Mortgage Fiasco—More Victims:

“You’re really unprotected in who you rent from,” [a renter said]. “You don’t know how overextended they are, or how well they’re managing their finances. It didn’t work out for me. These folks gambled on interest rates and lost. And now I lost, too.”

(From a story in today's New York Times on the other victims of the burst mortgage bubble.)

Oh, those foolish folks who got in over their heads, conned by the sleazy practices of the financial community offering megabucks for tiny percentages of interest that ballooned in a few years, right? But what about the rest of us, the renters, who trusted landlords to live up to the leases we signed with them? A good many of them have seemed to gone the way of a Bush administration that promised it had no interest in nation building.

Home and apartment renters are generally at the low end of the economic scale, so the Republican party doesn't need to worry much about any adverse effects here. Their constituency is the speculators and the Macmansion buyers. Ooops! Seems there might be a problem with them as well.