Blogs For Victory

Because abortion is, indeed, the enemy of hope:

A new Gallup Poll, conducted May 7-10, finds 51% of Americans calling themselves “pro-life” on the issue of abortion and 42% “pro-choice.” This is the first time a majority of U.S. adults have identified themselves as pro-life since Gallup began asking this question in 1995.

This will still swing around, but the trend is all towards Life. I think, in the end, that we grow weary of the way the world is. We’ve tried licentiousness and irresponsibility for quite a while now, and the people seem ready to start acting like adults, again.

The news story:

President Barack Obama has interviewed federal appeals court judge Diane Wood for the Supreme Court, one of the face-to-face meetings he’s holding with finalists, officials said Wednesday. The move signals Obama is getting closer to one of the most far-reaching decisions of his presidency.

Wood, who serves on the U.S. Court of Appeals in Chicago, is among a small number of people being seriously considered for the high court.

I’m going to try to work myself up over this, I guess…actually, its rather difficult. All we’re doing is replacing one unthinking, knee-jerk “love me, please, elites!” liberal Justice with his ideological duplicate. Now, if a conservative Justice were being replaced, that would be another story…but we’re just keeping the 4.7 to 4.3 split in the Court. Its a big yawn for me.

Rofl!

Well, it got crushed in California. California is bankrupt – made so by liberals and RINOs who simply spent and spent and spent as if money appears by magic. There is no way out of the hole except by massive spending cuts – naturally, the liberals and RINOs in California tried one last time to get the people to sign away yet more of their wealth.

All of the propositions to tax, spend and use financial hocus pocus were soundly defeated – the only one which passed, by a nearly 3 to 1 margin, was the proposal to limit the pay of elected officials. Even San Francisco voted against against the measures – it takes a lot to get San Franciscans to cast a majority of their ballots against expansions of the socialist super-State.

What does it all mean? That taxes are toxic. People aren’t buying the financial sleight of hand. That government isn’t trusted, at all. And, I think, that the people are getting used to the idea of complete economic collapse and are just waiting for it to happen, so we can start to build our way back out of it – the Powers That Be know that when the rejection comes, they will be the people tossed out…and so they are trying desperate expedients to some how keep it all together in the hope that some how, some way, the economy will rebound before the 2010 votes are cast. Lotsa luck – but I’m counting on a voter revolution next year.

Rob Simmons wants your help.

A second wave of foreclosures is building:

It is conventional wisdom in the housing blog community (and the OC Register) that a giant wave of foreclosures is coming later this year, but what facts do we have that support this thesis? Today, we take a look at the available data and show this wave in its formative stage.

Foreclosure is a four step process: (1) the borrower quits making payments, (2) the lender issues of Notice of Default, (3) the lender issues a notice of Trustee Sale, and (4) the foreclosure auction occurs on the courthouse steps. Steps 1, 2 and 3 are separated by 90 days each. At any time during this period, either the borrower can get current with their payments, or the borrower and lender can agree to a loan modification. If either contingency occurs, the foreclosure process is aborted.

California passed SB1137 to force lenders to try harder to reach borrowers in default and work out a loan modification plan. Also, the GSEs and many large banks were on voluntary or mandated foreclosure moratoria. This caused a dramatic decline in Notices of Default (step 2). Unfortunately, as I noted Moritorium on Defaults Announced, stopping lenders from issuing notices does nothing to prevent borrowers from actually defaulting (step 1). Borrowers everywhere stopped making payments, and lenders merely stopped issuing notices about it.

The hope of foreclosure moratoria is that additional time will allow lenders to work out the bad loans and avoid the foreclosure process. Unfortunately, it did not work. First, very few borrowers even try to work out the loan with the lenders, and many who try fail to reach an agreement. Second, most who have agreed to a loan modification end up defaulting again; the redefault rate is running at about 50%. And third, financially it is in a borrower’s best interest to give up the house in foreclosure, so the only thing keeping them in the loan and in the home is their sense of morality concerning the payment and their attachment to their properties.

It will come – in Las Vegas, for instance, you can pick up houses which were $400,000 four years ago for $125,000 today. Anyone in a 400k mortgage feels a strong pull to work out a purchase of an equivalent home for a fraction of the price and then just bag it on the more expensive house. Lenders should realize this and thus work out ways to convince people to stay in their homes – they should, in the end, figure out ways and means to set the current mortgage amount in line with current market values with inputs for what the lender paid at the start and what the borrower has paid since the inception of the loan.

In effect, what we need is a bankruptcy re-organization of America’s housing market – its a big, old poop sandwich and everyone has to take a bite. But the banks are cowardly and short-sighted, the government is bent on saving the banks from their folly and the people are going to make rational economic decisions. Ergo, another wave of foreclosures is coming no matter how many moratoriums they have or fiscal hocus-pocus is produced to make it as if economics doesn’t matter – there’s just no economic sense in paying more for housing than you have to.

This second wave of foreclosures will eat into the (mostly mythical) profits banks have been showing of late, which will cause credit to freeze up, with will cause markets to collapse, which will cause a full blown economic depression…and all The One’s spending won’t put Humpty Dumpty back together again. All that money we’ve blown through might as well have been torched in a bonfire – spending doesn’t create wealth; making, mining and growing things does…and if you invest in such things, you’ll make money. Real money – not the bogus wealth of fiat money sifted through a usurious financial system which produces nothing but Chinese slave-goods and fat bonuses for corporate executives who did nothing at all. Liberal financial sharks have done well out of this, just as they have out of every economic debacle since the world started to go off hard money…but Soros having more money won’t make an unemployed truck driver feel very good.

Dumb and dumber, that’s all we’ve been – and we’re going to pay the price. Eventually we’ll work our way out of it, but there’s going to be a price to be paid.

Given that we are about to have a debate on the Supreme Court:

I am certain nothing has done so much to destroy the juridical safeguards of individual freedom as the striving after the mirage of social justice. – F A Hayek

Trolling through America’s gutters for new sources of funding:

In what he casts as an attack on litterbugs and nicotine addiction alike, Mayor Gavin Newsom wants to impose a fee on an age-old inhabitant of city streets: the cigarette butt.

The proposal, to be introduced next month to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, would add 33 cents to the cost of a pack of cigarettes, to offset the estimated $10.7 million the city spends annually removing discarded butts from gutters, drainpipes and sidewalks.

Ok, someone tell me how they figured that cigarette butts cost that much to be removed. Bonus question: Can San Francisco do anything else to make themselves the freak show of American politics?

Asked by Gay Patriot:

Where’s that “Net Spending Cut” Obama Promised?

Candidate Barack Obama, October 15, 2008, third presidential debate:

But there is no doubt that we’ve been living beyond our means and we’re going to have to make some adjustments.

Now, what I’ve done throughout this campaign is to propose a net spending cut.

Economist Kevin Hassett, May 19, 2009, Bloomberg News columnist:

Extrapolating out the 2007 CBO forecast, our government plans to spend about $5.6 trillion more between 2009 and 2018 than was projected to be spent when the Democrats took over control of Congress.

To put that number in perspective, at the start of the 2007 budget year, Democrats inherited $4.8 trillion in outstanding government debt. That means that all of the deficits that have been run through all of history, funds that were used to finance the Vietnam War and the Iraq War and everything else in between, would be smaller than the spending increases of Democrats over the next 10 years if they are permitted to stay in power and keep up this pace.

Dear liberals: Obama lied. He never, not even for a moment, meant to have a net spending cut. If you believed him, you were a complete fool. If you didn’t believe him, then you deliberately supported someone you knew to be a liar. You pick: you’re either fools, or accessories to lying. Those are your only two choices.

Have fun.

Things that make you go, “hmmmm”:

Nearly half of Nevadans have had enough of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid as the powerful Democrat heads into his re-election campaign, a new Las Vegas Review-Journal poll finds.

About a third of the state’s voters would re-elect Reid if the 2010 election were held today, according to the poll, but 45 percent say they would definitely vote to replace him. Seventeen percent would consider another candidate.

I don’t think there could be anything more fun than running for Senate when you don’t particularly care about the results – but even more fun is having a 1 in 100 chance of winning. Who wants to have some fun?