Home "ownership"
Annualized, the July sales figures would translate into fewer than 3.9 million homes sold this year — a staggeringly low figure. (The record high occurred in 2005, when more than seven million houses were sold.)
The months-to-sale number was depressingly high; the Realtors group reported that it now takes more than a year to sell a typical house, compared with six months in a normal market. The amount of inventory is high.
Lest we forget, these awful numbers are coming out at a time when the financial incentive to buy could hardly be stronger: the fixed rate on a 30-year mortgage is at an incredibly low 4.36 percent, according to an authoritative survey conducted by Freddie Mac. ...NYT
Pretty awful.
Look for the truth hidden in there in the second sentence. Seven million houses were sold in 2005. Most "homeowners" were people didn't actually own those houses. They were in a bubble market in which their suburban mcmansion was owned by millions of "owners" of collateralized debt obligations. "Homes" were real property not owned by their inhabitants.
When we talk about "owning one's own home," we're talking about a stable society and national economy that didn't exist in 2005. The only real gain shown in "the sale of a home" in 2005 and now is in the bottom line of the middle man -- the real estate agent. As the Times article points out, the only happy fella these days is the chief economist at the National Association of Realtors and he's looking like a damn fool.
Republicans in bed
Democrats, who have been stung by the criticism that they've been too friendly with (and generous to) Wall Street, can now use that issue against their opponents. Dems may have had a couple of beers with bankers, but that's nothing like the hot sex found in the relationship, these days, between Wall Street and Republicans. The Times Eric Lichtblau focuses on Paul Singer, a Goldwater Republican who oversees a $17 billion hedge fund.
He has become one of the biggest bankrollers of Republican causes, giving more than $4 million of his money and raising millions more through fund-raisers he hosts for like-minded candidates who often share his distaste for what they view as governmental over-meddling in the financial industry. The same day in June that the House gave final approval to the sweeping overhaul of financial regulations, Mr. Singer had a fund-raiser at his Central Park West apartment, netting more than $1 million for seven Republican Senate candidates who had opposed the bill.
And it doesn't look as though this will end any time soon.
The Gitmo mess
The administration really wants Guantanamo's "child trial" to go away. The embarrassment of having the first big military tribunal under the new rules that centers on a prisoner who was not only a child when he was brought to Guantanamo, but who has been in prison now for eight years, is bad enough. But it's setting the Obama administration up for international protest. Worse, the kid is refusing a plea agreement. That leaves few options, none attractive. It's a mess.
The judge declined to suppress statements Mr. Khadr made after an Army interrogator sought to frighten him with a fabricated story about an Afghan youth who disappointed interrogators and was sent to an American prison where he died after a gang rape. In a pretrial hearing, the interrogator confirmed making that implicit threat, but the judge ruled it did not taint Mr. Khadr’s later confessions.
And prosecutors disqualified an officer from the jury because he said he agreed with President Obama that Guantánamo had compromised America’s values and international reputation.
Administration officials would speak only anonymously about deliberations on whether to try to abort the trial. But their view about the need to improve the system’s perceived credibility — so allies will cooperate by providing evidence or extraditing defendants — was echoed by Kenneth L. Wainstein, assistant attorney general for national security in the Bush administration.
“It is important for the government to be able to proceed through a trial, to do so in a transparent way, and have the world see that this is a fair process with strong safeguards and full due process,” he said. “The sooner that happens, the better.”
No one intended the Khadr case to be the first trial under the revamped system. ...NYT
There are so many messes left behind by the Bush administration that we maybe should have elected two administrations in 2008: the Obama administration to take us forward, and an entirely separate entity to deal with the dirt and stench of Bush/Cheney.
Of course, if Obama had a real Department of Justice, that would take care of the problem.
