Dems to ban modern firearms, labeling them assault weapons?

This is the big one. Hillary is discussing how the Mexican border is our problem because so called “assault weapons” are flowing from the USA to Mexican drug lords. 

Funny, I call them home defense weapons.

Here comes the government gun grab, take away Americans’ Second Amendment rights to own firearms and protect their family’s lives and do it for Mexico? How gullible do they think we are? 

We all know that the Mexican drug gangs have military, fully automatic weapons from China and Eastern Europe and are exporting tons of drugs and scores of people every day over our borders. Why would banning modern home defense firearms from Americans stop or even slow the drug violence and human trafficing? 

It’s “new speak” coming from the Obama/Orwellian Big Brother/Big Sis government. 

The progressive Democrats are going to ignore a major tenant of the Constitution out of fear, I believe of a civilian backlash.

Tip of the day: Buy guns and bullets. They are the new gold. 

 

 

The Obama administration didn’t waste more than a month to seek to reinstate “the assault weapons ban” (really the modern home defence firearm band) that expired in 2004 during the Bush administration, Attorney General Eric Holder said today.

Wednesday Attorney General Eric Holder said that the Obama administration will seek to reinstitute the assault weapons ban which expired in 2004 during the Bush administration.

(AP Photos/ABC News Graphic )

“As President Obama indicated during his campaign, there are just a few gun-related changes that we would like to make, and among them would be to reinstitute the ban on the sale of assault weapons,” Holder told reporters.

Holder said that putting the ban back in place would not only be a positive move by the United States, it would help cut down on the flow of guns going across the border into Mexico, which is struggling with heavy violence among drug cartels along the border.

Really, why can’t we stop the flow of humans and drugs along the border?

“I think that will have a positive impact in Mexico, at a minimum.” Holder said at a news conference on the arrest of more than 700 people in a drug enforcement crackdown on Mexican drug cartels operating in the U.S.

How are Americans to defend themselves, with only 150-year old gun technology against Mexican drug runners and a well armed new U.S. socialist police state?

Imagine the government making a law that kept new computer or cell phone technology from the public?

Which country’s citizens is Obama concerned about?

New York ABC radio newsman George Weber was a gay pedophile, killed by his boy date. Sanchez, the gay pedophile train engineer was texting teenage boys seconds before he crashed and killed 25 people in LA

The mainstream news has been filtering the news and making everything nice and PC for the dumbed down readers. They only report what fits the “progressive” agenda. 

With the rise of blogs, the truth can now be reported. Did you know that the longtime New York radio newsman was paying teenage runaways for gay sex? George Weber was found stabbed to death in his Brooklyn apartment Sunday morning, cops said. Now we find he was accidently killed by a troubled teen, paid to have rough gay sex with the radio newsman. 

The bloody body of Weber, a passionate liberal fan of the city who spent a decade doing local news on WABC morning radio, was found just after 9 a.m. when he didn’t show up for work. It can now be told that Weber, an outspoken Democrat, was a gay pedophile. He was a chicken hawk who paid teenage boys, often runaways money for sex. A boy who just turned 16 accidently killed Weber during a session of “rough” gay sex.

Weber, 47, was freelancing at ABC’s national radio network after being laid off last year.

 

What kind of books or DVDs did Mr. Sanchez have in his home? Doesn’t the media look into these things? Oh, wait, Sanchez was a gay pedophile Democrat, not a Christian Republican.

The first results of the National Transportation Safety Board investigation are in. Surprising no one, it’s now confirmed that train driver Robert Sanchez was sending text messages moments before crashing a train full of people into an oncoming freight train, killing 25 people. His last text message was sent 22 seconds before the two trains collided. Sanchez was an outspoken Democrat and Obama reporter with a keen interest in teenage boys.

While we’ll likely will never be able to definitively say one way or the other due to the lack of eyewitnesses, those 58 seconds between received message and sent message are likely the reason why Sanchez missed the “red lights” on the track as the freight train approached. Shouldn’t we know what Sanchez was texting? What if it was something like “the brakes don’t work well?”

The cellular network clock and the train’s onboard computer clock are almost certainly set slightly differently, so the final, incoming text message may have arrived somewhat earlier or later than 22 seconds before the crash. If the timestamps are reconciled exactly, the NTSB could then use information about the speed and location of the train to determine exactly where Sanchez’s train was when he took his eyes off the track ahead and whether that is what likely caused him to miss the signals. The content of the message is important, also. If it was a urgent warning, rather than just a friendly “HOW R U?” Sanchez shouldn’t have had to rush back with an answer. Was he having text sex games with the teenage boy?

Why didn’t you read about this in the LA Times or San Francisco Chronicle? How about this?

There is a dark side to the tragedy

Sanchez’s “partner,” Daniel Burton, allegedly hanged himself in the garage of the home they shared in Crestline, a community in the San Bernardino Mountains about 80 miles east of Los Angeles.

Burton’s sister, Carolann Peschell, said she suspected foul play and never believed her 39-year-old brother, who was HIV-positive, would have killed himself. He had found a job at a gourmet restaurant and sounded well when she spoke to him two weeks before his unusual death.

“He was doing fine; he was happy, no signs of depression,” Peschell said. “We didn’t feel my brother was capable of doing this to himself.” He was a gentle man and hanging is a brutal way to kill yourself.

Peschell, who described Sanchez as “very odd, very strange, and obese” said her suspicions were not investigated throughly by San Bernardino County sheriff’s investigators.

A coroner’s report said the two men had argued the night before Burton’s body was found; Sanchez had told Burton they should break up. That would draw attention by a professional CSI team.

Peschell kept her brother’s purported suicide note, which read: “Rob, Happy Valentine’s Day. I love you. Please take care of yourself and Ignatia. I love you both very much.” Ignatia was their dog.

From KFI radio, the John and Ken Show, Los Angeles

Newsman Eric Leonard reported on KFI radio (3:15 PT today) that the driver in the LA Metrolink crash last week, Robert M. Sanchez, is suspected of having killed his male lover 5 years ago. Leonard reports that the that the family of the lover, Daniel Charles Burton, has always believed that Sanchez killed Burton. The Burtons tried to get the police to investigate their son’s death as a murder to no avail. The death appeared to be a suicide, but the family has handwriting experts who say that the handwriting on the suicide note was not Burton’s. The family also told the police that Burton was HIV positive and that he and Sanchez had a fight right before the “suicide.” More recently, the Burtons called Metrolink to warn them that Sanchez was unstable.

Eric Leonard also reports that “it looks clear from [Metrolink’s] review of the [train] controls, that Sanchez did actually apply some speed controls within seconds of the crash but never braked.”

Would Sanchez have lost his home? That could be a motive. Was Sanchez a chicken hawk preoccupied with teen texting? He was arrested and plead guilty to theft of expensive electronic gaming equipment. And on Sept. 2 his train killed a pedestrian. Was Sanchez texting then too?

California dream turning into a nightmare for middle class

California has turned into a high-tax, socialist state where the working middle class has to support millions of illegals and highly paid government employees. The state income tax has now broke the 10 percent barrier. The number of people leaving has for the first time in 70 years outpaced the incoming number, (including illegals).

Nevada, Arizona, California and Florida had the nation’s top foreclosure rates. In Nevada, one in every 70 homes received a foreclosure filing, while the number was one every 147 in Arizona. Rounding out the top 10 were Idaho, Michigan, Illinois, Georgia, Oregon and Ohio.

Among metro areas, Las Vegas was first, with one in every 60 housing units receiving a foreclosure filing. It was followed by the Cape Coral-Fort Myers area in Florida and five California metropolitan areas: Stockton, Modesto, Merced, Riverside-San Bernardino and Bakersfield.

The Scobleizer has written a good blog post on the subject. Scoble is an IT and social media guru in Silicon Valley who often visits Texas. He interviewed the Texas governor, Rick Perry and they Twitter each other. Even after the real estate bubble burst in 2005-06, and homes fell in price by 20 percent each of the last three years, homes are still overpriced and only 10 percent of California  households can afford median-priced homes. Nationally, 50 percent can afford the median-priced home.

The state of California has lost it’s glamorous image. I think of it now as a congested, welfare state with the highest taxes in the United States and the largest “public” workforce to support. Did you know that most of the government employees retire at full pay after 20 years of service?

http://scobleizer.com/2009/03/24/is-california-is-setup-for-a-brain-drain/comment-page-2/#comment-2008731

Joel Kotkin of the SF Chronicle wrote this piece in 2007.

California has been losing ground in the new millennium. In 2004-05, it fell to 17th, behind not only fast-growing Arizona and Nevada but also Oregon, Washington and rival “nation-state” Texas.

Job creation has been even less impressive. In the Bay Area and Los Angeles, it can only be considered mediocre or worse. If not for the strong performance of the interior counties of the state — what Bill Frey and I call the “Third California” — the state already would be rightly considered a laggard when it comes to creating employment.

More disturbing, as California’s population has grown — largely from immigration — per-capita income growth has weakened. From the 1930s to as late as the 1980s, Californians generally got richer faster than other Americans. In 1946, Gunther reported, Californians enjoyed the highest living standards and the third-highest per-capita income in the country.

Today, California ranks 12th in per-capita income. And it’s losing ground: Between 1999 and 2004, California’s per-capita income growth ranked a miserable 40th among the states.

This slow growth reflects a gradually widening chasm between social classes. Although the rest of the country has also experienced this trend, the gap between rich and poor has expanded more rapidly in California than in the rest of the country.

Today, notes a recent study by the Public Policy Institute of California, California has the 15th-highest rate of poverty of all American states. When cost of living adjustments are made, only New York and the District of Columbia fare worse. Tragically, many of California’s poor are working. Somehow, this does not seem the best road to the governor’s dream of a “harmonious” society.

How did this happen to our golden state? There are many causes.

Certainly poverty has been greatly exacerbated by huge waves of immigration, particularly from Mexico and other developing countries. But other states — including Texas and Arizona — have also absorbed many immigrants, as well as people from the rest of this country, and have not experienced similarly strong jumps in their poverty rates.

Changes in the economy are clearly suspect. From the 1930s to the 1980s, California created a broad spectrum of opportunities for white- and blue-collar workers alike. Even the 1990s expansion, suggests Debbie Reed of the policy institute, helped reduce poverty by expanding a wide range of employment opportunities.

Today, economic growth in California — like that in much of the Northeast — seems tilted largely toward elites. Once a state known for its relative social democracy, the Golden State is becoming what Citigroup strategist Ajay Kapur has dubbed a plutonomy, dominated largely by a small wealthy class and their spending.

For example, despite all the hype about the renewed Internet boom in Silicon Valley, there has been only modest expansion of employment, even in the past year. Undoubtedly lavish takings by a relative handful of engineers, managers and investors are boosting high-end restaurateurs in San Francisco and revving up BMW sales, but benefits don’t seem to accrue as much to assemblers, midlevel managers and other high-tech workers.

Similarly, the governor’s entertainment industry friends, as well as art and developer elites close to Mayors Antonio Villaraigosa and Gavin Newsom, may feel these are the best of times. But Los Angeles and San Francisco, along with Monterey, now suffer a poverty rate of more than 20 percent, among the highest level in the country.

Parallel to these developments, California is losing its once broad middle class, the traditional source of its political balance and much of its entrepreneurial genius. Outmigration from the state is growing and, contrary to the notions of some sophisticates, it’s not just the rubes and roughhouses who are leaving.

Indeed, an analysis of the most recent migration numbers shows a disturbing trend: an increasing out-migration of educated people from California’s largest metropolitan areas. Back in the 1990s, this was mostly a Los Angeles phenomena, but since 2000, the Bay Area appears to be suffering a high per-capita outflow of educated people.

This middle class flight is likely driven by two things: greater opportunities outside the state and the cost of housing in-state. Over the past 50 years, housing prices in coastal California in particular have grown much faster than elsewhere; the Bay Area’s rate of housing inflation over the past 50 years has been twice the national average.

Given the shrinking per-capita income advantage for being in California, moving elsewhere increasingly makes sense, particularly for those who do not already own homes and don’t have wealthy parents. In some parts of the state, barely 10 percent of households can now afford a median-price home; in the rest of the country that number is roughly 50 percent.

These trends suggest that California could be devolving toward an unappealing model of class stratification. As educated white-collar and skilled blue-collar workers leave, businesses in the state will be forced to truncate their operations — perhaps having an elite research lab, design office or marketing arm in California but shunting most midlevel jobs elsewhere.

Davos annual financial summit — It’s time to show stockholders and taxpayers what the big shots do with our money–Gov. Paterson pulls out of his ski trip to Europe

Just last year at the annual gathering of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, the CEO of Lehman Brothers held court on the state of the global economy before lucky big league journalists and quiet subordinates while other Wall Street stars mingled after-hours with the likes of Claudia Schiffer, the supermodel, Bono of U2, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie. Pinch Sulzberger of the New York Times empire always attended. Did he get an invite this year? Why would he? 

IT ALL STARTS TUESDAY. Better shape up for those ski pants. 

But the politicians go on our dimes. New York Governor Paterson will fly off to a “junket” in a swank Swiss town this week, escaping from New York just days after his disastrous effort to chose Hillary Rodham Clinton’s Senate replacement, The New York Post has learned.

UPDATE: A beleaguered Gov. Paterson pulled out of his Switzerland trip Monday as a new poll shows his once-huge lead over Attorney General Andrew Cuomo has virtually disappeared.

Paterson was planning to leave Thursday to attend and speak at theWorld Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, but said this morning he decided to stay to concentrate on the state budget.

With all the wealthy Democrats in DC to help Obama make the USA a socialist state, the big spenders are not showing up in Davos this year. They may be in hiding. 

As business, government and even nonprofit leaders jet set into the ski mecca, the cameras may be blocked from some of the parties this time. It would not be good PR to let the “journalists” into the five star restarants this time around. 

And with much of the financial system in the UK, EU and the USA edging toward a possible socialist takeover, the 2009 agenda at Davos, “Shaping the Post-Crisis World,” has taken the limelight over  global warming and globalization.

“The pendulum has swung and power has moved back to governments,” said Klaus Schwab, the German-born economics professor who founded the World Economic Forum in 1971 and has been its impresario ever since. “This is the biggest economic crisis since Davos began.”

Davos will draw approximately the same amount of participants (2,500) – but the cavier and celebrity-filled parties are going to be hidden from view. There  will be many fewer members of the Bogner-ski suit set strutting down the resort’s snowy streets with their Rosignol skis in tow. Will Getty and his boy Gavin Newsom be there? 

 

Davos has become so early 2000s and so Euro-centric. “Let’s stay longer at Sundance!”

Republicans gain two more seats as the backlash begins

First it was the big win for Saxby Chamblis for the U.S. Senate from Georgia. The Democrats had a lot of paid people in the state to make sure that didn’t happen. They can’t change election results while counting if there is a landslide.

Next, in Louisiana’s runoff elections, two more wins for Republicans. This shows the people understand what absolute rule by the Democrats would be terrible for the nation. 

Republicans made an aggressive push to take the 2nd District House seat from the 61-year-old Democrat William Jefferson, who has pleaded “not guilty” to charges of bribery, laundering money and misusing his congressional office. You might remember seeing photos of Jefferson’s “cold cash” wrapped in foil in his freezer on FOX news.
“The people of the 2nd District have spoken,” Cao, 41, told supporters at a restaurant near the French Quarter. “We want new direction. We want action. We want accountability.”
In a speech that  stopped short of concession, Jefferson blamed low voter turnout for his showing and said supporters may have thought he was a shoo-in after he won a Nov. 4 primary in the black and heavily Democratic district.
“I think people just ran out of gas a bit,” he said. “People today flat didn’t come out in large numbers.”
Greg Rigamer, a New Orleans political consultant, said his analysis showed turnout in predominantly white sections of the district was double that in black areas. He said that helped push Cao to victory over Jefferson.
“This is quite a feat,” Rigamer said of Cao’s victory.

With ACORN money all used up to elect Obama, this election was decided by the voters of the district who cared enough to follow through on what was a national joke of corruption. 

Watch the New York Times, Washington Post, LA Times and SF Chronicle for their coverage. Page 12 you think?

The age of objectivity and fair reporting in America is over — MSNBC is disgraced

Who is a Democrat PR talking head and who is a journalist on MSNBC, NBC or CNN? Why stop there? The Washington Post, New York Times, LA Times and SF Chronicle are not investigating economic issues and massive bailouts. What kind of balanced journalism do you think the media performed during the two-year election?

First the gang journalists piled on Hillary, next they covered for Obama and attacked Palin.

MSNBC was the victim of a hoax when it reported that an adviser to John McCain had identified himself as the source of an embarrassing story about former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin, the network said Wednesday.

The New York TImes had a reporter rewrite an AP story on the hoax and they spun the story to blame FOX News first with the hoax.  This is called journalism?

MSNBC was the victim of a hoax when it reported that an adviser to John McCain had identified himself as the source of an embarrassing story about former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin, the network said Wednesday.

David Shuster, an anchor for the cable news network, said on air Monday that Martin Eisenstadt, “a McCain policy adviser,” had come forth and identified himself as the source of a story saying Palin had mistakenly believed Africa was a country instead of a continent.

Eisenstadt identifies himself on a blog as a senior fellow at the Harding Institute for Freedom and Democracy and “a contributor to FOX News.” Yet neither he nor the institute exist; each is part of a hoax dreamed up by a filmmaker named Eitan Gorlin and his partner, Dan Mirvish, the New York Times reported Wednesday.

The Eisenstadt claim had mistakenly been delivered to Shuster by a producer and was used in a political discussion Monday afternoon, MSNBC said.

“The story was not properly vetted and should not have made air,” said Jeremy Gaines, network spokesman. “We recognized the error almost immediately and ran a correction on air within minutes.”

Gaines told the Times that someone in the network’s newsroom had presumed the information solid because it was passed along in an e-mail from a colleague.

The hoax was limited to the identity of the source in the story about Palin—not the Fox News story itself. While Palin has denied that she mistook Africa for a country, the veracity of that report was not put in question by the revelation that Eisenstadt is a phony.

Eisenstadt’s “work” had been quoted and debunked before. The Huffington Post said it had cited Eisenstadt in July on a story regarding the Hilton family and McCain.

Among the other victims were political blogs for the Los Angeles Times and The New Republic, each of which referenced false material from Eisenstadt’s blog.

“The story was not properly vetted and should not have made air,” said Jeremy Gaines, MSNBC spokesman.

There are plenty of questions that are not asked.

How did Minnesota Democrat Party election officials come up with 500 more votes for the Democrat senate candidate days after the polls closed and none for the Republican candidate?

Why was there a crisis over $150,000 spent on Sarah Palin’s campaign clothing, but no comparison with Hillary’s warehouse of pantsuits or Obama’s Greek columns and semi-truck of suits?

Newspaper and news magazine circulation is dropping. Layoffs continue. (Wait until after January).

Bottom-up change of America by Obama — Lowering the middle class

Trickle up poverty,  a phrase coined by someone who deserves an award or something, is probably not well liked by the far right. Why not try trickle up economic support?  Most of us consider ourselves “middle class.” I’d imagine even Donald Trump and Rush Limbaugh think of themselves as middle class, on the upper end, of course.

For political “big tent” purposes, the middle class is now about 80 percent of the country, including the  millions who don’t pay income taxes. We now know that  Joe the Plumber will soon be too rich for middle class status or Obama’s tax cuts. Welcome to the new lower middle class.

The Wall Street Journal’s Bill McGurn unpacks Barack Obama’s “tax cut for 95% of the people” hooey. The short version:

Now, if you have been following this so far, you have learned that people who pay no income tax will get an income tax refund. You have also learned that this check will represent relief for the payroll taxes these people do pay. And you have been assured that this rebate check won’t actually come out of payroll taxes, lest we harm Social Security.

You have to admire the audacity. With one touch of the Obama magic, what otherwise would be described as taking money from Peter to pay Paul is now transformed into Paul’s tax relief. Where a tax cut for payroll taxes paid will not in fact come from payroll taxes. And where all these plans come together under the rhetorical umbrella of “Making Work Pay.”

All of this is breathtakingly dishonest. (As Al Gore would say I think we need a lock box.)

Welcome to the world of MSM-lapdog-ism. But I can’t blame the MSM. McCain was too frozen in country club Republican politics to respond. 

This will be the first of many terrible years for newspapers

There are no longer any suckers left with deep pockets and the desire to buy newspapers even at fire sale prices.

Last week, Hearst CEO Victor Ganzi abruptly resigned, citing “irreconcilable policy differences” over the future direction of the company.

 

What does he mean by that? Usually executives say “I’m taking time off to spend with my family…”

The New York Times and Business Week reported that the reason for Ganzi to leave a multi-million dollar-a -year, ivory tower position was recent investments and dismal returns in newspapers. He made some bad decisions.

Fortune and Portfolio said no, that was just an obvious-suspect guess and that the conflict was really over something else. Yeah, right.  Becuase Hillary was out of the race, perhaps?

 

Hearst made its last big newspaper acquisition in November 2007, buying the Tribune’s (former Times-Mirror) dailies in the well-heeled Connecticut suburbs of Greenwich and Stamford. Hearst has also signed on to numerous joint ventures with Dean Singleton’s MediaNews (bottom feeders), bought an interest in the company and thus has been poised to take over, should Singleton falter under its heavy debt load. That would be like owning the rights to own Enron in 2006.

This has been the longest, most grueling month for newspapers. Advertising reveue continues to fall like a brick thrown out of the new Hearst building. The editors need to fire the “business side” and get things turned around. That’s the ticket.

How about editors delivering the paper before they come to work in the morning?

The editors may be finding out that their ivory tower positions of filtering only the news that fits their liberal agenda is not viable any more. Each exectutive editor may want to pull their head out of their ass and look around at the massive layoffs.

Obama would be Jimmy Carter’s second term

Sen. John McCain just shot off the best line of the 2008 campaign: “Obama would be Jimmy Carter’s second term.” That is a grand slam, slam dunk and TD rolled up into one.

Jimmy Carter was the worst president of the past 50 years, but Obama could take that  title away from Carter. Maybe it would be good for the country to see how much damage the Democrat/Socialist party can do. That’s how Reagan and the Republicans came roaring back to power in a landslide. Even die hard Democrats couldn’t take another term of Jimmy Carter’s mediocrity.

The most dramatic dip in U.S. home prices in history — There will be blood

New figures the first week of June reveal that house prices in the U.S. have already fallen by more over the past 12 months than in any year during the Great Depression. This study comes from the Economist. You didn’t read about it in your LA Times, SF Chronicle, Chicago Tribune or Washington Post, did you?

These are national figures. Some of the country didn’t see any dip. For example, there are areas of Houston such as EPCOT village-styled, heavily wooded community called The Woodlands that experienced price increases in homes near The Waterway and Town Center, some call the Lake District, the homes in Panther Creek. Here you can buy a 3,500 square foot brick mansion with pool, granite counter tops, Brazilian cheery floors, glass conservatory, rot iron fence for $420,000-$500,000.

There are other areas of Houston, such as Sugar Land, Kingwood and Katy that have increased in value as well. Houston area properties didn’t go through the heady spike in prices that San Diego, Hollywood and the San Francisco area did from 2001-2005. Houston has become one of the safe havens of high-quality housing. Austin, San Antonio and Dallas have also survived the drop in prices.

Another factor saving the Texas economy — oil. U.S. oil production has sharply increased due to the price per barrel hitting $135. Old oil fields are pumping again due to high-tech well enhancement operations by Texas E&P oil service companies. In addition, Houston is second only to New York in Fortune 500 companies.

Mainstream media didn’t hide the housing bubble — They didn’t see it. They were too busy writing puff pieces on celebrities making millions on their mansions

Mick Gregory

I really do like to say “I told you so,” once in a while, especially to liberal Californians in the mass media. My family and I moved from the Bay Area to Houston, Texas three years ago at the peak of the housing bubble. We were watching the market trends and came to our own conclusion well before the “experts” in the media. Our neighbors, both attorneys, had also noticed the growth was hitting 30 percent a year in our San Francisco suburb. Those stats come in every month by realtor associations; polished up by their PR departments — they are finally picked up by journalists and edited neatly following the AP style book. There are a lot of hacks in the industry who think that’s what makes good journalism. No analysis, just following the rules of serial comma usage and the very important difference (in their minds) between that and which.

Never mind that the price per square foot was over $350 and there were multiple offers coming on homes. The time spent on the market wasn’t measured in days, but hours.

Three years ago, there were very few reporters at the LA Times or SF Chronicle looking at the historic, unreal climb in prices. “This is California, there will always be a market for a piece of paradise,” we’ve seen in various versions in the entertaining Homes sections that ran every Saturday and Sunday.

Reports on the housing bubble and wobbles were rare. How could you expect anything better? Business reporters don’t have the resume to get an administrative assistant job at Fortune 500 companies or with developers. They don’t have the ambition to sell real estate, or the skill to be a property flipper.

More important than that, journalists are tied to their home town newspapers or TV stations. They can’t be objective in reporting bloated housing prices or comparing the quality of housing between markets such as LA and Houston.

The free fall of California real estate is finally front page news. Now that foreclosures are equal to home sales in some California neighborhoods. All this sudden analysis is 2.5 years too late for the thousands losing their homes.

Back then, the “executive editors” promoted cute columns called Hot Properties with features on how celebrities were tripling their prices on Bay Area and Malibu homes.

The party is over. That was the last time newspapers made windfall profits off of 5 pound Sunday newspapers.

Here is an excellent look at the media circus from Dan Gillmor’s blog on citizen journalism is among the best in the blog biz. Gillmor gives journalists too much credit. He should know some 94.5 percent didn’t even take Economics 101.

Housing Bubble Coverage: Defending the Indefensible

Editor & Publisher: Newspaper Biz Editors Defend Mortgage Crisis Coverage. Did the growing mortgage credit crisis, which took a huge turn with last week’s collapse of Bear Sterns, get enough early coverage from newspapers? Top business editors at several of the nation’s major papers say yes, although a few admit some of the more complicated elements may not have been broken out enough for readers.

“What tripe. The newspaper industry almost totally failed to do its job, and the public got screwed once again.”

Citing a story here and there, as several editors do in the E&P piece, is not evidence of newspapers doing their job. It’s quite the opposite.

When an economic catastrophe of this sort — and entirely predicable one — is building, journalists are failing to do their jobs when they don’t harp on it.

As I said in a previous posting, newspapers and broadcasters were raking in billions in advertising from the real estate and banking industries as this bubble inflated. I do not believe this is a coincidence. I also don’t believe it was deliberate malfeasance; but you just don’t see lots of tough coverage in media of the people and companies paying the bills.

Many if not most papers have special weekly real estate pages or sections where you would find little hint of the potential for trouble. I know I looked for it in the papers I read. That’s where the discussion belonged — as well, of course, as Page One — not solely in the occasional business page stories. Hundreds of references to bubbles, most in the past year and not when there was a chance to slow down that train, were dwarfed by comparison to the buying advice that dominated coverage of real estate overall.

Oh, sure, there were extremely infrequent stories containing warnings in a few publications — and occasional quotes from skeptics in the prices-just-keep-rising stories that overwhelmingly dominated the coverage. But the reality is that journalists mostly didn’t have a clue, or didn’t want to have a clue. I don’t know which is worse.

Some bloggers, and some economists, did shout warnings. They were ignored, or worse, insulted by wishful thinkers and (I suspect) people who stood to gain from the continuing bubble.

Again, from a previous post, here are some questions the media all but ignored until too late:

Where were the stories we should have been seeing, noting that “buyers” — a word that is ludicrous in context –were running headlong toward a financial cliff? What happened to the coverage of a housing market that fewer and fewer people could afford to enter except with no-interest or no-down-payment loans, where home prices were so far out of sync with the economy that there was no precedent for such imbalance?

Where were the stories pointing out that the secondary (and far beyond) mortgage markets were salting hugely risky debt all through the American economy? You think your bank or pension fund doesn’t have some of this garbage somewhere in its books? Think again.

The media also bungled by not fingering the makers of this bubble apart from foolish “buyers” who proved to be such suckers. This boom was fueled by people who knew it couldn’t last: brokers, bankers and, above all, Wall Street’s ever-clever wizards who risk other people’s money for gigantic fees.

This is another journalistic scandal. It’s not quite on the order of the bended-knee, pre-war coverage — stenography of government officials’ lies and deceptions — that helped steer America into the Iraq war, but only because it’s not killing people in large numbers.

It’s a massive enough scandal, though. There’s plenty of pain left in this deflation, possibly including an outright tanking of the economy.

The journalism craft should take a long, hard look at what it’s failed to do, yet again, in the housing bubble. It has failed to warn — as loudly and incessantly as it did in promoting the housing bubble — that a financial crunch was on the way.

There’s plenty of blame to go around in this mess. The finger-pointing has barely begun. But when it gets going for real, I hope that journalists who do some of that pointing will at least look in a mirror.

“I can remember the yards of copy written about new developments and real estate sections filled with puff pieces promoting house buying, with no hint of any risks involved with these investments. For the few stories you cite, what about those that quoted the National Association of Realtors about how this was the right time to buy a house, and that house prices have never declined. Remember how we were told house prices were supposed to be “sticky” and that when there was a downturn, the prices would stick rather than fall precipitously. Where were the investigative pieces about how low-income people were being ripped off by subprime mortgages? Both the New York Times and Wall Street Journal you cite ran endless stories about high prices for New York apartments, with appropriate pictures of the luxury amenities that came with them. In my lifetime, newspapers have missed the S&L excess of the 1990’s, and they dropped the ball on this one, too. And what about the culpability of Congress in this? Where are the investigative pieces of House and Senate banking legislation that opened the door to easy lending, no-document loans and giving mortgages to people with lousy credit reports — including illegal aliens working day work construction jobs? From what I’ve heard on CSpan, Sen. Jon Kyl has reams of information documenting how Congress contributed to the collapse now happening, but no reporters seem interested.”

DanGillmor.com Home page

The Rev. Jeremiah Wright Is Preaching to the Democrat Choir. What He Says Sounds A Lot Like MoveOn.Org

The Democrat front runner, Barack Obama will clear things up this morning by distancing himself from his Trinity Church Minister, Rev. Wright. But why? Isn’t that the same hate speech that has been feeding the Democrat Party for the past 40 years?

This is the core of the Democrat Party.
Only the liberal elite, white leaders are to be the top of the ticket. Obama went beyond his station in life. He was to be Hillary’s “running mate.” Get to the back of the Clinton bus, Obama.

“That anger” of black men like Wright, Obama said, “may not get expressed in public, in front of white co-workers or white friends. But it does find voice in the barbershop or around the kitchen table. … to condemn it without understanding its roots, only serves to widen the chasm of misunderstanding that exists between the races.”

Post this sign in public places!

Imagine if you will, Rush Limbaugh or Michael Savage caught masturbating in front of a young girl. This is just a tid bit of Bernie Ward’s background.

This is a glimpse into the mind of a top Democrat and leader of the left. Bernie Ward is his name.
WARNING: DO NOT READ WHILE EATING

PUT THIS STICKER UP IN PUBLIC PLACES.

Barbara Boxer is said to have put pressure on the SFPD to halt the investigation of Ward.

“…Using the San Francisco Chronicle to get his message to KGO listeners, Bernie Ward is begging to be rehired at his former station. …Ward, 56, is using the kind of excuse that his liberal apologists would never tolerate from conservative talkers: that his crimes are in the past and therefore should be forgotten. Indicted on several counts of both possessing and distributing child pornography, Ward may indeed face prison time, whether San Francisco’s disturbed liberal establishment likes it or not…” http://radioequalizer.blogspot.com/2008/01/bernie-ward-begs-to-be-rehired-still.html

A pdf of the police report has an on-line chat between Ward, who refers to himself as a “slave”, and a Dominatrix. Ward talks about homosexual encounters at a porn theater, states he wants to be sodomized and “sisified”, says his daughter saw him masturbate, says he committed a sex act on his own son and threatens to molest children at a future date. http://prosites-prs.homestead.com/ward_new.pdf

This is the man that the San Francisco radio station, KGO, gave a primetime show to to attack President Bush for 15-hours a week and then three hours on the weekend to attack Christians (on the show “God Talk”) and is considering rehiring.

His agent intimates that it’s the Bush Administration getting him for being such a tireless critic ( she also offers the “Townsend Defense”) http://abclocal.go.com/kgo/story?section=news/iteam&id=5821709

Yet, like all good liberals, he is not going to let a little misunderstanding regarding pedophilia get in the way of his righteous fight against REAL EVIL:

US Marines fighting Bush / Hitler’s war:

“…American soldiers are engaged in an immoral war…Go Hillary! (Bernie Ward worked on the staff of Senator Barbara Boxer (D).

People cutting up their Bank of America and Capital One credit cards in record numbers and taking advice from Dave Ramsey

By Mick Gregory

The sub-prime mortgage meltdown has been one of the major news events of 2007. People in California with $5,000 monthly mortgage payments are just handing over their keys to the banks. But wait, there’s more.

Americans are stopping payment on their credit cards at an all-time record rate, sending delinquencies and defaults surging by double-digit percentages in the last year and prompting warnings of big hits to banks with more to come.

An Associated Press (AP) report of financial data from the country’s largest card issuers also found that the greatest rise was among accounts more than 90 days in arrears.

Finacial experts say these signs of the deterioration of finances of millions of American households are partly a result of the subprime mortgage crisis and could spell more trouble ahead for millions of Americans and some banks.

Timing is everything. Talk show host Dave Ramsey has seen his nationally syndicated show grow exponentially the past 18 months. He is telling listeners to cut up their credit cards and pay off those with the smallest balance first. But even before that, Ramsey says pay for your food, mortagage, car payment and sock away $1,000 for emergencies.

There are a lot of methods for trying to dig yourself out of financial problems, and this may not necessarily be the best one for you. The “Baby Steps” are, however, a very workable plan for most people. They’re simple, straightforward, and they work. Ramsey has callers every day screaming “I’m debt free!” He is attracting a following with a cult atmosphere.

“The bottom line?” asks Ramsey. “It’s easy to become wealthy if you don’t have any payments.”

The best and most-detailed version available of these Baby Steps can be found in Ramsey’s book The Total Money Makeover.

It’s like the chicken or the egg proposition. Did the banks start the credit crisis with their easy “come on” rates then turned on the juice to 30 percent of millions of customers, or was it Ramsey’s advice to stop paying these excessive fines and cut up your cards?

This was the first Christmas we didn’t use credit cards. What a nice feeling.

What are the consequences?

The value of credit card accounts at least 30 days late jumped 26 percent to $17.3 billion in October from a year earlier at 17 large credit card trusts examined by the AP. That represented more than 4 percent of the total outstanding principal balances owed to the trusts on credit cards that were issued by banks such as Bank of America and Capital One and for retailers like Home Depot and Wal-Mart.
At the same time, defaults – when lenders essentially give up hope of ever being repaid and write off the debt – rose 18 percent to almost $961 million in October, according to filings made by the trusts with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Serious delinquencies are up sharply: Some of the nation’s biggest lenders – including, GE Money Bank and HSBC – reported increases of 50 percent or more in the value of accounts that were at least 90 days delinquent when compared with the same period a year ago.

The AP analyzed data representing about 325 million individual accounts held in trusts that were created by credit card issuers in order to sell the debt to investors – similar to how many banks packaged and sold subprime mortgage loans. Together, they represent about 45 percent of the $920 billion the Federal Reserve counts as credit card debt owed by Americans.
Until recently, credit card default rates had been running close to record lows, providing one of the few profit growth areas for the nation’s banks, which continue to flood Americans’ mailboxes with billions of letters monthly offering easy sign-ups for new plastic.

Even after the recent spike in bad loans, the credit card business is still quite lucrative, thanks to interest rates that can run as high as 36 percent, plus late fees and other penalties.

But what is coming into sharper focus from the detailed monthly SEC filings from the trusts is a snapshot of the worrisome state of Americans’ ability to juggle growing and expensive credit card debt.
The trend carried into November. As of Friday, all of the trusts that filed reports for the month show increases in both delinquencies and defaults over November 2006, and many show sequential increases from October.
Discover accounts 30 days or more delinquent jumped 25,716 from November 2006 and had increased 6,000 between October and November this year.
Many economists expect delinquencies and defaults to rise further after the holiday shopping season.