Finally! President Obama is standing up for the little guy instead of trying to appease Republican opponents and the creeps in his own party who are so obviously in the pockets of predatory special interests.

An article by Marc Ash in “Reader Supported News” this morning reveals that the president has said no to politicians who are on the side of the sleazy mortgage lenders responsible for America’s housing disaster.

According to Ash:

Obama refused to sign legislation specifically crafted to protect lenders involved in record numbers of home foreclosures, and stymie efforts by homeowners and their attorneys to challenge documents in those foreclosure actions.

Ash is referring to the “Interstate Recognition of Notarizations Act,” passed by the House in April and then sneaked through the Senate the day before Congress recessed for their midterm-election break. While the media was distracted by such weighty matters as Christine O’Donnell’s eccentric behavior and Carl Paladino’s outrageous emails,  the bill was unexpectedly brought to the Senate floor and passed without the publicity it would normally have attracted.

The article charges that the Interstate Recognition of Notarizations Act “appears custom-crafted to validate retroactively mortgage foreclosure documents that many states’ attorney generals fear may be fraudulent.”

Ash elaborates:

At the center of the recent firestorm are what are alleged to be flawed foreclosure documents. Challenges to those documents are the basis for foreclosure defense actions in many states. The Interstate Recognition of Notarizations Act would have forced state courts to ignore many of the most commonly cited flaws in foreclosure documents, potentially streamlining and accelerating the already record pace of US families’ home foreclosures.

Flawed documents, experts say, may only be a symptom of the larger, more tangled web of so-called “securitized mortgages” – mortgage notes bundled into Wall Street investments – the very investments at the heart of the nation’s economic crisis.

In refusing to sign the Interstate Recognition of Notarizations Act, President Obama broke with his own party’s leadership on legislation successfully passed by both Democratically controlled houses of Congress. It was a bold and principled stand by a president often maligned by party activists for failing to act forcefully enough on issues of passionate concern to the party’s base, and often touted by the president himself.

This is encouraging news. I take back all those bad things I said about you, Mr. President. You da man!