GirlsAloudFan
Blue Crack Addict
Forgive me if this picture of Sarah Palin has already been posted...
A shame that kids don't even have the right to free speech any more. (one way to look at this)
But the truth?
this kid is being brought up in a very unhealthy environment.
I hope he makes it to adulthood and gains the ability to think for himself.
WASHINGTON (AP) — The lobbying firm of John McCain's campaign manager was paid $15,000 a month for several years until last month by one of two housing companies taken over by the federal government, a person familiar with the financial arrangement said Tuesday night.
That money from Freddie Mac to the firm of Rick Davis was on top of more than $30,000 a month that went directly to Davis for five years starting in 2000.
The $30,000 a month came from both Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, the other housing entity now under government control because of the crisis in the financial markets...
Forgive me if this picture of Sarah Palin has already been posted...
I don't know why people assume that students in a school have the same rights of expression or privacy that they would in their own homes. They do not and never have.
The whole "Bush Doctrine" and "Bridge to Nowhere" nonsense are distractions. I'm betting not a heck of alot of average undecideds give two shits about either of these "issues" so I wish the media would just shut the hell up and explore other issues.
But the truth?
this kid is being brought up in a very unhealthy environment.
I hope he makes it to adulthood and gains the ability to think for himself.
I have to agree. The dad and the son were on Hannity and Colmes last night, and they did seem a tad bit
Millions spend half of income on housingBy ADRIAN SAINZ and ALAN ZIBEL
AP Business Writers
Siobhan Dooley
Al Ray is so strapped for cash, the only time he eats out is on Wednesday or Sunday, when the local McDonald's sells hamburgers for 49 cents.
Ray lost his engineering job last November, and has been working as high school tutor, scratching out about $1,000 a month - if he's lucky. He struggled to make his $1,400 monthly mortgage payment and $330 monthly homeowners' association fee until May, when he stopped paying.
Ray, 44, is looking for work and renting out a room in his two-bedroom condo in Davie, Fla., for $500, but his monthly income doesn't match his expenses and he's facing foreclosure.
"I barely have money to survive," he said.
Ray is one of more than 7.5 million people - almost 15 percent of American homeowners with a mortgage - who are spending half of their income or more on housing costs, according to 2007 data released Tuesday by the U.S. Census Bureau. That is up from nearly 7.1 million the year before.
Traditionally, the government and most lenders consider a homeowner spending 30 percent or more of their income on housing costs to be financially burdened. But that definition now covers almost 38 percent of American homeowners with a mortgage - 19 million of them.
Though home prices have fallen this year, in the most expensive markets where home prices tripled during the boom, many working families still cannot afford to buy a home.
"We had a bubble," said Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, D.C. "This is a case where we absolutely want the market to adjust."
The data underscore the serious affordability problems in this country and highlight how the slightest financial problem - from a lost job to higher gas prices or insurance premiums - can put a family behind on their mortgages and into the realm of foreclosure.
When home prices fell in the early 1990s, borrowers had more equity in their homes, and were able to escape foreclosure. But now, an estimated 10 million homeowners owe more on their mortgages than their homes are worth, according to Moody's economy.com.
More than 4 million homeowners were at least one month behind on their loans at the end of June, and almost 500,000 had started the foreclosure process, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association.
Cascading foreclosures over the past two years created a domino effect in the lending industry, undermining investor confidence and forcing the Bush administration last weekend to announce the greatest rescue package and market intervention since the Great Depression.
And yet, the deal will not help Dolly Hanna, 51, and her husband, who bought five homes in the San Francisco area over the past 20 years, and were enjoying life during the housing boom by renting them out.
But her husband's overtime at his mechanic's job was cut, and the Hannas now find themselves overextended at a loss of $15,000 per month and trying two sell two of the homes.
With four children, Hanna had been a stay-at-home mom, but Monday she started a job in real estate. They are seeking a renter for two upstairs bedrooms in their primary residence for $1,200.
Getting a loan during the boom was easy, Hanna knows. Too easy.
"All you had to was massage the information enough to fit it into their round hole, and they gave us a mortgage," Hanna said.
In San Francisco, more than one out of five homeowners with a mortgage spends half or more of their income on housing.
That's also true in 13 more of the largest 100 metro areas analyzed by the Associated Press. Other places include California metro areas of Stockton, Los Angeles, Riverside, Oxnard-Thousand Oaks, San Francisco, and San Diego. Also in the top 10 are the Fort Myers, Sarasota and Orlando metro areas in Florida, and New York-Northern New Jersey-Long Island.
They had this tool on their show last night? Wow, I used to think Hannity was a little brighter than the others just uninformed, but the more I find out the more I realize he's not...
Sorry to burst your bubble:
September 22, 2008 2:02 PM
BY MARC COOPER
I was around a lot of gloomy Democrats today who are more or less convinced that McCain's got this thing in the bag.
They came to me looking to get cheered up because I've been writing columns to the contrary. In the end, of course, I don't know. I can only guess.
But one of my arguments or, better said, talking points is this: Yes, you can say that something is awry because Obama ought to be up 20 points in the polls. Or you can take the opposite tack, one I've been pointing out, and say: "Here we have John McCain. A long-time senator. A bona fide war hero in a time of war. Someone who has indeed showed moments of great independence from his party. And yet, he's running a couple of points behind a 47-year-old, black freshman senator whose middle name is Hussein. So, exactly who is in trouble here?"
from CNN
John McCain suspends campaigning to work on economy, requests postponing Friday debate; asks Obama do the same.
And Bush will be making a speech about the economy tonight at 6:00pm
I know Hannity has a thing for the Ayers and Obama association.
And many if not most people would consider Ayers a terrorist, at least at one time in his life.
I think having this father and son on FOX will do more to undermined their behavior than support it.
As for the free speech concept that some of you have mentioned, that is just crap.
There are all kinds of rights in the constitution that are stopped or restricted at the school yard fence.
And as for the shirt being patriotic, that is just stupid.
A shirt that read "McCain supports burning babies in Baghdad"
should not be allowed either.
Under the pressure of the financial crisis, one presidential candidate is behaving like a flustered rookie playing in a league too high. It is not Barack Obama.
Channeling his inner Queen of Hearts, John McCain furiously, and apparently without even looking around at facts, said Chris Cox, chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, should be decapitated. This childish reflex provoked the Wall Street Journal to editorialize that "McCain untethered" -- disconnected from knowledge and principle -- had made a "false and deeply unfair" attack on Cox that was "unpresidential" and demonstrated that McCain "doesn't understand what's happening on Wall Street any better than Barack Obama does."
To read the Journal's details about the depths of McCain's shallowness on the subject of Cox's chairmanship, see "McCain's Scapegoat" (Sept. 19). Then consider McCain's characteristic accusation that Cox "has betrayed the public's trust."
Perhaps an old antagonism is involved in McCain's fact-free slander. His most conspicuous economic adviser is Douglas Holtz-Eakin, who previously headed the Congressional Budget Office. There he was an impediment to conservatives, including then-Rep. Cox, who, as chairman of the Republican Policy Committee, persistently tried and generally failed to enlist CBO support for "dynamic scoring" that would estimate the economic growth effects of proposed tax cuts.
In any case, McCain's smear -- that Cox "betrayed the public's trust" -- is a harbinger of a McCain presidency. For McCain, politics is always operatic, pitting people who agree with him against those who are "corrupt" or "betray the public's trust," two categories that seem to be exhaustive -- there are no other people. McCain's Manichaean worldview drove him to his signature legislative achievement, the McCain-Feingold law's restrictions on campaigning. Today, his campaign is creatively finding interstices in laws intended to restrict campaign giving and spending. (For details, see The Post of Sept. 17; and the New York Times of Sept. 19.)
By a Gresham's Law of political discourse, McCain's Queen of Hearts intervention in the opaque financial crisis overshadowed a solid conservative complaint from the Republican Study Committee, chaired by Rep. Jeb Hensarling of Texas. In a letter to Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, the RSC decried the improvised torrent of bailouts as a "dangerous and unmistakable precedent for the federal government both to be looked to and indeed relied upon to save private sector companies from the consequences of their poor economic decisions." This letter, listing just $650 billion of the perhaps more than $1 trillion in new federal exposures to risk, was sent while McCain's campaign, characteristically substituting vehemence for coherence, was airing an ad warning that Obama favors "massive government, billions in spending increases."
The political left always aims to expand the permeation of economic life by politics. Today, the efficient means to that end is government control of capital. So, is not McCain's party now conducting the most leftist administration in American history? The New Deal never acted so precipitously on such a scale. Treasury Secretary Paulson, asked about conservative complaints that his rescue program amounts to socialism, said, essentially: This is not socialism, this is necessary. That non sequitur might be politically necessary, but remember that government control of capital is government control of capitalism. Does McCain have qualms about this, or only quarrels?
On "60 Minutes" Sunday evening, McCain, saying "this may sound a little unusual," said that he would like to replace Cox with Andrew Cuomo, the Democratic attorney general of New York who is the son of former governor Mario Cuomo. McCain explained that Cuomo has "respect" and "prestige" and could "lend some bipartisanship." Conservatives have been warned.
Conservatives who insist that electing McCain is crucial usually start, and increasingly end, by saying he would make excellent judicial selections. But the more one sees of his impulsive, intensely personal reactions to people and events, the less confidence one has that he would select judges by calm reflection and clear principles, having neither patience nor aptitude for either.
It is arguable that, because of his inexperience, Obama is not ready for the presidency. It is arguable that McCain, because of his boiling moralism and bottomless reservoir of certitudes, is not suited to the presidency. Unreadiness can be corrected, although perhaps at great cost, by experience. Can a dismaying temperament be fixed?
from CNN
John McCain suspends campaigning to work on economy, requests postponing Friday debate; asks Obama do the same.
And Bush will be making a speech about the economy tonight at 6:00pm
from CNN
John McCain suspends campaigning to work on economy, requests postponing Friday debate; asks Obama do the same.
And Bush will be making a speech about the economy tonight at 6:00pm
I'll be pissed off if the Friday debate is canceled. We were planning on getting a big group together for a drinking game.
Take a shot of vodka if...
McCain gives an insincere smirk or laugh
McCain says "my friend" or "my friends"
McCain says the economy is sound
McCain moves like a robot
Obama writes something down
Obama says the word "change"
The candidates look at eachother
Either of the candidates begin a response by saying "First of all..."
Either of the candidates tell an outright lie
McCain is gonna do what in Washington, exactly?
Nobody has missed more votes in the Senate than him.
And now he wants to spend all of his time working on the legislation? And being the legal scholar that he is, he's going to be personally penning it? LOL. Give me a break.