Politics Of Florida's Housing Crisis
MALVEAUX: OK. So when almost half of the mortgages in a state are underwater, the housing crisis becomes a big political issue, and that is the situation in Florida ahead of Tuesday's primary. I want to bring in Christine Romans. She's live from, Jacksonville to talk about the politics of the housing crisis, because Florida is one of the hardest hit when it comes to the mortgage meltdown. How bad is it, and how important is that for the folks who live there?</s>CHRISTINE ROMANS, HOST, "YOUR BOTTOM LINE": I don't think that anybody is going to be casting a vote in the primary on Tuesday or in the general election is going to go into that voting booth, Suzanne, without some housing baggage with them, because these neighborhoods have been devastated. I mean even if you are paying your bills, you have somebody down the street or somebody in your family who has lost their home or is fighting with the bank. I mean, everybody is talking about how much fighting and red tape they've been doing with the banks. You know, look, we walked along with a realtor who was going door-to-door. There he is. His name is Scott Nicholas, going door-to-door to check to see if people are actually living in the homes, because the banks own a lot of these homes. They don't even know if somebody's living there, checking the lawn. If it's not mowed, figuring out if somebody lives there, and what the bank has to do to try to fix it up and sell it again. In some cases, banks and the people are just fighting over who owns the home or what exactly the status is of the mortgage. We also talked to a guy named Chip Parker, who represents people who are fighting foreclosure, and he put what is happening here in Florida in very, very stark terms. Listen.</s>CHIP PARKER, JACKSONVILLE FLORIDA BANKRUPTCY ATTORNEY: Jacksonville is a beautiful, vibrant city, and it is being attacked by a cancer from within, house by house. And what we see in these neighborhoods, established neighborhoods and new neighborhoods, you start to see vacant houses, decaying lawns. You really lose a sense of community when your neighbors. all of a sudden, have gone.</s>ROMANS: It's so interesting, too, because, quite frankly, Suzanne, the foreclosure rate has slowed a little bit. One in 30 homes last month in this state got a foreclosure notice -- 1 in 360, rather, homes in this state got a foreclosure notice last month, but that is slowing but the reason it is slowing is because the banks have slowed down, because they have been under all this political pressure, legal pressure for doing such a horrible job with the foreclosures and the robo-signing scandal where they were foreclosing wrongly on some people. So this is a front-and-center issue, I think, that no matter what Floridians, housing and jobs, two things that they cannot divorce themselves from when they go to cast a ballot.</s>MALVEAUX: All right. Christine, thank you. Appreciate it. Talking about stories from affiliates across the country, it was a busy day for the Coast Guard in Alaska. They had to rescue 11 fishermen from two different boats that ran aground near Kodiak. You can see the ice and the freezing waters there, dramatic pictures. The fishermen are reportedly doing OK, since they were wearing survival suits. And check out the video, amazing from the Winter X Games in Aspen. This guy taking part in the snowmobile freestyle competition -- whoa, lets go of the sled midair. Colten Moore managed to tuck his head , land on his back, just in the nick of time, otherwise he would have hit the packed snow on his head. Even more amazing, he was able to walk away from the accident and keep competing. He actually took first place. Things getting rough at a Florida hockey game, but not on the ice. The Tampa Bay Lightning mascot sprayed Silly String on a Boston Bruin fan. He didn't think it was all that funny. The fans pushed the mascot -- the mascot is called Thunderbird -- Thunderbug, rather. The mascot was fired, and now there is a Facebook page, dedicated to get her job back. CNN has reached out to her for comment. We haven't heard anything back just quite yet. We got a lot of responses to today's Talkback question. We asked, "Does invoking Reagan help Republican candidates today?" Carol Costello, she's up next with your responses.