Tonight's guest on The Daily Show is Julian Castro and the panelists on The Nightly Show are Nicholas Irving, Paul Rieckhoff, Matt Taibbi, and Sabrina Jalees.
Julian Castro is the former mayor of San Antonio, Texas and current Secretary of Housing and Urban Development (HUD.)
Julián Castro remarked at a public event Wednesday that he was “shocked” at housing prices in the District of Columbia when he arrived from San Antonio last summer to head the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
For good reason.
The former mayor is paying $3,800 a month rent for a two-bedroom, two-bath apartment in the Woodley Park neighborhood, situated in northwest Washington near the National Zoo, he said in an interview. That includes parking, no small matter in the nation’s capital.
Castro has said that the prices he encountered when he took his new job gave him a better appreciation for the plight of would-be homebuyers.
He responded to questions with optimism, noting the economy is improving, fuel prices have plunged and housing prices are leveling off after a protracted period of increasing.
“All of that adds up to more money in people’s pockets to go from renting to buying,” he said.
As housing secretary, Julián Castro dealing with the high costs of housing
Tonight he is on to discuss lowering of insurance premiums.
viewers can tune in to watch Castro and host John Stewart discuss the finer points of the FHA's recent actions to lower insurance premiums — mortgages are set to decrease from 1.35 percent to 0.85 percent.
Julián Castro Will Appear on 'The Daily Show' Tonight
"We're not changing who qualifies for an FHA loan. What we're talking about here is affordability," said Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Julian Castro in an interview Monday on CNBC's "Squawk Box." The FHA is part of HUD.
The FHA, which does not originate but insures home loans with down payments as low as 3.5 percent, raised its annual premiums 140 percent during the housing crash. That priced thousands of borrowers out of the market. As of Monday, the premium falls by half a percentage point, from 1.35 percent of the loan balance to 0.85 percent of the loan.
"This is a very prudent step in the direction of providing middle-class families with opportunities for buying a home," said Castro.
HUD boss on FHA loans: 'We're not changing who qualifies'
Tonight, On Nightly, the topic will be
American Sniper. Although I am sure most people are familiar with it by now, here is the trailer
American Sniper is a 2014 American action and drama film directed by Clint Eastwood and written by Jason Hall. It is based on Chris Kyle's autobiography American Sniper: The Autobiography of the Most Lethal Sniper in U.S. Military History. With 255 kills, 160 of which were officially confirmed by the Department of Defense, Kyle is the deadliest marksman in U.S. military history. The film stars Bradley Cooper and Sienna Miller with Luke Grimes, Kyle Gallner, Sam Jaeger, Jake McDorman, and Cory Hardrict in supporting roles.
American Sniper (film)
Nicholas Irving is a former Army Ranger sniper with 33 confirmed kills in Afghanistan.
a former U.S. Army Ranger with multiple combat deployments to both Iraq and Afghanistan. During my service within the 75th Ranger Regiment, I served as an Assaulter, Heavy and Light Machine Gunner, and Designated Marksman. I was the first African American to serve as a sniper in my battalion and am now the owner of HardShoot, where I train personnel in the art of long-range shooting, from Olympians to members of the Spec Ops community.
Paul Rieckhoff is a writer, social entrepreneur, advocate, activist and veteran of the United States Army and the Iraq War.
He is the Founder and CEO of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America (IAVA). He served as an Army First Lieutenant and infantry rifle platoon leader in Iraq from 2003 through 2004. Rieckhoff was released from active duty in March 2004 and the National Guard in 2011.
Matt Taibbi is an author and journalist. He is also the author of The Rolling Stone article 'American Sniper' Is Almost Too Dumb to Criticize
I saw American Sniper last night, and hated it slightly less than I expected to. Like most Clint Eastwood movies – and I like Clint Eastwood movies for the most part – it's a simple, well-lit little fairy tale with the nutritional value of a fortune cookie that serves up a neatly-arranged helping of cheers and tears for target audiences, and panics at the thought of embracing more than one or two ideas at any time.
It's usually silly to get upset about the self-righteous way Hollywood moviemakers routinely turn serious subjects into baby food. Film-industry people angrily reject the notion that their movies have to be about anything (except things like "character" and "narrative" and "arc," subjects they can talk about endlessly).
This is the same Hollywood culture that turned the horror and divisiveness of the Vietnam War era into a movie about a platitude-spewing doofus with leg braces who in the face of terrible moral choices eats chocolates and plays Ping-Pong. The message of Forrest Gump was that if you think about the hard stuff too much, you'll either get AIDS or lose your legs. Meanwhile, the hero is the idiot who just shrugs and says "Whatever!" whenever his country asks him to do something crazy.
Forrest Gump pulled in over half a billion and won Best Picture. So what exactly should we have expected from American Sniper?
Not much. But even by the low low standards of this business, it still manages to sink to a new depth or two.
But to turn the Iraq war into a saccharine, almost PG-rated two-hour cinematic diversion about a killing machine with a heart of gold (is there any film theme more perfectly 2015-America than that?) who slowly, very slowly, starts to feel bad after shooting enough women and children – Gump notwithstanding, that was a hard one to see coming.
Sniper is a movie whose politics are so ludicrous and idiotic that under normal circumstances it would be beneath criticism. The only thing that forces us to take it seriously is the extraordinary fact that an almost exactly similar worldview consumed the walnut-sized mind of the president who got us into the war in question.
Sabrina Jalees is a comedian, dancer, actor, host and writer.
The daughter of a Swiss mother and a Pakistani father, she graduated from Earl Haig Secondary School, and later from the Radio and Television Arts program at Ryerson University in June 2007.
Jalees is out as a lesbian.[2] She has stated that she was shunned by her extended Muslim family after coming out, an experience she relates in her 2013 Canadian comedy tour, "Brownlisted.
This sounds like it should be another excellent panel.
This Week's Guests
THE DAILY SHOW WITH JON STEWART
Tu 1/27: Jill Leovy
We 1/28: Oscar Isaac
Th 1/29: Sarah Chayes
Due to the blizzard, I may lose power. I expect tonight will be fine and I should be here to participate (this is being typed up in the afternoon and set to autopost tonight). Tomorrow is questionable, I will be typing up tomorrow night's post in the afternoon tomorrow (in theory), and setting it to post. If I lose power I won't be around to comment, but I should be fine. I would hope that after all of the storms and power outages recently, we have finally run out of things to knock down the lines. :D The substation that serves most of this town is located on this road, and so sometimes we get shut off if there is too much damage to lines in other places. The lines here were recently rebuilt as was the substation so we should be fine, but living in a rural area means having power that is not as reliable as a city in a storm like this. Everyone dealing with this storm should stay safe, be cautious and prepared but not afraid. It is just snow, even if the media is making it sound like a combination of the apocalypse and the Götterdämmerung. :D