The housing downturn has been under way for a while now, so it's hard to
believe that many homeowners could still think their homes are appreciating these days.

Yet a recent survey from Zillow.com found that 62% of homeowners believe their home's value has increased or stayed the same in the past year. They can't all be right: According to Zillow, 77% of homes in the United States actually declined in value during the same time.

"Our survey reveals a wide gap between the perception homeowners have about their own home's value and the realities of a market in which three-quarters of homes declined in value in the past year," said Dr. Stan Humphries, Zillow vice president of data and analytics, in a statement. "We attribute this gap to a combination of inattention and a fair bit of denial that causes people to believe their home is insulated from the woes of the market that affect others, but not them."

In the survey of 1,361 homeowners, three out of four expect their home value will increase or stay the same in the next six months, yet 42% expect values in their neighborhood to drop. Four out of five homeowners expect the amount of foreclosures will increase or stay the same in the next six months, compared with the last six months.

Read more real-estate news in this week's pages, including why it's a good idea to negotiate on commission with your real-estate agent as well as the latest pending home-sales numbers.

A year ago, it might have been understandable for people to be in denial about housing-market realities. These days, to assume your home is somehow immune isn't very realistic -- and potentially problematic if you're planning on selling soon.

-- Amy Hoak, real-estate writer

Labels: delusion, economic death watch, homeownership

Labels: John and Elizabeth Edwards, liars

Labels: economic death watch, humor

Mayor Cheye Calvo got home from work, saw a package addressed to his wife on the front porch and brought it inside, putting it on a table.


Suddenly, police with guns drawn kicked in the door and stormed in, shooting to death the couple's two dogs and seizing the unopened package.

In it were 32 pounds of marijuana. But the drugs evidently didn't belong to the couple.

Police say the couple appeared to be innocent victims of a scheme by two men to smuggle millions of dollars worth of marijuana by having it delivered to about a half-dozen unsuspecting recipients.

The two men under arrest include a FedEx deliveryman; investigators said the deliveryman would drop off a package outside a home, and the other man would come by a short time later and pick it up.

Now, federal authorities say they're looking into how local law enforcement handled the July 29 raid. FBI Agent Rich Wolf said late Thursday that the bureau had opened a civil rights investigation into the case.

A furious Calvo said earlier Thursday that he and his wife, Trinity Tomsic, had asked the government to investigate.

"Trinity was an innocent victim and random victim," Calvo said outside his two-story, red-brick house in this middle-class Washington suburb of about 3,000 people. "We were harmed by the very people who took an oath to protect us."

Calvo insisted the couple's two black Labradors were gentle creatures and said police apparently killed them "for sport," gunning down one of them as it was running away.

"Our dogs were our children," said the 37-year-old Calvo. "They were the reason we bought this house because it had a big yard for them to run in."

The mayor, who was changing his clothes when police burst in, also complained that he was handcuffed in his boxer shorts for about two hours along with his mother-in-law, and said the officers didn't believe him when he told them he was the mayor. No charges were brought against Calvo or his wife, who came home in the middle of the raid.

Prince George's County Police Chief Melvin High said Wednesday that Calvo and his family were "most likely ... innocent victims," but he would not rule out their involvement, and he defended the way the raid was conducted. He and other officials did not apologize for killing the dogs, saying the officers felt threatened.

The FBI will monitor how effective, fair and professional the law enforcement agency's conduct was during the incident, Wolf said. A police spokesman declined comment Thursday on the FBI investigation.

Police announced Wednesday they had arrested two men suspected in a plot to smuggle 417 pounds of marijuana, and seized a total of $3.6 million in pot. Investigators said the package that arrived on Calvo's porch had been sent from Los Angeles via FedEx, and they had been tracking it ever since it drew the attention of a drug-sniffing dog in Arizona.

Police intercepted it in Maryland, and an undercover detective posing as a deliveryman took it to the Calvo home.

Calvo's defenders — including the Berwyn Heights police chief, who said his department should have been alerted ahead of time — said police had no right to enter the home without knocking.

But officials insisted they acted within the law, saying the operation was compromised when Calvo's mother-in-law saw officers approaching the house and screamed. That could have given someone time to grab a gun or destroy evidence, authorities said.

Can I say what the hell is going on here? These are fully trained professionals? A kid and ball could have contained these dogs. Shot? Pursued and shot? Can we say trigger happy morons just waiting to bust of some rounds and choosing these dogs because they think, “hey they are just dogs, it isn’t like we shot some people you know.”

I went in over 500 homes in New Orleans and did't need to shoot a single dog in 3 weeks and nobody else did either.

This is an outrageous abuse and totally unnecessary. Even if the officers got a little bite it would have been reasonable vs shooting and killing two otherwise friendly dogs in their own house. As much as I see them tasering and beating people with clubs I am quite sure they could have found another way to disable two dogs. Not to mention that these “wanna be” swat players went in with all kinds of protective gear on I am sure.

As animal people we understand the dogs were probably acting up loudly as a group of men busted the door down and proceeded to attack its owner. One of which was shot in the back as it ran away.

To interrogate these people who were not even arrested in the presence of their own killed dogs is simply one of the most despicable things I have ever heard of by the police.

Patrick Murphy, the chief of the Berwyn Heights police, was not informed about the raid in advance. He reviewed the warrant and concluded Tuesday it did not contain the necessary language.

"There is no permission from the judge to treat this as a no-knock warrant. There is no affidavit of probable cause," Chief Murphy said. "The mayor demanded that they show him the warrant and they never did so."

The mayor, Cheye Calvo, could not be reached for comment Wednesday, but described the raid in an interview last week.

"They bound me and forced me to kneel in the corner," he recalled. "My mother-in-law was bound on the kitchen floor. They killed our dogs; these dogs are loved throughout town."

Prince George's County Police said Berwyn Heights Mayor Cheye Calvo brought a 32-pound package of marijuana into his home that had been delivered by officers posing as delivery men. The Tuesday evening raid was conducted by county police narcotics officers and a sheriff's office SWAT Team.

Labels: Fourth Amendment, police state

AP— Bruce Ivins was so obsessed with the Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority that he believed it had a "fatwah" against him, once claimed to have broken into a sorority house to steal a secret handbook and claimed to know more about the organization than any other nonmember, according to government documents made public Wednesday.
***
The anthrax letters all were sent from a mailbox in front of 10 Nassau St., right across from Princeton University's campus and near the building at 20 Nassau St. where Kappa Kappa Gamma, which has no official affiliation with the university, had offices.

Labels: anthrax, Bush family, Judith Miller

Labels: anthrax

Labels: pop culture

Labels: Advertising

Now, yesterday, Senator McCain started running a TV ad saying that Washington is broken. No kidding. It only took Senator McCain those 26 years in Washington to figure that out. But here’s the thing, Elkhart. I’m having a little trouble squaring that statement with Senator McCain’s declaration a few months ago that we’ve made “great progress economically” over the past eight years. Or his boast that he’s voted with President Bush over 90% of the time. Or his assertion that overall, the American people are better off now than they were when George W. Bush came into office.

You know from your own lives that we’re not better off than we were eight years ago. Back then, you were paying about $1.50 for gas. Today, you’re paying around $4 a gallon. Back then, you were paying $875 a year on electric bills. Today, you’re paying more than $1,100. Back then, you were paying about $900 for heating oil to get you through the winter. This winter, you’re likely to pay nearly $2,500.

This didn’t happen by accident. It happened because for too long, we haven’t had a real energy plan in this country. We’ve had an oil company plan. We’ve had a gas company plan. But we haven’t had a plan that made sense for the American people.

So if Senator McCain wants to talk about why Washington is broken, that’s a debate I’m happy to have. Because Senator McCain’s energy plan reads like an early Christmas list for oil and gas lobbyists. And it’s no wonder – because many of his top advisors are former oil and gas lobbyists.

Instead of offering a plan with significant investments in alternative energy, he’s offering a gas tax gimmick that will pad oil company profits and save you – at most – a quarter and a nickel a day over the course of an entire summer. That’s why Washington is broken.

Instead of supporting my plan to use the windfall profits of oil companies to help you pay rising costs, he’s offering $4 billion more in tax breaks to oil companies like Exxon that just made the largest quarterly profit in the history of the United States of America. That’s why Washington is broken.

Instead of offering a comprehensive plan that will lower gas prices, the centerpiece of his entire energy plan is more drilling. It’s a proposal that won’t yield a drop of oil for at least seven years, but it’s produced a gusher for Senator McCain. Because after he announced his drilling proposal to a room full of oil executives, the industry ponied up nearly a million dollars in contributions. That’s the kind of special interest-driven politics that’s stopped us from solving our energy crisis. And that’s why Washington is broken.

So I know Senator McCain likes to call himself a maverick – and the fact is, there are times when he’s shown independence from his party in the past. But the price he paid for his party’s nomination was to reverse himself on position after position, and now he embraces the failed Bush policies and politics that helped break Washington in the first place – and that doesn’t exactly meet my definition of a maverick.

Labels: Barack Obama, John McCain, oil

Labels: supply-side economics

On Monday, Obama gave a detail-rich speech on how he would address the energy crisis, which is a major point of concern among Americans. From ideas for energy innovation to retrofitting the U.S. auto industry to conservation steps to limited new offshore drilling, Obama did what he is often accused of not doing, fleshing out his soaring rhetoric.

McCain responded with a harsh critique of Obama's calls for more conservation, claiming that Obama wants to solve the energy crisis by having people inflate their tires. McCain's campaign even passed out a tire gauge marked as Obama's energy plan.

For his part, McCain made clear he wanted to drill for more oil wherever it could be found and to build many more nuclear power plants.

These competing plans offered a chance for the evening news to address an issue of substance that is high on the voters' agenda. Instead, NBC News anchor Brian Williams devoted 30 seconds to the dueling energy speeches, without any details and with the witty opening line that Obama was "refining" his energy plan.

So, instead of dealing with a serious issue in a serious way, NBC News ignored the substance and went for a clever slight against Obama, hitting his political maneuvering in his softened opposition to more offshore drilling.

Williams's quip fit with one of the press corps' favorite campaign narratives, Obama's flip-flopping. But the coverage ignored far more important elements of the story, such as the feasibility of Obama's vow that "we must end the age of oil in our time" or the wisdom of McCain's emphasis on drilling -- and nuking -- the nation out of its energy mess.

And, as for flip-flops, McCain's dramatic repositioning of himself as an anti-environmentalist -- after years of being one of the green movement's favorite Republicans -- represents a far more significant change than Obama's modest waffling on offshore oil.

The Sierra Club, one of the nation's premier environmental organizations, has repudiated McCain and now is running ads attacking his energy plan. But McCain's flip-flops -- even complete reversals -- remain an underplayed part of the campaign story. They just don't fit the narrative of maverick John McCain on the "Straight Talk Express."

Labels: John McCain, media whores

"When it comes to temporary entry of business professionals we signalled that we are ready to have that conversation in the context of the Doha round," U.S. Trade Representative Susan Schwab told reporters.

Susan Schwab is eager to use our technology jobs as a bargaining chip, but surprisingly India isn't buying the deal. As proposed by the U.S. we will give away our technology jobs if India will allow our agri-businesses to export rice, wheat, and other farm products duty free. Indian farmers refuse to go along with the deal because they argue that our agri-businesses are government subsidized. They are worried about their jobs!

“Professional visas would have allowed free movement of people. Today, if you have to send someone from India to the US to understand a client’s need or any other work, you have to wait for months,” he said.

snip

“Last year, out of every three (H1B) visas applied for by a company, only one was issued. This year also the ratio was the same. The professional visa would have taken care of this irritant,” said Natarajan. This visa restriction has forced IT firms to hire more American workers for onsite jobs. This pushes up their labour cost. [Emphasis mine.]

Usually, companies depute close to 25-30% of their total employees for onsite jobs. Earlier, most of the onsite jobs were carried out largely by workers from India. That is changing. Today, the proportion of US employees (including of Indian origin) in the onsite team has shot up. [Emphasis mine.]

"That is because the locals bring with them knowledge on local market, domain and technology. Customers are looking for value of both low-cost and high-cost locations.” Subramaniam felt the globally distributed work paradigm is a reality that the companies would have to come to terms with. [Note from Carrie: A paradigm shift that requires a complete change in mindset. American companies hiring local workers!]

“Toyota has localised to such an extent that it is not affected by the protectionist policy of the US,” said Nandy. [Note from Carrie: This is probably Wipro's Sudip Nandy, their Chief Executive of the Telecom and Product Engineering Solutions Business Unit.]

Labels: globalization, H-1Bs, India, media

That's how it SHOULD start! This ia a free country!

Labels: Barack Obama

Labels: Iraq War, lies

Labels: comedy, icepick meet forehead

Cheap oil, which helped push the American Dream away from the city center, isn't so cheap anymore. As more and more families reconsider their dreams, land-use experts are beginning to ask whether $4-a-gallon gas is enough to change the way Americans have thought for half a century about where they live.

"We've passed that tipping point," U.S. Transportation Secretary Mary Peters said.

Since the end of World War II, government policy has funded and encouraged the suburban lifestyle, subsidizing highways while starving mass transit and keeping gas taxes much lower than in some other countries.

Americans couldn't wait to trade in the cramped city apartments of the Kramdens and Ricardos for the lush lawns of the Bradys. Local land-use policies kept housing densities low, pushing development to the periphery of metropolitan regions and forcing families who wanted their dream house to accept long commutes and a lack of any real transportation choices other than getting behind the wheel.

Even the way the government pays for roads and transit is dependent on gas taxes, which is effective only if Americans keep driving.

"There is a whole confluence of government policies -- tax, spending, regulatory and administrative -- that have subsidized sprawl," said Bruce Katz, director of the Metropolitan Policy Program at the Brookings Institution. A gallon of gasoline costs more than $8 in Britain, Germany, France and Belgium, according to the U.S. Department of Energy. Much of the price difference is due to higher taxes.

Federal spending is about 4 to 1 in favor of highways over transit. Today, more than 99 percent of the trips taken by U.S. residents are in cars or some other non-transit vehicle, largely as a result of decades of such unbalanced spending.

The policies -- building so many highways and building so many houses near those highways -- have had a direct bearing on how and where people live and work. More Americans, 52 percent, live in the suburbs than anywhere else. The suburban growth rate exceeded 90 percent in the past decade.

But there's been a radical shift in recent months. Americans drove 9.6 billion fewer highway miles in May than a year earlier. In the Washington area and elsewhere, mass transit ridership is setting records. Last year, transit trips nationwide topped 10.3 billion, a 50-year high.

Labels: Gutter politics

JetBlue Airways said Monday that it planned to begin charging for pillow and blanket sets on flights of two hours or longer. The $7 sets, which passengers can keep and reuse, include a 10-by-12 inch pillow, a fleece blanket and a $5 coupon for Bed Bath & Beyond.

Buying the sets will be the only option for airline slumberers who do not tote their own; pillows and blankets will no longer be distributed free.

Last week, US Airways began charging $1 for coffee and tea and $2 for bottled water and soft drinks, a step already taken by some European carriers. Several airlines have begun charging passengers to check luggage and book tickets using their frequent-flier miles.

Labels: airline industry

Labels: anthrax, tinfoil

A new book by the author Ron Suskind claims that the White House ordered the CIA to forge a back-dated, handwritten letter from the head of Iraqi intelligence to Saddam Hussein.

Suskind writes in “The Way of the World,” to be published Tuesday, that the alleged forgery – adamantly denied by the White House – was designed to portray a false link between Hussein’s regime and al Qaeda as a justification for the Iraq war.

[snip]

According to Suskind, the administration had been in contact with the director of the Iraqi intelligence service in the last years of Hussein’s regime, Tahir Jalil Habbush al-Tikriti.

“The White House had concocted a fake letter from Habbush to Saddam, backdated to July 1, 2001,” Suskind writes. “It said that 9/11 ringleader Mohammad Atta had actually trained for his mission in Iraq – thus showing, finally, that there was an operational link between Saddam and al Qaeda, something the Vice President’s Office had been pressing CIA to prove since 9/11 as a justification to invade Iraq. There is no link.”

[snip]

The author claims that such an operation, part of “false pretenses” for war, would apparently constitute illegal White House use of the CIA to influence a domestic audience, an arguably impeachable offense.

Suskind writes that the White House had “ignored the Iraq intelligence chief’s accurate disclosure that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq – intelligence they received in plenty of time to stop an invasion.

Labels: George W. Bush, lies, The War in Iraq

Labels: 2008 election, cynicism, rant

Just think about it . . . MSNBC Dateline ran child molester stings until we cried Uncle. What would have happened if they did the same about the financial crisis. If they had done that, they would have all lost their jobs, because Paulson’s fraternity of Goldman Sachs brothers would have eviscerated the advertising of the media through strong-arm tactics on their clients. Why was it OK to run To Catch A Predator until we puked? Because the sexual predators were not buying air time.

Labels: bloggers, housing bubble

I've spent a few days on the campaign trail with Obama and know people who've traveled with him for months. I wouldn't argue that portrayals of the candidate as occasionally aloof, or a little professorial, are imagined.

But it's a long ways from, in the words of Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank, acting like "the presumptuous nominee" whose "biggest challenger may not be Republican John McCain but rather his own hubris."

Milbank, who is often wickedly revealing, last week seemed mostly wicked as he turned benign campaign tableau -- an Obama motorcade, a talk with the Treasury secretary, a "pep rally" with congressional Democrats -- into evidence that Obama thinks he's already the winner.

[snip]

Then came the stunning revelation that Obama had begun planning for a transition to the White House.

Fox News hostess E.D. Hill -- who dubbed Obama's playful knuckle bump with his wife a "terrorist fist jab" -- reminded viewers recently that the Democrat was "not commander in chief just yet, which is why some find his decision to start planning his transition into the White House a bit presumptuous."

Hill wondered whether Obama was "jumping the gun or just covering all the bases?"

Never mind that McCain advisors have acknowledged that they too were planning for a White House transition or the fact that history has rewarded those who looked ahead. Early transition planner Ronald Reagan hit the ground running in 1980. Bill Clinton initially struggled after dawdling on White House preparations in 1992.

Yeah, but what about that talk of remodeling the Lincoln Bedroom? Surely that proves Obama thinks he's destined for 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.

That whopper grew out of an entirely benign moment last month in Fargo, N.D. A woman asked if Obama would consider remodeling the room with African kente cloth.

"No," Obama said with a laugh. He mused that when he had toured the White House in 2005, he thought a copy of the Gettysburg Address would look more appropriate in the historic chamber than the flat-screen TV on the wall.

What about that seal, complete with American eagle, that the Obama faithful trotted out a few weeks back? No question it was a cheesy would-be stature-builder -- but it was far short of counting electoral votes before they're cast.

The candidate's crowning demonstrations of hubris, according to those building a case, came during his extended trip to Iraq, Afghanistan, the Middle East and Europe. Recall the pundits demanding the freshman Illinois senator prove he could be presidential in the foreign arena?

So he appeared at ease with world leaders, talked animatedly with beaming American troops and drew huge civilian crowds. Then the pundits -- who had been taking a round of bashing for supposedly going easy on Obama -- told Obama he needed to beware of appearing too presidential.

[snip]

"There's an interesting line building on Obama that somehow success and intelligence are a handicap," said Mark Sawyer, a UCLA political scientist. "If he wasn't extraordinary, he wouldn't be there. But then he is extraordinary and it becomes, 'He is just too good, too well spoken, too accomplished.' "

Labels: idiocy

Labels: blogging

The evidence amassed by F.B.I. investigators against Dr. Bruce E. Ivins, the Army scientist who killed himself last week after learning that he was likely to be charged in the anthrax letter attacks of 2001, was largely circumstantial, and a grand jury in Washington was planning to hear several more weeks of testimony before issuing an indictment, a person who has been briefed on the investigation said on Sunday.

While genetic analysis had linked the anthrax letters to a supply of the deadly bacterium in Dr. Ivins’s laboratory at Fort Detrick, Md., at least 10 people had access to the flask containing that anthrax, said the source, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the investigation publicly.

Agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation also have no evidence proving that Dr. Ivins visited New Jersey on the dates in September and October 2001 when investigators believe the letters were sent from a Princeton mailbox, the source said.

The source acknowledged that there might be some elements of the evidence of which he was unaware. And while he characterized what he did know about as “damning,” he said that instead of irrefutable proof, investigators had an array of indirect evidence that they argue strongly implicates Dr. Ivins in the attacks, which killed 5 people and sickened 17 others.

Atrios writes: "now that we know that the US gov't believes that anthrax came from the inside, shouldn't Cohen be a wee bit curious about what this warning was based on?"

That applies to much of the Beltway class, including many well-connected journalists, who were quietly popping cipro back then because, like Cohen, they heard from Government sources that they should. Leave aside the ethical questions about the fact that these journalists kept those warnings to themselves. Wouldn't the most basic journalistic instincts lead them now -- in light of the claims by our Government that the attacks came from a Government scientist -- to wonder why and how their Government sources were warning about an anthrax attack? Then again, the most basic journalistic instincts would have led ABC News to reveal who concocted and fed them the false "Saddam/anthrax" reports in the first place, and yet we still are forced to guess at those questions because ABC News continues to cover up the identity of the perpetrators.

Labels: anthrax, incompetence, tinfoil

Homeowners with good credit are falling behind on their payments in growing numbers, even as the problems with mortgages made to people with weak, or subprime, credit are showing their first, tentative signs of leveling off after two years of spiraling defaults.

The percentage of mortgages in arrears in the category of loans one rung above subprime, so-called alternative-A mortgages, quadrupled to 12 percent in April from a year earlier. Delinquencies among prime loans, which account for most of the $12 trillion market, doubled to 2.7 percent in that time.

The mortgage troubles have been exacerbated by an economy that is still struggling. Reports last week showed another drop in home prices, slower-than-expected economic growth and a huge loss at General Motors. On Friday, the Labor Department reported that the unemployment rate in July climbed to a four-year high.

[snip]

Delinquencies in prime and alt-A loans are particularly challenging for banks because they hold more such loans on their books than they do subprime mortgages. Downey Financial, which owns a savings bank that operates in California and Arizona, recently reported that 11.2 percent of its loans were delinquent at the end of June, a big increase from the 6.1 percent that were past due at the end of last year.

The bank’s troubles stem from its $6.2 billion portfolio of so-called option adjustable-rate mortgages, which allow borrowers to pay less than the interest owed on their mortgage in the early years. The unpaid interest is added to the principal due on the loan, so over time borrowers can owe more than the initial loan amount. Eventually, when loans grow by 10 percent or 15 percent, the borrowers are required to start paying both the interest and principal due.

Many borrowers who got these loans during the boom had good credit scores, but many of them owe more than their homes are worth. Analysts believe that many will not be able to or want to make higher payments.

Labels: economic death watch, housing bubble

It is a complete waste of the money John McCain's contributors have donated to his campaign. It is a complete waste of the country's time and attention at the very moment when millions of people are losing their homes and their jobs. And it is a completely frivolous way to choose the next President of the United States.

Labels: evil, John McCain, misogyny

Labels: punditry, racism

Labels: cute things

The CNN/Opinion Research Corp. Poll showed that 24 percent have a positive outlook for the country, while 76 percent say things are on the wrong track.

It is the lowest number on record since 1980 and the third time in four decades that the number has dropped so low.

Recent CNN/Opinion Research Corp. polling has shown a steady drop in the country's mood. In April 2007, 51 percent said things in the country were going badly. A year later, 70 percent reiterated that position.

The poll questioned 1,041 adult Americans by telephone July 27-29, 2008. The margin of error was plus or minus 3 percentage points.

Labels: 2008 election, insanity