Karl Rove leaves OZ

Now the bastard leaves, after he helped destroy the Constitution and run our Country in the ground. I am horrified to see what other damage Bush can do without his brain.

Thanks for nothing.

Addicted to More

When my daughter reaches into the scrapbook of her mind, the trips to park, showing up at school events, just hanging out are the ones that bubble to the surface.

She is child of two divorced parents who made/make a decent buck. She has had some awesome vacations. Why? Well if he is taking her to the Caymans, I must counter that with a trip to Aruba.

It was my mother, who pointed out what I was doing. Mind you, she was a companion on these competitive vacations. But she was right. My daughter lumps the trip to the park in the same category as an exotic trip.

In either place, she wanted spend time with her parents. So how about less time at work chasing "more" and more time with the little people.

How dare we get annoyed with their lack of appreciation.....

Children just want our time.

Somebody wake me up from this American Dream

"Although significant, the losses won't be large enough to topple the United States' $12 trillion economy, Cagan said. "This is the turning of a business cycle," he said. "There will be some pain, but most people will be fine and most lenders will be fine."

That's little consolation to homeowners like Andrew Villaruz, a 43-year-old hospital administrator who said he refinanced into an option-ARM late last year without understanding what he was getting into. His loan balance quickly grew from $364,000 to $370,000, a shift that become even more disturbing to him as he watched more foreclosure signs go up around his Sacramento neighborhood.

Coupled with other costs lumped into the loan, Villaruz figures he lost about $25,000 by the time he found another lender willing to refinance him into a more conventional mortgage. He sheepishly acknowledged he had never heard of a negative amortization loan until he had one. He knows enough now to stay away from them.

"They might be good for people who make a lot of money, but they don't pan out for the average person," he said. "They just don't make sense.""

When it was it "those stupid not credit worthy" people, there was little registration on the compassion meter. Now that a hospital administrator didn't understand what "he was getting into," he's looking for a little understanding.

Newsflash Mr. Hospital Administrator, if you don't pay your mortgage, on time, your credit will look no different then "those subprime" people.

The disturbing part of this entire debacle is the housing market was overpriced. Too many people were building bigger home when, I'm just guessing" they reallly didn't need "that much house."

But inorder to feed in their fantasy of wealth, these people overextended themselves. I had two employees purchase homes in the past two years. One whom graduated with honors from Franklin & Marshall in business. The other a possessed a high school diploma from a rural county. Both employees put NO money down but just knew it was time to buy.

In their excitement, I asked a simple question of both "Will you have money at the end of the month?" Both were surprised by the question. It never occured to them. Their friendly mortgage broker told them it was time for them to buy a house. Neither employee had prepared a simple budget.

Every 28 year old needs to buy an overpriced four bedroom home, right?

When they signed on the dotted line they could afford the ARM monthly payments as they were trying to convince me and themselves. When the call arrived, I verified their employment income.

Now these former employees and their spouses are working two jobs now just make ends meet. So when do these spend time in their dream homes?

(Oh I forgot to mention, that when our company was preparing to be purchased for the second time in three years, we had to lay people off. Neither employee anticipated losing their jobs within sixty days of buying their homes.)

Now the Feds are dumping money into the markets so RICH people won't lose their expensive shorts in this shell game.

Home depot is having a sale on tents.....

Buy Coleman

Let's see, private equity companies are taking a breather from buying successful companies, sucking the life out them by doing the EBITA dance, shutting down divisions then selling the companies and record profits.

The collateral damage are the employees would made the company profitable in the first place. Either they are laid off and the survivors will be rewarded with more work and a 2% raise.

Here's an investment tip, buy stock in Coleman, because the folks who can't keep up with the AMR's will be living in a tent city near you.

"Those people" may look surprisingly like your college educated neighbors.

See you in September

"Surely it was a coincidence that this latest statement of official Bush administration amnesia was released on Aug. 6, the sixth anniversary of the President’s Daily Brief titled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.”

And so the president, firm in his resolve against “Al Qaeda in Iraq,” heads toward another August break in Crawford while Al Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan remains determined to strike in America. No one can doubt Mr. Bush’s triumph in the P.R. war: There are more American troops than ever mired in Iraq, sent there by a fresh round of White House fictions. And the real war? The enemy that did attack us six years ago, sad to say, is likely to persist in its nasty habit of operating in the reality-based world that our president disdains."

I'm sure the soldiers stationed in Iraq would like to take the sweltering month of August off.

Lack of Hope=Urban Genocide

n Camden, N.J., on a Sunday morning in June, a 24-year-old nurse’s aide was killed in a burst of gunfire as she stood talking with a friend on a street corner. She was one of four young people killed in a four-day eruption of violence in Camden.

A teenager who lives in the city tried to explain to me what it was like to have a number of friends or relatives murdered: “You don’t exactly get used to it,” he said, “but you expect it.”

"Philadelphia, across the Delaware River from Camden, is struggling with an even worse problem. As if signaling the start of an accelerated killing season, six people were murdered on the first day of summer. Philly’s homicide rate is on pace to break last year’s tally of 406.

As Senator Barack Obama said during a visit to a Chicago church last month, “From South-Central L.A., to Newark, New Jersey, there’s an epidemic of violence that is sickening the soul of this nation.”

More attention to this crisis of violence is needed, and more police resources, and more jobs, and better schools, and improved prison re-entry programs, and tighter gun controls. But more than anything else, a cultural change is needed.

The communities hardest hit are those in which too many parents have failed their children. The most effective anti-crime effort begins at home with parents (fathers, are you listening?) who raise their kids to know better than to point a gun at another human being and blow that person away for no good reason.

That’s the essential component. Without it, all other crime-fighting efforts are doomed, and thousands upon thousands of poor youngsters will continue to be denied their most basic civil right — the right to grow safely to adulthood."

I AGREE WITH MR. HERBERT!

Fifteen years ago I met a smart, spirited and sort of cute attorney. We were thirty at the time. Through happentance our paths crossed. He had just left the DA's office and was working in a tiny minority firm. Another friend was looking to diversify his Irish, Jewish firm.

The transition to this all white firm was not easy for this gentlemen with the Muslim name. Part of the problem was his world view was different. As a practice he carried a gun. He didn't think twice about it. He wore it as easy as they all wore their Brooks Brothers suits. This was very unnerving for a corporate law firm.

Eventually, the experiment ended and he started his own successful criminal defense firm. On the eve of his firm's anniversary party, we had a reflective conversation. I inquired what do you think happened at the other firm?

He gave me a big smile and said, I really did not expect to make 30 so I never really planned for life once I got there.

Wow.

I grew up in a community with OLD people. Many of my most powerful life's lessons came from my GREAT Grandparents. They lived across the street from us. They worked everyday, went to church and travelled with us to all of our events. The loved baseball. Both my brothers played and they couldn't wait for the games.

They never quite understood the field hockey I played but they were always there.

It was expected that we went to college. My grandparents saw in us opportunities they could only dream of.

When I entertained "not walking" to pick up my college diploma, my Mom dimed me out to my Grandmother. After work that day, before I got out of my car, my Grandmother summoned me. My mother stood in the doorway smirking.

My grandparents informed me how important the walking across the stage was to them. I was the first person in the family to get a college diploma and it was going to be done right.

It was a very brief directive.

The day of graduation was record cold but we froze our backsides off taking pictures in front of the school signs. My father took pictures until my grandfather told my grandmother it was time to go home. He didn't say much, but when he did, Grandmom relented.

I am so glad I had family to point out positive rituals and accomplishments. They cared enough to fuss at me. The respect was instilled early and often enough that I listened. We expected to work and live in white America. We were taught survival skills with the expectation to get an education, a good job, get married have babies, get a pension, retire, THEN die. In that order....

What we are dealing with is a generation of kids who do not expect to make their next birthday. Unless this generation is taught there is the possiblity of life past 15, the issue will solve itself. They will all be dead or shuttled into the dysfunctional criminal justice system.

The hope must begin at home.

Mining disaster

My hope is the miners are found alive. After the rescue, an investigation of the owner needs to occur. Reports are emerging that his mine is not safe and he is a greedy bastard.

If it is determined that he put his people in harms way to squeeze out more profits, then he and all his bluster should land in jail.

To compound the problem, the agencies set up to protect workers rights have be woefully underfunded. Not that their were a ton of OSHA inspectors running around before Shrub was handed the first election. There are more crickets in these offices than people.

If this becomes a recovery mission, then he should be charged with murder. Those who benefited from his profits via political donations and turned a blind eye to his behavior have coal dust on their hands.

Will the real Mitt Romney stand up?

"In interviews, Romney talks easily about books by Fareed Zakaria and Rory Stewart, but in public his frame of cultural reference is mostly limited to songs like “Whistle While You Work.” (Why do the Democratic candidates pretend to be smarter than they really are, while the Republicans pretend to be dumber?)

He is also the world’s worst culture warrior. George H. W. Bush’s son could resent the coastal cultural elites, but George Romney’s son just can’t. He’s a 1950s consensus man — he asked his grandkids to call him Ike, after his hero — who is play-acting at being Pat Buchanan. He’s unable to do anger. I asked him recently who he hated, and he dodged the question.

Finally, Romney’s real passions seem sparked by issues he rarely gets to talk about. When I asked him why the G.O.P. is in such bad straits, he said it’s because the party had ceded issues like the environment, education and health care to the Democrats.

Somehow the Romney campaign seems less like an authentic conservative campaign than an outsider’s view of what a conservative campaign should be. It oversimplifies everything, and underexploits the G.O.P.’s vestigial longing for efficient administration. I suspect the Romney campaign would do even better if it let the real Mitt Romney out to play."

Let's talk about money

"The Fed normally responds to economic problems by cutting interest rates — and as of yesterday morning the futures markets put the probability of a rate cut by the Fed before the end of next month at almost 100 percent. It can also lend money to banks that are short of cash: yesterday the European Central Bank, the Fed’s trans-Atlantic counterpart, lent banks $130 billion, saying that it would provide unlimited cash if necessary, and the Fed pumped in $24 billion.

But when liquidity dries up, the normal tools of policy lose much of their effectiveness. Reducing the cost of money doesn’t do much for borrowers if nobody is willing to make loans. Ensuring that banks have plenty of cash doesn’t do much if the cash stays in the banks’ vaults.

There are other, more exotic things the Fed and, more important, the executive branch of the U.S. government could do to contain the crisis if the standard policies don’t work. But for a variety of reasons, not least the current administration’s record of incompetence, we’d really rather not go there.

Let’s hope, then, that this crisis blows over as quickly as that of 1998. But I wouldn’t count on it."

The past two weeks have been bumpy for investors. Even if you don't have skin in the game per se, you will affected indirectly, through higher prices, or inability to get credit.

Finances is the one subject, we as a society fail to discuss openly. Talk about family secrets. People live in expensive trappings but work wacky hours just to have bigger homes or the latest gadgets. How many families are living beyond their means? Their homes and crap are built upon shaking credit.

I came from a working class family. In my junior year, my school had a trip to France. I think my father would have a given up a kidney than tell me this trip was not in the budget. He was very bitter and angry about the whole thing. A simple we can't do it would have been fine. There would have been less hard feelings about the situation. I learned a lot about finances and the silly secrets.

The mortgage drama has been created, in my humble opinion, by people's failure to have a basic understanding of finances.
Budgeting and the concepts of borrowing money should be taught by schools by the eighth grade. If your folks won't talk about it the schools need to step in.

Wisdom from Grrison Keillor

"Unless the bridges get blown up by helpful terrorists, making us eligible for Halliburton to come in and rebuild them, I don't imagine that much will happen. There will be an investigation and someday, when we are much older, we will learn that the bridge collapsed due to a unique set of circumstances that could not have been predicted by anybody. Nobody had sex with that woman. Everybody was doing a heckuva job.

I like the Mayo Clinic a lot and prefer it to the chiropractor down the street, but of course this is my responsibility and not the state of Minnesota's. The day when we look to big government for solutions to our transportation problems is gone. Our governor has twice vetoed a 7.5-cent increase in the state gasoline tax to pay for road and bridge repair. He believes it is dumb. So it's up to us to solve our own problems. Rochester is 88 miles away. Northwest Airlines offers seven flights daily for a roundtrip fare of about 500 bucks, or slightly more than the fare to New York. You want to visit Rochester, pay your own freight. Don't expect Minnesota to take care of you."

Missing the point

Roger Cohen misses one glaring point in his essay. Information from newspapers are the foundation for many blogs. By linking to the news items, people who don't read the papers have this information.

Bloggers are just making the "reporters" accountable for what they write or report on the air. If NY times did not provide a liberal voice for this White House maybe there would have been more questions about this fiasco.

News is no longer read on a street corner. Pamphlets are no longer a source of news. Rupurt Murdoch has finally purchased the Wall Street journal. He is more of a threat to Cohens profession then the netroots.

Tainted Row

I got it...

The Hall of the Fame should have a special section called Tainted Row.

Mark McGuire, Sammy Sosa and Barry Bonds will find their in to the Hall of Fame.

Hank Aaron Classy hero

"I would like to offer my congratulations to Barry Bonds on becoming baseball's career home run leader," Aaron said. "It is a great accomplishment which requires longevity and determination. Throughout the past century, the home run has held a special place in baseball, and I have been privileged to hold this record for 33 of those years.

"I move over now and offer my best wishes to Barry and his family on this historical achievement. My hope today, as it was on that April evening in 1974, is that the achievement of this record will inspire others to chase their own dreams."

Size Matters

Rep. Kucinich's has the smartest platform. If he were taller and his voice were stronger he would be leading the pack.

We are going to miss out on a bright leader because of his size. He will lose and so will the country.

What a man!

On the night the other guy made some noise in San Francisco, Phillies own Ryan Howard is slowly building some stats of his own.

Being the "runt of the litter" in his family, his power comes genetics and probably biscuits. Good for us, good for baseball.

B*NDS

*756*

props to SI

It's freakin' hot

It shouldn't be 82 degrees at 7:07am in the morning.

Too important to sweat the details

The basic CEO defense of “I was too important to worry about accounting details” would have become very popular if it had worked.

You got to love Gregory Reyes, CEO of Brocade Communications. My guess is he will look smashing in his prison garb.

Ozzie " Bonds is not welcome"

"White Sox manager Ozzie Guillen completely ruled out his interest in signing Barry Bonds for 2008. "When you go out to stretch, you have to go with the ballclub," Guillen said. "When you go out for the national anthem, you have to be out for the national anthem. The rules are for 25 guys, not 24. "Maybe Barry says, 'I don't want to play for you either.' I don't want to say I'm different, but I like when we have team rules, everybody goes for it."

I am suddenly in love with Ozzie Guillen...........

Fear is the new kryptonite

"Yet the bill that passed the Senate on Friday and the House on Saturday attracted mostly Republican support. In all, only 41 House Democrats voted for it and its inclusion of new powers to force the cooperation of telecommunications firms and to tap into e-mail correspondence and telephone conversations without court approval; 181 House Democrats voted against it.

Democratic leaders said they did win agreement that the authority would be in effect for only six months, at which point it would be revisited, though the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, immediately called the law "unacceptable" and vowed to change it sooner. Vice President Dick Cheney urged Congress to make the law permanent.

The arguments behind the expanded wiretapping power - that failure to grant it would result in attacks here - were reminiscent of those Republicans aimed at Democrats during the 2002 congressional election, a contest that brought a Republican victory, and arguably helped Bush a year later to win Democratic votes authorizing the use of force against Iraq.

And Democratic memories are still fresh with attacks Bush used in 2004 against Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, a presidential rival he portrayed as "weak on terror." That Bush would succeed this month - and on a program as controversial as the eavesdropping carried out by the National Security Agency - was somewhat surprising, given that the White House has seen its credibility on war and terrorism perceptibly erode this year.

In recounting the weekend showdown Monday, Democrats said they believed they had an agreement with McConnell on a narrow set of provisions that could address gaps in the surveillance law. But they said McConnell had pushed for broader presidential authority than they were ready to grant. "We acceded to them and said, 'If this is the bar, we'll do it,' " said Representative Rahm Emanuel of Illinois, chairman of the House Democratic Caucus. But, he said, "then they would come back and say, 'That's not enough.' "

When Bush has no other card to play, he whips out the fear card. The Dems fall hard like Superman being exposed to kryptonite.

This is no way to run a country.