ROCK'EM SOCK'EM BARACK'EM

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ROPE-A-DOPING THE GOP

AFTER TAKING THE HITS ALL WEEK, ALI, UH, OBAMA COMES OUT SWINGING, AT LAST!

YOUTUBE: "THE UNTOUCHABLES"
"The Chicago Way"
"What are you prepared to do? If you open the ball on these people, you must be prepared to go all the way. He pulls a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you put one of his in the morgue. That's the Chicago way... The Lord hates a coward."



Americans Cheer As President Goes Into Combat

Us Yanks, we love politics, but only when it's a blood sport. The Chicago way is fine with us. Most of my fellow New Yorkers would agree with this: If the other guy brings a tire iron, you bring a baseball bat. If the other guy brings a knife, you bring a gun. If the other guy brings a bucket of horsesh*t, you bring a firehose. Obama cut loose with the Presidential firehose yesterday, flushing obstructionist partisan Republican horsesh*t right down the DC drains, where it belongs.

Reminding us why they lost the election, career conservative failures have dithered and whined and pissed and moaned and bitched and complained all week like the bunch of little sh*ts they truly are and always have been. The take away: The extreme right wing in Washington doesn't give a crap about the American people. All they care about is their rich foreign buddies and the crooks on Wall Street who own their pimply white saggy old Republican asses. They have no answers, no solutions, no way out of the mess they created. They have only horsesh*t.

It's time they were handled as they have so richly f**king deserved for hundreds of years now: These descendants of slavers and slumlords, Tories and Nazi's, bankers and brokers, torturers and mass-murderers of innocent women and children around the world. They need to be beaten to the ground and stomped out of existence, once and for all. The Lord hates a coward. Batter up!


BLOOMBERG
"U.S. Economy: Jobless Rate Soars and Payrolls Plunge by 598,000"
Attention Republicans: Look out the f**king widow!!!

' The unemployment rate reached the highest level since 1992 and payrolls tumbled in January, with millions more likely to lose their jobs before a stimulus and emergency-lending programs temper the U.S. economy’s freefall. '

YOUTUBE: CNN: PRESIDENTIAL SPEECH ON ECONOMY
"President Obama's Famous Presidential Speech on the Economy - 2-5-09.- AWESOME SPEECH - Part-1"
"It is time to get something done here in Washington. Don't come to the table with the same tired arguments and worn ideas that helped to create this crisis. This is not a game."


YOUTUBE: ROPE-A-DOPE
"MuhammadAli-George Foreman comments pt1"
Hang on the ropes and take the punches, let your opponent wear himself out.

YOUTUBE: ROPE-A-DOPE
"MuhammadAli-George Foreman comments pt2"
Wait till your opponent is all punched out. Then BAM! Knockout!

WASHINGTON POST: OBAMA OP-ED PIECE 2/5/09
"The Action Americans Need"
Counterpunch.

' By now, it's clear to everyone that we have inherited an economic crisis as deep and dire as any since the days of the Great Depression. Millions of jobs that Americans relied on just a year ago are gone; millions more of the nest eggs families worked so hard to build have vanished. People everywhere are worried about what tomorrow will bring.

What Americans expect from Washington is action that matches the urgency they feel in their daily lives -- action that's swift, bold and wise enough for us to climb out of this crisis.

Because each day we wait to begin the work of turning our economy around, more people lose their jobs, their savings and their homes. And if nothing is done, this recession might linger for years. Our economy will lose 5 million more jobs. Unemployment will approach double digits. Our nation will sink deeper into a crisis that, at some point, we may not be able to reverse.

That's why I feel such a sense of urgency about the recovery plan before Congress. With it, we will create or save more than 3 million jobs over the next two years, provide immediate tax relief to 95 percent of American workers, ignite spending by businesses and consumers alike, and take steps to strengthen our country for years to come.

This plan is more than a prescription for short-term spending -- it's a strategy for America's long-term growth and opportunity in areas such as renewable energy, health care and education. And it's a strategy that will be implemented with unprecedented transparency and accountability, so Americans know where their tax dollars are going and how they are being spent.

In recent days, there have been misguided criticisms of this plan that echo the failed theories that helped lead us into this crisis -- the notion that tax cuts alone will solve all our problems; that we can meet our enormous tests with half-steps and piecemeal measures; that we can ignore fundamental challenges such as energy independence and the high cost of health care and still expect our economy and our country to thrive.

I reject these theories, and so did the American people when they went to the polls in November and voted resoundingly for change. They know that we have tried it those ways for too long. And because we have, our health-care costs still rise faster than inflation. Our dependence on foreign oil still threatens our economy and our security. Our children still study in schools that put them at a disadvantage. We've seen the tragic consequences when our bridges crumble and our levees fail.

Every day, our economy gets sicker -- and the time for a remedy that puts Americans back to work, jump-starts our economy and invests in lasting growth is now.

Now is the time to protect health insurance for the more than 8 million Americans at risk of losing their coverage and to computerize the health-care records of every American within five years, saving billions of dollars and countless lives in the process.

Now is the time to save billions by making 2 million homes and 75 percent of federal buildings more energy-efficient, and to double our capacity to generate alternative sources of energy within three years.

Now is the time to give our children every advantage they need to compete by upgrading 10,000 schools with state-of-the-art classrooms, libraries and labs; by training our teachers in math and science; and by bringing the dream of a college education within reach for millions of Americans.

And now is the time to create the jobs that remake America for the 21st century by rebuilding aging roads, bridges and levees; designing a smart electrical grid; and connecting every corner of the country to the information superhighway.

These are the actions Americans expect us to take without delay. They're patient enough to know that our economic recovery will be measured in years, not months. But they have no patience for the same old partisan gridlock that stands in the way of action while our economy continues to slide.

So we have a choice to make. We can once again let Washington's bad habits stand in the way of progress. Or we can pull together and say that in America, our destiny isn't written for us but by us. We can place good ideas ahead of old ideological battles, and a sense of purpose above the same narrow partisanship. We can act boldly to turn crisis into opportunity and, together, write the next great chapter in our history and meet the test of our time.

The writer is president of the United States. '

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WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE: "HENRY V"
"Saint Crispin's Day Speech"
A message from 410 years ago.

' If we are mark’d to die, we are enow
To do our country loss; and if to live,
The fewer men, the greater share of honour.
God’s will! I pray thee, wish not one man more.
By Jove, I am not covetous for gold,
Nor care I who doth feed upon my cost;
It yearns me not if men my garments wear;
Such outward things dwell not in my desires.
But if it be a sin to covet honour,
I am the most offending soul alive.
No, faith, my coz, wish not a man from England.
God’s peace! I would not lose so great an honour
As one man more methinks would share from me
For the best hope I have. O, do not wish one more!
Rather proclaim it, Westmoreland, through my host,
That he which hath no stomach to this fight,
Let him depart; his passport shall be made,
And crowns for convoy put into his purse;
We would not die in that man’s company
That fears his fellowship to die with us.
This day is call’d the feast of Crispian.
He that outlives this day, and comes safe home,
Will stand a tip-toe when this day is nam’d,
And rouse him at the name of Crispian.
He that shall live this day, and see old age,
Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbours,
And say “To-morrow is Saint Crispian.”
Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars,
And say “These wounds I had on Crispian’s day.”
Old men forget; yet all shall be forgot,
But he’ll remember, with advantages,
What feats he did that day. Then shall our names,
Familiar in his mouth as household words-
Harry the King, Bedford and Exeter,
Warwick and Talbot, Salisbury and Gloucester-
Be in their flowing cups freshly rememb’red.
This story shall the good man teach his son;
And Crispin Crispian shall ne’er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remembered-
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition;
And gentlemen in England now-a-bed
Shall think themselves accurs’d they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day. '

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HIGH NOON ON MAIN STREET

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SHERIFF IN SHOWDOWN WITH BANKS

CHI-TOWN LAWMAN SAYS NO MORE EVICTIONS ON HIS WATCH

YOUTUBE: CNN
"Sheriff Tom Dart: No foreclosure evictions on my watch"


Rent-Paying Tenants Being Tossed Into The Streets By Banks Who Failed To Do Their Jobs

First these banks lent money to dead-beat landlords. Then they failed to collect payments on the money they lent. Then they foreclosed without notifying the legal occupants of what they knew to be rental properties. Now they're after the Sheriff for "refusing to do his duty," i.e. making innocent people homeless without legal notice or due process of law.

In fact, the Cook County Sheriff, Thomas J. Dart, is doing what any movie sheriff would do in a classic Western: Facing down the real bad guys and defending the honest citizens of his town. It's a sight that is all too rare in the real world. Most law enforcement officers do not concern themselves with questions of right and wrong, legal and illegal, fair and unfair, human and inhuman. Like good Germans, most government officials just follow orders, even when they come from crooked landlords and predatory bankers, incompetent bureaucrats and bought-and-payed-for judges. But this time, the bad guys found themselves facing down an honest man, a real American hero.

Sheriff Dart may lose his job. He may be fined or sanctioned or demoted or even imprisoned. He may have to back down. But for now, the good sheriff of Cook County, Illinois, has drawn a line in the dust of Main Street, and everybody knows which side of that line justice is on. If only all of our elected and appointed officials would watch and learn from this Western. In all of this talk of bail-outs and rescues, you don't hear much about justice.

Justice would require that the good be rewarded and the bad punished. Justice would demand that those who have victimised the American people and gamed the system should not be allowed to continue to do so. Justice would guarantee that those who have been victimised should be made whole, and that ownership of our own economy should vest with us. If we're going to have to pay for the mistakes and misdeeds of our financial giants here in America, we should, by rights, receive a large share of any profits that accrue to them in the future. We should take full possession of these entities, and run them for our own benefit. Our lives, our laws, our systems are not a game.

We need to stand up for what is right like Sheriff Dart is doing. We need to do it right now. Otherwise, we end up like the foolish, cowardly townspeople in one of those Western movie morality plays, and we lose our town, our country to the bad guys. It's time we stood up and supported our local Sheriff, or Congressman, or Senator, in fighting for justice. They can't do it alone, and they shouldn't have to.


CNN
"Illinois sheriff: No foreclosure evictions on my watch"

' "These mortgage companies only see pieces of paper, not people, and don't care who's in the building," Dart said. "They simply want their money and don't care who gets hurt along the way. "On top of it all, they want taxpayers to fund their investigative work for them. We're not going to do their jobs for them anymore. We're just not going to evict innocent tenants. It stops today." '

CBS NEWS KDKA PITTSBURGH
"Renters Caught In Middle Of Foreclosures"

' Renters are often the innocent victims of the foreclosure crisis. Tenants pay their rent but face possible eviction because their landlords don't pay their mortgage loans. Now there's word of a massive foreclosure on a dozen apartments buildings whose tenants who face an uncertain future. All of the buildings are owned by one landlord who owes the bank more than $2 million dollars. Sheriff sales are the end of the line in the foreclosure process. Now on the block are 11 apartment buildings sprinkled through the Southside and a few other neighborhoods and towns. All of them are currently owned by one landlord, Davin Gartley, the owner of Davin Investments, who is in default to the bank for some $2.4 million in loans. That default leaves rent paying tenants like Jean Winkowski in the lurch. "If it goes up for sheriff sale how long does that give us to move," asked Winkowski. "You know what I mean. He hasn't told anybody nothing." '

DAILY CALIFORNIAN
"Foreclosure Crisis Hits Many Local Residents"

' For UC Berkeley graduate student Steven Barcelo, what seemed like an exciting new start in his life-moving with his fiancee into a home in a nice neighborhood at a bargain rent-soon turned into a nightmare. After Barcelo and his fiancee settled into the new house two months after pre-paying an entire year's rent to outbid other prospective tenants, they received an e-mail from their landlord that the property was going to be foreclosed. The couple is only one of many Berkeley residents who have felt the pinch of the foreclosure crisis. Barcelo said representatives from the lending bank started pressuring him to leave the property. "If we didn't leave, the sheriff would come by and force us to leave, was what (a bank representative) was telling us," Barcelo said. The representative told the couple that they had a few days to move out before the sheriff could come to their home without notice and remove their belongings, Barcelo said. '

CLEVELAND PLAIN DEALER
"90-year-old woman shoots self as deputies try to evict her"

' A 90-year-old Akron woman is in Akron General Medical Center after shooting herself as sheriff deputies came to evict her from her Lacroix home Wednesday. The woman's condition was not known. Summit County deputies were at the home in the 1100 block of La Croix Avenue around 1 p.m. Thursday and no one answered the door when they knocked. The deputies heard a commotion upstairs and a neighbor said he thought she was still home. The neighbor then got a ladder and crawled in a second floor bathroom window. He found the woman shot in her bedroom. '

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Suggestion Box & Tip Jar We would like to make over this blog to make it easier to access, to read and to comment on. We would also like to serve our readers better by providing more of what you need and want to see. All serious suggestions will be considered. We hope to move to our own domain in the near future, and we would like to ask for your financial assistance in doing that, and in upgrading our hardware & software. Small one-time donations and larger long-term subscriptions are welcome. Exclusive advertising is also available. If you think we are wasting our time in doing all this, please let us know. If you wish to help us, now is the time. As always, negative bullsh*t from right-wing trolls will be sh*tcanned. Thank you to everyone else. Please send feedback & PayPal contributions to cosanostradamusATexciteDOTcom. Thanks.

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HAWAII LEADS NATION IN SOMETHING! MTG FRAUD...

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CROOKS FLOCK TO ISLES FOR "LAX STANDARDS"

ONCE-HOT MARKET FOR MILLION-DOLLAR HOVELS COLLAPSES

Fannie Mae & Freddie Mac Flummoxed By Mortgage Applications Filled Out In Pidgin English?

The "Price of Paradise" starts with the high cost to own or rent real estate here in Hawaii. The cost of everything you buy includes the sellers' rent or mortgage payments. That's on top of your own housing costs. So, yes, rising interest rates, a shrinking property market, tightening regulations and crises way off in Washington and New York do have an effect here in Honolulu.

Under normal circumstances, real estate can be a bit dicey. Back when I was selling in the 80's, all the banks cared about was a complete file folder full of papers with everything filled in: Because that was all FNMA (Federal National Mortgage Association) & FHMC (Federal Home Mortgage Corporation) cared about.

The weak link was always the appraisal, the mortgage broker or bank's evaluation of the property's worth in the current market. In a hot market, the realtor had to project into future value to get a realistic "CMA" (competitive market analysis) for the seller. Otherwise, with two or three per cent per month appreciation on a $300,000 home, you'd cost the sellers ten to fifty thousand dollars over the average three-month time on the market, and three-month closing time.

Of course, if you sold and closed in three months for full price, you were really speeding up the price appreciation. And that became an inflated "comp" (comparable sale) for the bank's appraisers. It also became a benchmark for realtors' CMA's beyond which they would project still further value, until the whole house of cards collapsed; s-l-o-w-l-y, with any luck. If it collapsed quickly, lots of people, and banks, and depositors, and taxpayers got hurt. Voila, the S&L crisis.

See, you try to help somebody out, and look what happens.

In addition to fudging the appraisals, by accepting unclosed and unconfirmed price-inflated sales from realtors as comps, the banks could also be persuaded to overlook certain credit problems, provided you gave them a piece of paper to cover their asses. Everything was cool as long as everything was cool. If there was a problem, oh, man, then you really had a problem.

Still, I never once saw or heard of any Federal regulators coming down on any realtors, or many bankers. We knew they were there; we just never saw them. So we tried to keep it that way: Generally avoiding outright fraud and really egregious behavior.

That was the go-go 80's. I don't do R.E. any more, but what I see out there really shocks me. Qualifying a buyer is the professional real estate salesperson's first responsibility. An unqualified buyer is a waste of the agent's time, and could cost the seller boo-coo bucks. Debt to earnings ratio is Page One of your Broker's Bible. Or, it was.

While incomes have not moved all that much since 1980, home prices have skyrocketed. Here in Hawaii, the average home price is $500,000 to $1,000,000. The average income is $20,000 to $60,000. By the old rules, the price of the house should be 3 to 6 times the annual income, no more. Top price should be $360,000, and that's a stretch with this income. But most people are paying double or triple that here in Hawaii. Which means that, either Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac themselves have thrown out the debt-to-income ratios of 28-32% for just the monthly "PITI" (principle, interest, taxes and insurance) payment, and 36-40% for all debt as a percentage of income, or we're in Super-Duper-Fudgie-Land.

Buyers must be SUPER-fudging now, and the realtors, banks and regulators are letting them get away with it. That means they are counting the income of parents, children, unrelated persons, people not living in the home, rent from tenants legal and illegal, investment income real and imaginary, and God knows what all else, to come up with income figures of more like $175,000 to $300,000 per "household."

And there's another fudge: Back in the day, only married couples or really rich people could easily get mortgages with less than 20% down. Unmarried couples, gay or straight, buddies, partners, whatever, no sale without a huge down payment and great credit all around. The banks just looked at it all as inherently unstable, without a marriage contract. Even then, if two incomes were needed to pay the mortgage, a young wife might be required to sign a document agreeing not to have children, or take time off from work, for the first five years or more. Obviously, it would be tough to get all this today, with the percentages of unmarried, never-married, divorced, gays, lesbians, group living, etc, etc, etc. Still, there has to be some standard of stability, or the banks get stuck.

OK, so times have changed. That's not what shocks me, none of the above. What shocks me is that, given the sh*t we used to pull, and adding in all this other stuff above, these pr*cks went WAY beyond all that, and just threw out all the rules. They're not only lending to ANYbody, they're FORCING risky loans down their throats. They're going out and soliciting business from people they KNOW to be unstable, or credit risks, by their own records. And they're doing it not with $60-80-100,000 homes. Not even with two, three, four hundred thousand dollar homes. They're doing it with $500,000 to a MILLION dollar homes. And not just a few: Hundreds of thousands of them, nationwide. That's the multiplier in all this: it's a factor of five to ten times as risky, a thousand per cent more exposure, a million bucks a pop instead of a measly hundred grand, all around.

And they're going to walk away from this with their pockets full of tax-payers' hard-earned money, Scot-free and no worries about prosecution or jail, lawsuits or judgements: All thanks to their good buddies on both sides of the aisle in that Super Duper Corporate Fudgie Factory known as Congress. Way to go, country-clubbers! Us caddies love ya for it. [doffs cap, pulls forelock submissively]


NBC NEWS- KHNL 8 HONOLULU
"Hawaii developers council discuss state of Hawaii real estate"

' The current state of the economy and cooling real estate market leave people who live here in the islands wondering about the market's future direction. Hawaii's real estate market is in a downward trend but experts say it's a normal part of the business cycle in Hawaii. In the next 18 months, tourism will be effected by the consolidation of airline routes which make it more difficult for visitors to make it to Hawaii. Joe Toy is the President of Hospitality Advisors. "We're definitely seeing a decline in occupancy our busy seasons are much more shallower and our off seasons will be much more steeper in terms of loss of occupancy," he said. Helping to cushion the loss of visitors, is less hotel rooms. Toy says over the past five years more have transferred to condos or timeshares. Because of the reduced demand for housing people aren't bidding so high, and sellers are concerned. '

HONOLULU STAR-BULLETIN
"Housing fuels bankruptcies"

' Bankruptcies are on the rise in Hawaii, due mostly to a higher percentage of filings related to real estate problems. The number of statewide bankruptcies jumped 30.1 percent to 890 during the first six months of this year from last year, reflecting tougher economic times. The annual figure is likely to surpass last year's, when 1,381 bankruptcy filings were recorded. '

HONOLULU ADVERTISER
"Mortgage fraud unusually high in Isles"

' Lax lending standards and the high cost of housing caused an increase in mortgage fraud in Hawai'i during the past few years, outpacing the majority of Mainland markets dealing with similar schemes, according to the FBI. Beginning March 1, the FBI's Honolulu division opened more than a dozen investigations and identified more than 80 individuals and three schemes developed to defraud Hawai'i homeowners as part of a push to arrest and prosecute mortgage fraud purveyors. Officials said the number of investigations and individuals here is more than the FBI is seeing in comparable jurisdictions on the Mainland. "Greedy people looking to make an easy buck found Hawai'i's hot housing market to be a lucrative place to operate their scams," said Janet L. Kamerman, special agent in charge of the FBI's Honolulu division. "The mortgage fraud schemes we have thus far identified in Hawai'i are as diverse as the individuals and groups running them." The "fraudulent activities" of more than a dozen local mortgage brokerages are under investigation by the FBI and officials estimate losses from the schemes stretch into the millions of dollars. Officials declined to name the local brokerages. In Hawai'i, the FBI is looking at real-estate agents, mortgage bankers, home builders, attorneys, appraisers and buyers who "knowingly allow some frauds to occur so that they can purchase property," according to the U.S. attorney's office. Investigations are open and ongoing on O'ahu, the Big Island, Maui and Kaua'i. The indictment unsealed May 16 alleges that John Gilbert Mendoza, Antonio Alcantara Jr., Ira Altwegg, Albert A. Alimoot Jr. and Evan M. Koizumi illegally obtained more than $400,000 from lenders after securing mortgage loans under false pretenses. They have been charged with conspiracy to commit mail fraud, wire fraud and making false statements on loan applications. If convicted they face up to 20 years in prison. As detailed in the indictment, the scheme allegedly involved homebuyers, home sellers, loan officers and others working together to defraud lending institutions between April 5, 2004, and July 13, 2006. According to the indictment, buyers applied for loans they never intended to pay back, loan officers handled applications they knew were false and sellers knew proceeds from the sale would be obtained by fraud. "These are not the last defendants in Hawai'i who will be charged with these types of crimes," Kubo said. '

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