Use Your Head

I implore our elected leaders as well as those about to be elected to take the real pulse of the country before using our tax dollars in a wanton fashion. And pehaps before you use our tax dollars against us. This ABC News story has comments with a clear sentiment. That sentiment is clearly stating that foolish and irresponsible people should not be bailed out. By a 4 to 1 margin, CNN readers do not want to see their tax dollars used to bailout individual homeowners.

Skeletons Falling Out of the Closet

It looks like someone who knows something about the deals Senator Dodd and others received on their Countrywide loans is spilling his guts to the Justice Department. Along with Senator Christopher Dodd, the story cites Sen. Kent Conrad, former Fanie Mae CEO Franklin Raines, Henry Cisneros, Richard Holbrooke, Alphonso Jackson, and Donna Shalala and James Johnson.

I wonder when they will start looking at loans from Northern Trust Bank and a certain junior Senator from Illinois.

This Will Be A Disaster

The government is working on a plan to remove the risk of foreclosure from 3 million home owners.

These over priced, ill financed homes need to be returned to the market in order to return home prices to historically normal levels that are in parity with costs of renting and personal incomes. Everyone who was priced out of the market by the real estate bubble along with the millions who have yet to come into the market place will NEVER be able to afford to own their own home without some sort of drastic action to readjust incomes to costs of ownership. In simple terms, I am talking about massive inflation with no real growth in wages. Incomes will rise to meet the cost of living indices. Other costs for food, energy and other consumer goods will rise too. Once again Washington is looking to rob Peter to pay Paul.

The other problem I have with this that "Paul" accounts for less than 10% of the households in the country, who are in trouble with a mortgage. Peter is a bit larger and more complex. The "Peter" who is paying is the rest of the population, who aren't in trouble with their mortgage. "Peter" is every potential home owner who was priced out of the market. "Peter" is every young person who has yet to graduate from school and enter the work force in pursuit of the American dream which is being stamped out by people like Christopher Dodd, Barney Frank, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.

Their names and dozens of other political leaders who have pandered to an uniformed public, in the name of Main Street, will appear on the epitaph of the American Dream, as it killers.

This Must Be Really Bad

The LA Times is refusing to release a video where Barack Obama is at a dinner toasting and singing the praises of a man with ties to a Palestinian terror group. I say it must be bad, because the appearance of impropriety that the existence of this video creates is staggering in my mind. Lets not forget that Barack Obama is a man who has only one degree of separation between himself and the founder of Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah. There are far too many questionable ties between Senator Obama and terrorist organizations to allow this man to become President of the United States. Let’s not forget that these terrorists don't care if they kill, Democrats or Republicans, as long as they are American citizens.

Someone Explain How This is Legal

So, last night the wife and I are watching TV and on comes this Obama commercial, showing a web site with a calculator to show what the savings you'll reap from the 2 candidates tax plans if you plug in your salary, dependants, deductions, etc. I tell the wifey to go that URL, after all, I trust the Tax Policy Center as impartial and honest. We get to the web site and this is what we found ...

We have received many inquiries about an Obama campaign commercial that seems to imply that the Tax Policy Center (TPC) has a tax calculator that can be used to see how the candidates' tax plans would affect people. We don't. The calculator shown in the commercial was designed by the Obama campaign and is in no way affiliated with the nonpartisan TPC.

I have to say, I am really shocked at the out and out lying on the part of the Obama campaign. The ad doesn't imply it, it shows the TPC web site with an application that will tell you that you'll save more money with Obama's tax plan.

Its one thing to register homeless ghetto trash to vote. It’s quite another to tell a lie on TV, like the TPC tax calculator. Watch the video to the end when the guy says he wants to Obama do his hizzle or something. Classic.

Its a shame that McCain will not take of the gloves and start really fighting hard, because the Obama campaign is guilty of everything that the Democrats have accused the Republicans about. I guess for once the Democrats came up with the bigger scum bag.

Calling a Spade a Spade

Even The Boston Herald is calling out its brethren for being biased and partial. In fact The Boston Herald even goes so far as to suggest that people have more faith in Congress, whose approval rating is below that of the President, than they do in a fair and impartial media.

Corruption of the News Media

I really despise this years election cycle. I feel like it has robbed me of my pragmatism, which I valued so much. I've turned into a stark raving Republican and I don't like it very much, but I find it easier to stomach than the current hypocritical line of rhetoric from the Democrats. The way in which the business of electing our representative leadership has changed and not for the better.

My first caveat, I haven't watched much TV news over the last 5 years. Perhaps 10% of my news comes from TV, the rest from various internet outlets. Next, I am a Republican who has become highly disenchanted with W, to the extent that I voted for both Webb and Moran in the last few years. That will not happen again, after their votes on the housing bailout.

I have never really bought into the whole liberal media conspiracy thing. I have always felt that Fox News was overtly biased toward the right.

A recent spat of business travel had me spending a lot of time in airports, where I was subjected to a lot of CNN on airport TVs. I have say, what I saw left me disappointed, appalled and disgusted. CNN clearly displayed a Democratic bias in the amount of coverage and the tone of the coverage for the Presidential candidates. I find this to be a significant betrayal of CNNs principals. As a news outlet, which is what CNN likes to portray itself as, CNN should be offering fair and impartial coverage, but it isn't.

CNN is passing off its liberal agenda as fact or news, when in fact it seems more like CNN is helping to create news and sway events. The way I see it, CNN is overtly pressing its editorial agenda while trading on its solid gold reputation as news agency.

I will direct you all to this article, it describes a lot of what I have observed, from an insider in the inside of the news business.

Media's Presidential Bias and Decline

Summing it All Up

In a recent conversation, I reminded a friend of mine, that for months, I have been saying that we were entering the toughest economic stretch in generations. This was his response...

The 60s got weed and free love.
The 70s got coke and disco.
The 80s got heavy metal and coke.
What did we get? R&B, crystal meth and econnomic fuckery.

What can I say? We got screwed.

This Will Be The Trigger for Runaway Inflation

Recently, Boston Federal Reserve President Eric Rosengren called on the government to do something to bolster home prices. I find it incomprehensible that someone who is educated and informed, like a Federal Reserve President could be this short sighted. For some reason, the government and politicians fear being perceived as doing nothing, which is exactly what the current dilemma requires, because meddling with the natural way in which our economy works is what got us in this mess in the first place?

Even with the last 2 years worth of declines, home prices NEED to come back at least another 20% to approach historical norms, parity with the cost of renting and approach reasonable levels with respect to personal income.

Anything that artificially maintains current home prices will only serve to set the table for another economic crisis in the future. I believe that this crisis will be of epidemic inflation. The only thing that is going to get housing moving again is if younger people can afford entry level homes, which will allow subsequent echelons of home owners to move up. That is the way it has worked in this country for generations. Short circuiting the natural flow of home owners and buyers can only end negatively.

If entry level home prices, and other strata of home prices for that matter, remain at artificially supported levels the consequences will be dire. Cost of living indices will be higher and employers will be forced to pay higher wages to attract quality staff. Higher wages will translate into higher costs for other non-housing related goods and services. Thus, in the long run the working man will see little real growth in income. The relative growth in income will be another mirage that will suck in more and more unwitting people. While I lack the PhD in economics needed to forecast exactly where and how the next disaster will strike, my horse sense tells me that any kind of individual home owner bailout will be the catalyst for it, just like the CRA was for the housing bubble.

A final note on any potential bailout of the individual home owners ... If you are not a home owner and you are a tax payer, your tax dollars are being used against you. In a sense, the government is denying you your right to pursue the American dream; they are denying you, your Constitutional right to pursue happiness in order to help out the foolish, greedy, ignorant home owners who purchased homes that they truly couldn't afford. The time has come to pay the piper and putting off that bill will only make it worse in the future.

Obama’s Agenda, Not so Altruistic

Judge For Yourself

If you read this article and strip out the political rhetoric, you really have to sit back and scratch your head. Sure most of what the author presents is circumstantial, but there is an aweful lot of coincidence that is hard to just write off as coincidence.

How Can the Dems Sidestep Blame?

With evidence like this?

Thanks Moodys

Reuters is reporting that Moodys is now calling for a 2010 bottom. Its nice, but your still not there. Look at the ARM resets coming up. It will easily be 2011 before we find a bottom. Homes are still vastly over priced. And for some reason, fools with more money than sense are still over paying. For some reason Moodys thinks that banks will be done writing down bad paper by 2010, but I think the paper has to go bad before you can write it down, especially considering the just in time accounting processes banks use these days. Considering how caustic the 2006 ARMs are said to be, I can't quite see how the end of the tunnel comes before 2011 or even 2012.