Back on July 25th, 2009, I had this to say:

As I’ve said for some time now, we need what amounts to a bankruptcy reorganization of our national housing market. It will take some primo number crunchers to work it out, but mortgage amounts – by zip code – will have to be reduced to match current market values, and then the loans re-worked based upon the current value of the house. Its a lose/lose situation for everyone (for instance, I’d lose the approximately $130,000 I’ve paid for this house to date, the bank would lose a great deal of future interest as my mortgage amount would have to drop by 50% or so to bring it in line with current market values). Its lousy, but I can’t think of any way to really get us out of this mess – we have so many millions of houses “upside down” in relation of loan balance to house value that the temptation will become massive for people in that situation to just walk away…in which case, the banks would get even less than they’d get with a “cram down” on existing loans.

And now there’s this report:

…BofA’s credit loss mitigation executive, Jack Schakett, said the amount of strategic defaulters (those who can pay their loans but opt not to) are “more than we have ever experienced before.” He went on to say, “there is a huge incentive for customers to walk away because getting free rent and waiting out foreclosure can be very appealing to customers.”

Schakett says the foreclosure process is still taking 13 to 14 months (and by my estimates that’s an optimistic assessment), and so there’s over a year of free rent. While the banks are trying to improve the time, they’re just not there yet.

31 percent of foreclosures in March were deemed to be “strategic default” by researchers at University of Chicago and Northwestern University.

That’s up from 22 percent in March of 2009.

Business is business, folks. I know that some people are still following the bankster’s meme on this and calling such defaults “deadbeats”, but the fact of the matter is that a bank will default in a heartbeat if that is the most logical business decision to make. When you are in a financial jam, you add up the numbers, figure out what will hurt you least, and then do it.

There are also those who think that a person should still pay even on a massively “underwater” house because the price will eventually come back. Even supposing it will, I calculated that it would be approximately 2038 before my house came back to purchase price. Anyone with a calculator can do the same thing – and I’m sure a lot of people are. But, the prices won’t come back – not ever. There simply aren’t enough people in the rising generation to create the demand necessary for substantial price increases – unless we manage to get ourselves in to hyperinflation (which, of course, would only change the nominal rather than the real price of the house).

Cramming down people’s mortgage amounts will be a difficult business, but it still commends itself to me as the best means of curing the housing industry. Everyone would lose – but, also, everyone would gain. Houses would be priced to reality, they would be affordable and people would no longer view their houses as piggy banks from which to withdraw vacation cruises and other such nonsense.

Or, we can just continue on as we are and have massive increases in defaults which will cram down the prices the hard way. Its our choice.

Dropping Meeks for Crist in Florida – because they know a spineless political hack like Crist will vote as he’s told…and, for Democrats, that is all that matters – from the New York Post:

Top Democratic strategists are abandoning their party’s frontrunner in the Florida Senate race in favor of Independent Charlie Crist, who bolted the Republican party over the state party’s rightward lurch toward the Tea Party.

SKDKnickerbocker, a leading Democratic political strategy and communications firm, has agreed to work on Crist’s up-hill campaign as an independent for the U.S. Senate.

The decision will be widely viewed as a slap at Democratic frontrunner Rep. Kendrick Meek, who is trailing badly in the polls and many Democrats believe is hopeless for winning in November.

Do any of you Democrats out there have the guts to stand up and say “no” to this? This is what the Democrat party has become – a corrupt and hidebound organization only interested in power and the wealth it brings.

Disgusting, that is all it is.

Wikipedia has a good account of the battle. Its good for us to pause and remember – and especially so for our battles of the Pacific War, most of which seem to have dropped out of the public mind.

Midway is especially worth remembering because it was a fight against long odds and we won it. Outnumbered and facing a much better trained and experienced force, the US Navy met the Japanese fleet toe to toe and administered a crushing defeat. Before Midway, there was no limit to Japanese conquest in the Pacific – after Midway, it was only a matter of time before Japan was beaten.

Had the battle gone the other way, Hawaii would have been open to invasion and the US west coast naked to raids and other destruction. It would have added years to the war, at the very least, and might have eventually forced a negotiated peace leaving Japan in control of a mighty empire.

So, remember those brave men – especially the hundreds of Navy pilots, some of them flying hopelessly obsolete aircraft thanks to pre-War idiocy about military spending, who threw themselves upon the Japanese fleet with no thought for their own safety.

Caught me by surprise – I expected the number of census hires to be much higher. Maybe with the heat rising, they decided not to fudge the numbers as much? At any rate:

After a relatively large expansion in private-sector employment in April of 224,000, the Obama administration led people to believe that the growth rate would continue in May. The White House leaked to several media sources that the number of new jobs would exceed a half-million positions, mainly through temporary Census Bureau expansion, and that the private sector would gain around 150,000 — somewhat less than April but still ahead of population growth. Instead, the actual BLS numbers missed both marks…

When you boil it down, about 20,000 private sector jobs are estimated (estimated! No one knows for sure, yet) to have been created in May. The only thing which kept the unemployment rate from shooting above 10% is the number of workers estimated (once again, estimated!) to have left the labor force. The numbers are still a bit bogus because a lot of guess work goes on with what is called the “birth/death model” – the means by which BLS throws darts at a wall and says “we say this many jobs were made ’cause the the stars aligned just right”.

Until we start creating new wealth, we cannot create new jobs in any sort of number necessary to improve overall employment. We can’t start creating wealth until we know how much wealth we have to begin with – and we can’t know that until the crash completes its process. All we did with TARP, stimulus and other such government boondoggle nonsense was prop up things which needed and still need to come down.

The question still remains – how long before the process completes? It is unknown because we simply don’t know how much longer our government and governments around the world can keep printing and borrowing money to shore up a dead economy. Eventually it must all come crashing down – but is that tomorrow? Next week? Next month? Next year? I don’t know – but I didn’t think they’d keep it going as long as they have…it could happen at any time and when it does happen, there will be little advance notice in the MSM (while people in the know will see it a couple days in advance and act accordingly).

Welcome back, Carter:

…1979 followed two years of Carteresque utopian proclamations. Do we remember them all still? There was Cy Vance, in perfect aristocratic style, and in perpetual atonement for his earlier support of the Vietnam War, with his creased brow and sermonizing tone, bringing in the kinder, gentler order. He resigned over the failed hostage rescue, replaced by a stoic Ed Muskie. And there was Andrew Young at the UN trying to be a sort of proto-Barack Obama, reaching out to the radical Palestinians, and so on.

Remember the commandments? No more inordinate fear of communism; human rights governing U.S. foreign policy; no more nuclear weapons housed in South Korea which was to be free of U.S. troops; outreach to the terrorist/rebel/reformer Mugabe, and so on.

In other words, it took a flawed world about 24 months to size up the new idealistic administration, and to determine that it either could not or would not continue U.S. foreign policy of the previous three decades…

Its taken the world a bit less time to size up this President – our 1979 has arrived a bit sooner. The “Gaza flotilla” is a direct result of Obama’s foreign policy – it simply would not have happened while Bush was President and if Obama hadn’t started coddling our enemies, it wouldn’t have happened now. More and worse is to come.

I remember that terrible year – I turned 15 two weeks after the Islamists seized our embassy in Tehran. In my mind’s eye I still see that picture of the Islamists using Old Glory to haul out trash. Of thousands chanting “death to America”, while my President wrung his hands and stumbled from mistake to blunder and back again.

It is eerily familiar – Obama is just blindly repeating almost the exact errors of Carter. He’s just as old as I am – doesn’t he remember? Or does he just not care? Or was he just told in school that Carter’s programs were working and if only we American dummies had re-elected him, all would have come out ok? I don’t know – I can’t explain it.

We’re going to get it all, and likely worse than before. Its such a crying shame – and remember, Republicans, it is our fault. We failed the American people, and thus Obama was able to get elected. We’ll be a long time repairing the error, and this time around we simply must remember that waiting in the wings, if we lose are way, is Carter III…now being trained either directly in the Obama Administration, or immured in one of the same schools Obama came out of.

Not surprising:

Elena Kagan has kept her cards so close to the vest that in the days after President Obama nominated her to the Supreme Court, some on the left worried she was too moderate to replace liberal Justice John Paul Stevens.

But in documents obtained by CBS News, Kagan–while working as a law clerk to the late Justice Thurgood Marshall – made her positions clear on some of the nation’s most contentious social issues.

The documents, buried in Marshall’s papers in the Library of Congress, show Kagan standing shoulder-to-shoulder with the liberal left, at a time when the Rehnquist Supreme Court was moving to the conservative right.

Now, why does this come out? My guess is that there are worries on the left that she won’t be a mindless drone for leftist, judicial activism. This document dump is designed to allay those fear – see, liberals, you can count on Kagan to do precisely what she’s told! There’s no chance she’ll apply the law for refer to the Constitution – if its liberal and fashionable, she’s with you 100%!

Solution for our side: Expand the court to 11 members once we’ve won the Congress and White house. Appoint two more justices who understand what law is to the four we’ve already got, and we get a sure-thing 6-5 majority in favor of the United States Constitution. Problem solved.

The change we can believe in:

The federal government is now $13 trillion in the red, the Treasury Department reported Wednesday, marking the first time the government has sunk that far into debt and putting a sharp point on the spending debate on Capitol Hill.

Calculated down to the exact penny, the debt totaled $13,050,826,460,886.97 as of Tuesday, leaping nearly $60 billion since Friday, the previous day for which figures were released.

At $13 trillion, that figure has risen by $2.4 trillion in about 500 days since President Obama took office, or an average of $4.9 billion a day. That’s almost three times the daily average of $1.7 billion under the previous administration…

This is entirely out of control and it is unsustainable. Eventually, purchasers of US bonds will start demanding a premium to lend us money, just as they are demanding from Greece and Spain. When we reach that points, we’re just a step away from complete national bankruptcy.

When will we hit that point? Impossible to say with any certainty – the markets, these days, are driven by sentiment more than logic. As it stands, any government bond is essentially a gamble. Smart investors are staying away from them. The best guesses I have seen are that some time between 2013 and 2015, unless we radically cut spending and get our house in order, we’ll face the threat of sovereign default.

Revolution! Palin endorses GOP primary challenger to Senator Murkowski (R-AK).

Obama’s weakness with the Islamists is endangering Israel.

Federal Court rules that political spending limits are unconstitutional. We’ll have to see where this heads, but anything which reaffirms the right of the people to continually annoy the politicians is a good thing.

So, just why do we Catholics say that pro-abortion politicians cannot have Holy Communion? Here’s why.

Daily Kos dude is just, well, insane, ya know?

Rasmussen: 30% still suckered by Obama.

Michael Yon has been kicked out of Afghanistan – seems that a certain Administration is tired of the truth being told.

Here is Yon’s report from Kandahar dated April 25th – you decide if he should be kept out. Don’t forget: he’s reader supported, so make a donation.

Take tomorrow’s May jobs report with a very big grain of salt. Could be as high as a claimed 700,000 new jobs – more than half a million of them will be census workers and with the growing scandal in that area…