been for quite some time now. so the media ought to be used to it. but nooooo .... the daily here in vegas is continually coming out with yet another article on strippers/whores/callgirls/etc. they're *fascinated* by them! can't get enough! it's almost as if they see some weird parallel with hooking and the news racket, or something. "we'll put out for you if you give us money (or ratings?)". i suspect CBS is no different.

i don't know what a psychiatrist would make of that.

[seekeronos]

What was the hook?

Hookers?

Media hooks?

"Sex sells".

And when someone takes a topic and slaps a pair of boobs onto it, too often, that becomes (in the public eye) the unadmitted but sole reason they even bothered to devote 15.5sec of their rather limited attention span to it.

[jj]

What really pisses me off about this whole debacle is this. These people have driven housing prices up for no good reason other than speculation fueled by mortagage companies who made bad decisions. In other words, a ponzi scheme, which was bound to fail at some point. No bail outs of any kind. Period.

[Purple Avenger]

Greed gets'em every time. Anytime you can walk away with a tidy profit, take it. Owning real estate is a PITA. Its like a child. It needs constant feeding, care, trips to the doctor, etc. And you have to ransom it back from the govt every year -- something a more liquid investment doesn't need.

[southdakotaboy]

We need to legalize, license and tax prostitution. It would be a rational step towards protecting our country and helping our health system.

[seekeronos]

"--- We need to legalize, license and tax prostitution. ---"

I'd say the same, both for that as well as certain soft drugs (marijuana and its derivatives, absinthe, and scrapping the restriction against the > 3.0% alcohol import ban (this principally affects beer, such as not being able to get the main label of Warsteiner Doppelbock, Guinness, or the _real_ Budweiser (Budvar) from th Czech Republic.

But, at the same time (other than the beer) - heavy "sin" taxes should be imposed on the sale of these items in order to help relieve other tax burdens. Oh, and a screen on users of those items (as well as prostitution) where partakers of those sins would incur a heavier share of the health care costs. A portion of the "Whore Tax" could also be set aside to provide sex-worker specific health care for the whores, as well as routine examinations and procedures for disinfecting them from treatable STDs, and possibly even sterilization as a precondition of hiring into a whorehouse to prevent pregnancies.

[seekeronos]

Oh, and definitely no bailouts for speculators. I could possibly see some assistance _maybe_ for first-time home buyers, but then again, few first timers are looking for a $700K McMansion the first time around.

Of course, the possibility of that sort of expense increases the closer you get to NYC. Even with a so-called recession in th housing market, the median price of a 3BDR/2Bath of around 1500-1800 s.f. house built within the past 15 years is in the low to mid $400K's.

And taxes for that run lowball about 3.5k/year if you get lucky, and about 5k/year seems average. Rockland and Westchester counties are pretty bad, and Long Island communities are even worse - one NYPD cop I know was paying about 12k/year for taxes in Suffolk County on a quite modest home.

[Fred Beloit]

Pleasantville, NY. Pop, 6600. Homes from $400,000 to $1,000,000. This according to a PV realtor. So $700,000 may be no mcmansion there just kind of an average house. In any case what an idiotic "news" story.

[seekeronos]

PV is exceptionally pricey, as is also Scarsdale and pretty much any of the major NYC bedroom communities in Westchester County. And anything close to the river (save for the relatively lower income working class areas in White Plains or Ossining) just about prices out anyone trying to make a living in that area (that is, non-NYC commuters).

The Rockland/Orange county corridor is not nearly as bad, but is catching up, as married couples (both hubby and wife each holding down a high-powered six-figure career) in NYC who would rather work 160 man-hours per week per partner instead of 200 man-hours per week trade up out of their Upper East Side apartments and into the status of a "Hamptons on the Hudson" home for the unbelievably low, low price of only $650K...

... Y su casa es el caso de especialmente: esta casa hecha en EE.UU para los trabajadores Mexicanos... nuestro guarantido, muy cualidad y construyen rapidamente!

Bad Spanish grammar included. :)

[TheSpartan]

"possibly even sterilization as a precondition of hiring into a whorehouse to prevent pregnancies."

Can we get the same precondition for working for the GOP?

[steveaz]

Talk about Leftist Meme-collusion

I heard this same sham-meme repeated on a BBC Channel 4 news feed, inserted as "human-interest," testimonial evidence of the depths of the "Mortgage-Crisis" that purportedly grips our nation.

This meme neatly fits the Euro-Left's usual MO of relying on exaggerated fears of American economic hegemony to generate relevancy for their agendas.

It's interesting to track these anti-American memes as sympathetic media propagate and circulate them, kinda like mapping cancer-nodes with radioactive dyes.