From Rasmussen:

Over one-third of current homeowners say they owe more on their mortgage than their home is worth, and outlooks for the housing market in the short and long-term are growing more pessimistic.

The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey of homeowners shows 53% report the value of their homes are worth more than the amount they still owe on their mortgages. But 35% report the opposite and say they owe more on their mortgage than their home is worth…

This probably understates the full picture – unless you actively think about it and look in to housing prices, you wouldn’t really know. The other day I saw a new sticker on a new home development sign…prices start at $130,000.00. When I first saw that sign, I think it was starting in the low 200s. Been watching it drop all year. A friend of mine who bought a “bargain” house last year for 210k just had her neighbors house sell for 140k or some such.

And there is still the “shadow inventory” of, perhaps, a couple million homes nationwide being kept off the market by the banks for fear of a complete collapse of home prices. Eventually, though, they’ll have to disgorge…I fully expect my house, which I bought for 396k, to drop to less than 100k before its all said and done.

Just part of Great Depression II, good people.

The “Mom Awakening”…

Keep in mind they are still terrified of her – and with good reason

This may go down to the wire:

Florida’s Senate race remains all about Republican-turned-independent Charlie Crist and likely GOP nominee Marco Rubio.

The latest Rasmussen Reports telephone survey of Likely Voters in Florida finds the two candidates neck-and-neck again this month, with Rubio earning 36% support and Crist, the state’s current Republican governor, capturing 34% of the vote. Prospective Democratic candidate Kendrick Meek remains a distant third, picking up 15%. Fourteen percent (14%) of the state’s voters remain undecided…

Absolutely this is anyone’s race – except Meek’s; he might as well write his concession speech early and start lobbying for an Administration job.

Crist’s eroding approval rating as Governor might eventually tell the tale for him here – he’s down 7 points since Rasmussen’s last survey, and that can probably be traced to the continuing bad economy in Florida coupled with the increasing disaster along Florida’s Gulf coast; that oil swings ’round to Miami, and that might be all she wrote for Crist.

Rubio’s problem is to get better with GOP voters – Democrats are splitting fairly evenly between Meeks and Crist and as election day nears, there is a chance that this Democrat support for Crist will both solidify and grow. Rasmussen has Rubio with 60% support among Republicans – it’ll probably take at least 70% of them to secure Rubio’s victory, unless Crist really melts down over the next couple months.

The key is to remind Florida Republicans and Republican-leaning Independents that a vote for Crist is a vote for Reid and Obama – Crist is certain to back the Democrats in organizational matters and will vote with them most of the time. If that can be driven home, then the overwhelming bulk of GOP voters will come home and what will then be a split Democrat vote will ensure GOP victory.

Ready to rumble with the TEA Party on the National Mall.

Have at it, Shabazz, you twit. You’ll find that the TEA Partiers are not pants-wetting liberals who tremble in fear of loud mouthed morons.

Battles there are aplenty these days – a continual and increasingly rancorous argument proceeds in our nation. Depending on one’s point of view, we have to get at the conservatives, the liberals, the progressives, the socialists, the TEA Partiers, the Republicans, the Democrats, the Islamists, RINOs, DINOs, racists, homophobes, Christians, fundamentalists, heretics…and on and on. Over at Zero Hedge a post by a gentleman named Mike Krieger brought this to my mind: whom do we fight?

Those who have read my stuff over the past couple of years will find some similarity between some of my views and some of Mr. Kriegers’s. But there will also be that clear demarcation – he’s one of those convinced that the two party system is one party and the whole thing, combined with banksters and bureaucrats, are leading us to ruin. Deliberately. Us vs Them in such theories comes down to “people who agree with me vs those who don’t”. If you don’t agree, you see, it means you’re just a willing or blind tool of “them”.

Now, to hold that the two-party system is corrupt and, often, results in the same sort of disaster no matter who is in charge has a long and honorable history – but it has also picked up some disreputable hangers-on from time to time. Chesterton and Belloc, representing the best of this theory, argued cogently from personal experience – they had fought a campaign against political corruption only to find both parties white washing the results – that there wasn’t a dime’s worth of difference between Britain’s Tories and Liberals. In a very real sense, this was (and is) correct – both parties are made up of people who want to be in power and will make all manner of intellectual and moral adjustments to do just that.

But that doesn’t mean there isn’t a difference. It doesn’t mean that, for instance, had McCain won that we’d be in the same plight we are today. That we’d likely be in a bad way is almost certainly true – McCain had no more idea of what ails the US economy than Barack Obama – or George Bush. Or, for that matter, 999 out of 1,000 people in government. But things would be different.

For instance, we wouldn’t be heading for a massive tax increase in January. McCain would have worked out at least a partial extension of the cuts. We wouldn’t have ObamaCare metastasising through our government. We wouldn’t have a half-war, lets-not-lose-too-fast campaign in Afghanistan. Things would be different, even if not entirely better – and this in spite of the fact that, yes, McCain is firmly part of the socio-political elite who are often as alike as peas in a pod and who are joined together in, at least, an unwillingness to fundamentally change things.

On can read too much in to things. And by so doing, one can make far too many enemies and thus make victory impossible. At its worst, believing in such terms (ie, that the parties are the same and “they” are out to get us) can lead to bizarre conspiracy theories and easily fall in to racism or Jew-baiting or survivalism or some warped combination of these things (you’ll note that Jew-baiting is becoming common on the left…its not a matter of conservatives will fall for this and liberals will fall for that…anyone who starts to think too much in “us vs them” terms can fall for the same sorts of things, just from different angles).

The most important thing to keep in mind is that the people we battle are not working from a master plan. We are not dealing with a wicked, knowledgeable, global conspiracy against us. We’re mostly dealing with purblind idiots who simply don’t know what they’re doing – this wouldn’t be so entirely bad, except that they additionally hold positions of wealth and power. Being in such positions they – remember, they are idiots, mostly – have convinced themselves they are extra wise and good (how else could they have wound up with wealth and power, after all?) and thus cannot get it wrong and must retain power, lest un-wise and un-good people get in to power (and they are certain their opponents are bad because if they were good, they’d be just on the side of the current socio-political elite…a great deal of circular psuedo-reasoning is going on in there, boys and girls).

There is, though, the leavening of wickedness in there, as well. Stupid/wicked people combined on a 1 to 100 ratio with stupid/well meaning people. Think of it as 1 George Soros for every 100 Dennis Kucinich. What unites them is a lack of thinking – and that, ultimately, is what we’re really fighting against: people who don’t think. Stupid people, as it were.

And, yes, some of the stupid people hold the same party label as the rest of us. Some times, my dearest of friends, the stupidest person in the room holds the face we see in the mirror each morning. It isn’t enough for us to say “we’re going to fight them liberals” or “we’re gonna whack them RINOs” or (as some might put it) “we’re going to get those Republicrats”. Doing that abdicates thought, and once we do that we’ve become the enemy. Most of our enemies, most of the time, will conveniently congregate around the labels of “liberal” or “Democrat” as lack of thinking on a consistent basis leads to those points of view – but even among them, we must be prepared for those moments of thought when we can get them on the good side. Anyone who thinks is on our side, anyone who refuses to do so, is the enemy.

More often than not, I’m going to find someone who thinks under the label of “conservative” as opposed to under the label of “liberal”. More often than not, I’m going to find someone who thinks under the label of “Republican” as opposed to under the label of “Democrat”. To chuck the whole thing is to cease to think, altogether, and thus is the work of the enemy. I’m in this to win, not become a pure pillar or steel – and armored not just from head to toe, but from ear to ear. I battle against irrationality – my enemy is insanity; not the inability to think, but the unwillingness to do so.

I will think and I will come to a rational conclusion. It is after thinking things over that I am what I am. Our world is being wrecked by people who refuse to think – by people who really do just take things on absolute faith, when even the most faithful Christian will stand aside and say, “God gave you reason, Man; you are to use it”. I will use it – and by so doing, I’ll know who my friends and enemies are.

The bad news keeps coming – from CNBC:

Unemployment has shifted from a lagging indicator to a leading one…

…More than half the labor force out of work for more than 26 weeks, the average length of unemployment at greater than 35 weeks, and the unemployment rate of 25.7 percent for 16- to 19-year olds.

“These are structural aspects which cannot be solved overnight, cannot be solved with a cyclical mindset,” El-Erian said. “And they are worrisome because they make the unemployment rate not only a lagging indicator but also a leading indicator.”…

El-Erian goes on to get it wrong about the “new normal”. He seems to expect just a wallowing around in slow growth – I fully expect Great Depression II. Too much debt, my friends – we just owe too much money and with Obama running the show, we won’t even start on those structural changes to the economy necessary to start digging out of it.

I’d like to say I hate to sound like a broken record, but I don’t hate it at all – I’ll keep yammering on about it until everyone agrees with me. We need to start making, mining and growing things here in the United States and to that end, we need to clear out all the taxes and regulations which make it difficult to do these things.

We need to return to the gold standard – or, at least, some thing of measurable value to back our currency. We need to abolish the Federal Reserve. Get rid of the FDIC. Figure out a way to reward handsomely those who hold a particular stock for a least a year. Restructure the housing market to make it less likely to get in to speculative bubbles. Forbid Congresscritters and their staffers from working in federally regulated industries for 10 years after they leave federal office/employment.

Lots of things to be done. I’ll be writing a book about it. Meanwhile, we’re pretty much in the soup. Get ready for a long, hard economic road.

D.B. Grady argues in the Atlantic:

…He would be the first man to hold that rank since the revered Omar Bradley in 1950. It would require authorization by the president and confirmation by the Senate. In practice it wouldn’t change the job of General Petraeus. But it would not only show that President Obama believes in Petraeus — that he’s not simply throwing America’s best general into the arena for political expediency — but would also reassure soldiers and civilians alike that this White House expects this man to win. This man’s plan to work…

…as General of the Army, he will be given an unambiguous mandate with the unfettered support of the president and the nation.

I’d have to say, “no”. If General Petraeus does pull out a win in Afghanistan to add to the laurels of Iraq, then that would be a grand and glorious thing, but still not something to place him on the same level of Douglas MacArthur, Dwight Eisenhower or Omar Bradley. It would put him ahead of George Marshall, who seems to have gotten his fifth star mostly on the fact that it would be unseemly to have the Army Chief of Staff outranked by two theater commanders…but just because we awarded one before without just cause doesn’t mean we should do so, now.

MacArthur, Eisenhower and Bradley led vast armies in the liberation of huge areas of the globe. MacArthur’s drive in the southwest Pacific was akin to a general moving an army from Miami to Seattle – but harder as the area was mostly water and what wasn’t wet was some of the densest jungle in the world. Our fifth star should be reserved for officers of stupendous achievement.

What do you think?

Race-based law enforcement, that is what we have. Justice is not possible from Obama’s “Justice” Department.

While 80 percent of Democrats are still drinking the Obama Kool-Aid,  Independents are seeing the light fast and Obama’s approval from this key voting bloc is not only a problem for him in 2012, but for his party in 2010.

Thirty-eight percent of independents approve of the job Barack Obama is doing as president, the first time independent approval of Obama has dropped below 40% in a Gallup Daily tracking weekly aggregate. Meanwhile, Obama maintains the support of 81% of Democrats, and his job approval among Republicans remains low, at 12%.

Over the past year, Obama has lost support among all party groups, though the decline has been steeper among independents than among Republicans or Democrats. Today’s 38% approval rating among independents is 18 percentage points lower than the 56% found July 6-12, 2009. During the same period, his support has fallen nine points among Democrats (from 90% to 81%) and eight points among Republicans (from 20% to 12%).

THis is just so encouraging. After the Big Mistake of ’08 I thought there was no way Obamaphoria would dwindle down enough before 2012, let alone before the 2010 elections. But look at what has happened: Obama’s regime turned out to be as extreme left-wing as we here said he’d be… and he was as incompetent (if not more) than we expected… This is buyer’s remorse at an unprecedented level.

Are there any of our readers here who voted for Obama that actually think he’s still doing a good job?

For those of you who don’t know geography, that is right on the border with California – from Haaretz:

Mexico foiled an attempt by Hezbollah to establish a network in South America, a Kuwaiti newspaper reported on Tuesday.

Hezbollah operatives employed Mexicans nationals with family ties to Lebanon to set up the network, designed to target Israel and the West, the Al-Seyassah daily said…

…Nasr was living in Tijuana, Mexico at the time of his arrest, the report said…

Very close to home and I doubt he was in Tijuana as a tourist. Mark my words: they are working out ways and means of attacking us, and our undefended southern border is becoming a beacon for them to attack.

Sealing the border is not about immigration, it is about law enforcement and justice – and if we won’t control the border, then someone else will. Do you want it to be Hezbollah allied with Mexican drug lords? Follow Obama and his Democrats, and that is precisely what we’ll get.

Obama is playing politics with immigration – hoping to use Arizona’s immigration law to stir up hatred and division in the United States which he can then exploit at the ballot box. Meanwhile, his actual job – defending the United States – goes by the wayside. We are in great and increasing danger – and things need to change.