When it comes to the mortgage rescue piece, I’m not exactly going out on a limb here when I say I’m betting that Joe the Plumber and the majority of those who show up on Friday haven’t even looked at the details of the plan. Santelli already has admitted he hasn’t read it. And that’s really too bad. Because if they had bothered to read what’s actually in there, they might not bother protesting.

All week, I’ve been talking to housing advocates and experts, and they’re all expressing the same emotion over the mortgage rescue plan: Disappointment. As TWI’s Mike Lillis wrote, many consumer groups said they thought the plan fell short when it was first introduced last week. But it goes beyond that — although some help for homeowners is better than nothing, the Obama administration’s plan is hardly the breakthrough advocates of loan modifications were hoping for.

For example, it doesn’t include any legal protection for servicers to do modifications without fear of being sued by investors — the major impediment to mass loan modifications. The problem has tripped up everyone from Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation Chair Sheila Bair to grassroots housing organizer Bruce Marks of the Neighborhood Assistance Corporation of America. I’m hearing talk that the administration rushed the plan and couldn’t get that part together in time, and it may include servicer protections at some point in the future. But for now it’s not in there — which means the mass loan modifications the Tea Party folks are protesting aren’t likely to become a reality anytime soon.

President Obama also was entirely accurate when he vowed during his speech Tuesday that the plan won’t help homeowners who bought bigger houses than they can afford. That’s because the plan has stringent limits on how far underwater a homeowner can be, in order to qualify for a loan modification. If they owe significantly more on their mortgages than their homes are worth, they won’t get help. Rick Sharga, vice president of marketing for RealtyTrac, which collects foreclosure data, told me Wednesday that many homeowners in California are further underwater on their loans than the plan’s limits allow, so the plan offers nothing for them. That’s probably true in the other bubble markets as well, such as Nevada, Florida, Arizona and elsewhere.

No one’s sure exactly how the Obama housing plan will play out, but they don’t expect it to have more than a moderate effect on slowing down foreclosures. And there is still a tsunami coming, with $1 trillion worth of Alt-A “liar’s loans” resetting to higher monthly payments this year, and in every year of Obama’s first term. The Center for Responsible Lending breaks down the numbers and finds 6,600 new foreclosures a day, or one every 13 seconds. Some 45 million homeowners not facing foreclosure are projected to experience a $233 billion decline in the value of their homes, due to several million foreclosures expected in the next two years. We’re in a mess that’s only getting worse, and protesting against a small-scale attempt to stem some of the damage simply ignores reality.

I can understand how Santelli, Joe the Plumber, and the other Tea Party folks might not be intimately familiar with the housing plan’s details. They’re for us loan modification junkies, an admittedly small group. But if you’re going to organize a protest, you should at least have a grasp of the basic idea here — and it’s pretty obvious we’re talking about a very modest government effort. It’s entertaining to throw a tirade about a neighbor who bought a bigger house to get an extra bathroom, as Santelli did. But look closer at the housing plan, and that neighbor probably won’t qualify for a loan mod.

The Tea Party folks aren’t letting that sort of thing get in the way of their big plans. It would be a lot harder to throw a revolt if you bothered to tell people the truth about the foreclosure mess that still lies ahead, and how little has actually been done to address it.

“You’re asking me to comment on what other people think,” said Wurzelbacher. “I can’t do that. He’s right that this plan is rewarding bad behavior, without a doubt. And I appreciated his passion when he was speaking.”

Several times, once without being prodded, Wurzelbacher lit into the presidential candidate who lifted him out of obscurity.

On the housing bubble:

John McCain likes to say: Well, I warned about this! Well, I didn’t hear him. And I listened. He might have said it in certain circles but I didn’t really hear him. If he was thinking that was really going to be something he ought have made a bigger stink than he did.

On the Straight Talk Express:

John McCain’s a politician. I don’t really have a whole lot of respect for politicians. I did not agree with the amnesty bill he tried to put forth before running. I thought it was just about the most asinine thing I’d ever heard. You go ahead and let people break laws, then you pardon them and welcome them in? It makes no sense.

Three years ago he was the favorite among Democrats. That always bothered me. Then he talks about reaching across the aisle. I’m tired of reaching across the aisle. You got voted in, supposedly, because of your ideas, your principles, your values, and yet you’re supposed to reach across the aisle and bend on those things to get things done? You don’t sit there and say, ‘I’ll give you Park Place for Boardwalk.’ There’s too much wheeling and dealing in politics. You don’t coerce, and see, that was my problem when I was on the bus. That was the word that was used on the bus. “Coerced.” That’s a bad word. When John McCain sat there and said, “Well, some senators had to be coerced,” that pissed me off. That really upset me.

On Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin:

Absolutely incredible woman. Actually really wants to serve America. Do I think she should give ‘em another chance? I dunno. I mean, America tore her up. The media in general. But of any of the politicians I’ve actually met she seems the most sincere. She actually wants to do what’s right for America. She didn’t have that gleam in her eye of power an money, she had that ‘I want to serve’ look. That’s the kind of character and leadership we need. When you go into politics you want to help your fellow man, not help yourself. I think I’ve got a pretty good B.S. detector and I didn’t smell any from her.

Wurzelbacher wasn’t thrilled by Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal’s GOP response to last night’s presidential address. “The only one I can see who I’d considering voting for is Newt Gingrich.”

From the interview, with CBS Channel 5

“I think its totally repulsive,” Hammerness said when asked what she thinks of Bank of America now. ”What idiots, what kind of idiots are running that bank?”

There’s more. Hammerness also talked with pride about the founding of the bank at the turn of the century, and expressed dismay with the way things have turned out:

She reflected on how her grandfather founded B of A as the Bank of Italy in San Francisco’s North Beach neighborhood in 1904 as a reaction to the fact that the big eastern banks wouldn’t lend to middle class immigrants like Italians.

Hammerness was outspoken about what has happened to the bank that is her family’s legacy, saying she had little doubt that Giannini was “rolling over in his grave.”

She added that her father, who succeeded her grandfather as bank president and “gave his life for the bank,” would have had a similar reaction upon seeing today’s decline of the institution.

Let’s see if her rant gets the same attention as Santelli’s did.

When we pour $10 or 30$ billion into AIG, it doesn’t vanish into thin air. It goes to someone else. Earlier evidence suggested that Goldman Sachs had massive exposure to a potential AIG bankruptcy. And it’s been alleged — though not on any harder evidence than a certain elementary logic — that AIG got saved in part because of people tied to Goldman who were running Bailout Inc. last fall.

Whatever the truth of that, I think it’s time we know more clearly where the $100 or so billion we’ve ‘loaned’ AIG so far went. (There’s been some data on this. But I don’t believe it’s been exhaustive or particularly detailed.) And where’s the next dollop of money likely to go? Whoever these recipients are, they are by definition companies that are in the capitalism business who made a bad bet on AIG, probably a lot of bad bets on AIG.

They don’t seem to be taking the hits, however. Taxpayers are the ones paying for the bad bets.

But let’s just ignore investigating all that and blame the whole thing on irresponsible homeowners instead. It makes for a better viral video.

As I said before the plan came out, the Obama administration should have stepped up and acknowledged right off the bat that some people will get help who don’t deserve it, and that there’s a certain unfairness to the plan. But with foreclosures killing the economy — and all of our home values — there aren’t many alternatives.  That didn’t happen. Instead, as Slate’s John Dickerson notes, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs attacked Santelli. That only added to his fame.

The problem is that Santelli and Sullivan are tapping in to something that’s real, a resentment of being forced to pay for someone else’s mistakes. I’ve heard the same sentiments from friends who rented or  remained cramped in smaller houses as their families grew — and now feel they have to pay for people who bought houses bigger than they could afford. The point is not to ridicule those feelings, but to draw the larger picture.

We’ve spent billions of taxpayer dollars to bail out banks that profited from all this, and yet, the resentment toward homeowners in trouble outweighs that anger.  The often egregious, if not outright illegal, lending practices that went on during the boom haven’t always received the attention they deserve. It would help, I think, to fully lay them out: The targeting of minority neighborhoods for high-rate loans. The deregulatory zealots at the Office of Thrift Supervision who sought banks to regulate by offering easier oversight. The use of the government-chartered Federal Home Loan Banks to provide low-cost money to banks like IndyMac Bankcorp to continue  ”unsafe and unsound lending practices,” as one financial analyst put it, even as they teetered on collapse. The meth addicts at Washington Mutual who frantically processed loans as OTS examiners looked the other way.

During the bubble years beginning in 2006, underwriting standards went out the window, and anyone with a pulse got a mortgage, with few or no questions asked. Many of those  Alt-A “liar’s loans” don’t deserve modifications. But banks for years also made  huge profits in subprime  mortgages — the most sophisticated of loan products, sold to the people least likely to understand them. There’s a reason it’s called “predatory lending.” Banks and mortgage firms proved they could make money by bringing in customers who signed up for loan terms they clearly didn’t understand and that trapped them in debt, from prepayment penalties to “exploding” adjustable rate mortgages that increased to unaffordable payments.

When you shopped for a subprime mortgage, you couldn’t just lock in a rate and shop around, a basic tenet for consumers looking for prime loans. It was all risk-based pricing, meaning you had to apply first for the loan, and find out your rate when you were approved. And, of course, the brokers were adding on hidden fees and points as fast as they could. Lenders actually paid brokers extra for bringing in borrowers at higher rates than what they actually qualified for.

All this is to explain that “irresponsible” homeowners is a too-broad term. Yes, some people bought houses beyond their reach or used them as ATMS for vacations and cars. But many others didn’t – they were reaching for the home ownership dream as a responsible path to wealth, and got trapped in loans they didn’t understand and couldn’t afford. The problem with the childish rant of a cable TV talking head is that it can’t grasp the complexity of all this. Neither can any plan to help homeowners, since some of the irresponsible will get help. But banks and lenders profited for a long time by preying on and exploiting many others — and those borrowers do, in fact, deserve  a break.

In Andrew Sullivan’s neighborhood, I somehow doubt that brokers knocked on doors at all hours, attended churches to gain the trust of members and sell them subprime loans, or staked themselves out at community centers to find customers. But that happened all too often in places like Prince George’s County, Md., the nation’s wealthiest majority-black suburb, where housing counselors as early as 2005 complained about a proliferation of subprime loans, and which had almost twice as many  subprime mortgages as the national average.

In Sullivan’s world, there might not be a lot of people who didn’t realize that they could have an attorney at their real estate closing, who didn’t know that it wasn’t standard practice for a broker to come to their office and tell them if they didn’t sign their loan papers right away, they would lose their homes. Some may have understood the interest rate on the loan they were applying for; others may not have. Either way, it didn’t matter, because their broker was assuring them they could refinance out of the loan — the broker they had met at church or in their community, the one they trusted.

The key thing in the Obama plan, and in the idea for national standards for loan modifications, is that you have to verify your income and assets to qualify. In other words, if you lied to get your loan, you won’t get it modified. That takes a lot of unfairness right off the table.

Still, it’s hard for people to swallow the fact that some degree of unfairness will likely be necessary to achieve the greater good of stabilizing the economy — especially when they see a neighbor who blew their home equity on vacations or a nice car getting federal assistance. But it’s what they don’t see that should also trouble them, and that should cause all of us to recognize that irresponsibility in lending didn’t start or end with homeowners alone.