One Word For The Decade
I realize this isn’t the end of the decade, but so many papers have articles like these, I decided to run with it. Tomorrow we’ll have a predictions thread, and this is a Thursday desk clearing post. “This was the year, finally, that promised relief, opening with foreclosure moratoriums and a highly touted Obama administration initiative to keep millions of desperate borrowers in their homes. But 2009 ends with the same old troubles. Woodland, Calif., borrower Jennifer Quigley made six months of trial modification payments to Wells Fargo, only to get a permanent modification offer that raised payments to 54 percent of her family’s gross monthly income, not the targeted 31 percent.”
“‘I said, ‘This isn’t our income.’ They said, ‘That’s what’s in our computer,’ said Quigley, laid off a year ago from UC Davis. ‘We’re right at the end of our sanity. Come January we’ve been doing this for a year with no resolution.’”
“A’Leah and Randall Knight, of Bend, built their 1,700-square-foot home practically themselves five years ago. An appraiser valued it at $350,000 just two years ago. The market was booming and investing in a second home made sense. Even worse, her husband recently had a severe pay cut, and their renter stopped paying rent. They sold the rental house. Now, trying to short-sell their home to help pay off their $300,000 debt, they have it on the market for $136,900.”
“”We bought a rental house, and then the market just crashed,’ Knight said.”
“First came foreclosure sales, then short sales. Now Central Florida is seeing more half-finished homes for sale: bare-stud, bare-yard houses abandoned by their builders and left to languish on the market. ‘If I had known three years ago that my business would be based on selling short sales, foreclosures and half-built houses, I would have told you you were smoking crack,’ said Kelly Price, a veteran real-estate broker based in Winter Park.”
“It’s been a wild and eventful past 10 years in the East Valley. Nothing defined the decade more than the area’s housing bubble. The double-digit appreciation rates during the first half of the decade had real estate agents driving investors through neighborhoods while they snapped up houses in hours or days. It was said agents for buyers and sellers were so hot to move on deals they were filling out the paperwork using car trunks as desks. Buyers didn’t think twice about the home’s condition, and sellers did dances over the amount of money they were getting.”
“Then the crash came. And house prices slid for most of the rest of the decade. Foreclosures led to blight in many neighborhoods. There are still about 50,000 homes on the market in the Valley.”
“Call it the end of the age of exceptionalism, Flagstaff-style. Entering 2009, Flagstaff appeared to cling to the notion that somehow the Great Recession was going to pass it by. It was only a matter of time before Flagstaff’s government- and tourist-dependent economy went on the ropes, too. The first signs early in the year came as housing values declined, making new home equity lines of credit harder to come by. That caused retail spending to plunge by double-digit percentages compared to the previous year. Flagstaff’s municipal budget went into a tailspin.”
“The idea that Flagstaff could somehow remain above the economic fray was wishful thinking that, in hindsight, might have cost the region valuable time in confronting and coping with the recession’s major impacts.”
“After decades of leading the nation in growth, Nevada may now be losing population. A new report from the state’s demographer estimates Nevada lost more than 27-thousand people in the year ending July First. ‘This is a new phenomenon for Nevada.’ says state Demographer Jeff Hardcastle . ‘We used to joke Nevada was the one state in the nation where a three percent growth rate was a recession.’”
“‘We peaked in about 2006 with construction employment,’ says Hardcastle, ‘and if you recall we got hit by the housing bubble in 2006, then got hit by the gas price surge in 2007 which deteriorated the tourism industry and then got hit by the Lehman Brothers and financial crisis nationally.’”
“I’ve come to visit a brand new housing development, just off the main street of a small town 17 miles from Dublin city centre. The signs at the entrance promise ‘The Best of Everything’. But there’s no one living here. It’s a scene replicated hundreds of times around the country. As the New Year approaches, the question is: What do we do now with these ghost estates?”
“First, you have to ask why we were mad enough to build all these surplus homes in the first place. Let’s go back to 2006 when the Central Statistics Office identified 266,000 empty residential properties — representing 15pc of all homes. It was obvious that supply already exceeded demand and yet, in that same year, property fever still gripped the nation, and people slept in their cars overnight to be first in a queue to buy within commuting distance of Dublin.”
“As the first decade of the 21st century draws to an end, many Northern San Joaquin Valley residents say: Good riddance. This decade has been so economically brutal that most can’t wait for it to be over. Lots and lots of homes were built. In Stanislaus County alone, about 25,000 homes and apartments were constructed. BATs — ‘Bay Area transplants’ — swooped in to buy those homes. Those newcomers inspired commercial developers to erect shopping centers throughout the region.”
“When the inflated housing bubble burst in 2006, the Northern San Joaquin Valley’s entire economy imploded. Since then, more than 51,000 homes in Stanislaus, San Joaquin and Merced counties have been lost to foreclosure, costing lenders more than $19 billion in unpaid mortgages. About one in eight homes in the region have been repossessed, the worst foreclosure rate in the nation.”
“We’re also worst when it comes to home value declines. From the price peak in December 2005 to this spring’s bottom of the market, homes lost about two-thirds of their value. Because of that, more than 81 percent of the region’s homeowners owe more on their mortgages than their houses are worth.”
“And unemployment during 2009 has been more than double what it was at the start of the decade. Stanislaus’ rate in November 2000 was just 7.7 percent, but it reached 17.2 percent last month.”
“A decade ago, people’s biggest fear was Y2K. Let’s hope something so trivial will dominate the news in the decade to come.”
“How did Fannie and Freddie help cause the crisis? In 1990, outstanding mortgage debt held was $3.805 trillion. Then, Fannie and Freddie weakened lending standards by handing out unsecured loans to unqualified borrowers. And, by the end of 2007 as the crisis was reaching its peak, total mortgage holdings had risen to $14.568 trillion, a staggering 383 percent jump.”
“Today, total mortgage holdings stand at $14.418 trillion. A full 75 percent of that—roughly the amount Fannie and Freddie are responsible for financing—is $10.8 trillion! Add to that the securities which were sold by the GSE’s, and it’s larger than the Gross Domestic Product. Taxpayers could never, ever possibly cover losses on that scale.”
“There are actually more losses on the way. Reported Business Week yesterday, ‘Foreclosure filings in 2009 will reach a record for the second consecutive year with 3.9 million notices sent to homeowners in default, RealtyTrac said Dec. 10. This year’s filings will surpass 2008’s total of 3.2 million.”
“The government shouldn’t reward liars. But that’s the effect of changes to the Obama administration’s failing program to help homeowners modify their mortgages. Until recently the rules were clear: if you grossly understated your income to qualify for the program, you had to restart the loan modification process. It made sense. After all, we got into this housing mess partly because too many people were dishonest about how much they made.”
“Fast forward to today. The federally funded Home Affordable Modification Program was aimed at getting banks to rework mortgages for homeowners in order to slow the pace of foreclosures. The program isn’t working like it’s supposed to. Since March, just 31,000 homeowners have won permanent relief. One big reason why is that lenders are doing what they should have been doing all along - requiring things like proof of income.”
“How’s the government responding? By letting homeowners who fudge their income numbers off the hook with little more than a wink and a nod. ‘This isn’t the kind of person the government should want to help,’ said Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research.”
“Fitting that while the first decade of this century was dribbling away, the mendacious Eldrick “The Weasel” Woods (The Golfer Formerly Known as Tiger) was watching his marriage and his endorsement deals fall apart, the Heenes were preparing for jail, Bernie Madoff was already in jail and George W. Bush was as invisible as it is possible to be for a man who was president of the United States only 11 months ago.”
“Such is the unravelling of the Decade of Deception. Of fabrication, mendacity and untruth. Of Enron and Bernie Madoff, Earl Jones and Vincent Lacroix. Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens. And the filthy rich bankers of Wall St., who came up with a filthy lie – renamed toxic assets as ‘derivatives’ and very nearly brought the global economy to its knees.”
“At the beginning of this decade, I wondered aloud what we were going to call the first 10 years of the new millennium. The Aughts? Naughts? Zips? Nothings? After 10 years of systematic, percolating, corrosive lies, the appellation is simple. The only name that fits the past decade is the Zeros.”
“As the first decade of the 21st Century ends, a whopping 50 percent of Americans have a negative impression of the past 10 years, compared with 27 percent who hold a positive view. In a survey released this month, the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press found results ‘in stark contrast to the public’s recollection of other decades in the past half-century.’”
“The decade was speckled with both bubbles of prosperity and high-profile, high-dollar cases of white collar crime that wiped out consumers, investors and workers by the billions. The breadth and depth of discontent with the current decade is reflected in the words people use to describe it, Pew researchers found.”
“‘The single most common word or phrase used to characterize the past 10 years is downhill, and other bleak terms are common. Other, more neutral, words like ‘change,’ ‘fair’ and ‘interesting’ also come up, and while the word ‘good’ is near the top of the list, there are few other positive words mentioned with any frequency,’ the study said.”
“Wealth manager Paul Schatz said there were multiple bubbles and busts over the decade involving the so-called dot.com frenzy over Internet startup companies and technology stocks, housing prices, mortgage derivatives, over-leveraged investment banks and commodities. ‘My one word for the decade: bust,’ he said.”
‘If I had known three years ago that my business would be based on selling short sales, foreclosures and half-built houses, I would have told you you were smoking crack,’ said Kelly Price, a veteran real-estate broker based in Winter Park.”
So Kelly, when you telling everyone to buy,buy,buy, RE always goes up. Were you smoking crack?
Veteran huh? Veteran implies wisdom, experience and judgement. Kelly Price talks like a clueless, inexperienced greenhorn because Kelly Price IS a clueless, inexperienced greenhorn.
“A’Leah and Randall Knight, of Bend, built their 1,700-square-foot home practically themselves five years ago. An appraiser valued it at $350,000 just two years ago. The market was booming and investing in a second home made sense. Even worse, her husband recently had a severe pay cut, and their renter stopped paying rent. They sold the rental house. Now, trying to short-sell their home to help pay off their $300,000 debt, they have it on the market for $136,900.”
Blind greedy speculation + Lying appraiser + a dose of reality= Collapsing Housing Prices
But good luck getting a $136k for your $60k shack.
Bend is the quintessential Oregon boomtown: Just like Portland was the nexus for ‘up-and-coming’ hipsters who wanted a better quality of life, Bend for awhile became an attraction for wealthy Oregonians who wanted to get away from the increasing sprawl and big city feel of Portland. It had tons of new construction, yuppie sensibilities and all the (scaled down) skiing amenities of Aspen or Park City but without the traffic…until it too became a infested with greedy developers and property speculators.
Now Bend has had a complete collapse. Their 350K love shack has fallen in price to its true value, and their dreams of having a real estate empire have shattered. Their only alternative is to walk away and live on their actual income.
Something tells me that if Barbara Corcoran had been born 25 years later, her story would hardly be any different from this one.
A’Leah and Randall…it sucks to be you.
NoSingleOne,
LOL! Not to say you haven’t had some knee slapper posts in the past but that one was an absolute stand out! Kudos.
I have to think, especially given the track records of so many… of these young couples, that they these two didn’t ‘fancy’ themselves something of a “builder”?
The young couple that used to rent below us jumped in w/ both feet by selling (1) home in 2004 ( no cap gains ) building their dream home ( finished in late 2005 ) built yet another… home for ‘her’ parents and contrary to all their insistances to the contrary.., listed their “dream home” 2 years to the day after they -finished- the damn thing!
do most couples really “build” their own home or do they just hover around the spec builder? I heard a few couples say *they* were building and thought they mean they were out there hammering nails.
In Montana,
Obviously ( and see below ) I have my serious doubts?
‘My’ strategy was that, a 20′ cargo container would just… barely clear inside my garage and I plan to outfit w/ all the amenities, ultimately to be delivered to my property so we would have a starting point from which to build the actual home.
I know a guy ( in Southern OR no less ) that’s been spending this winter in a makeshift “bunk house” ( glorified pump house for his well ) and I just don’t think I could talk the wife into that?
Yeah…. I think the genesis of “I’m building a house” came directly from Dells “we’ll ‘build’ you a computer” even though dell merely assembles pieces like a jigsaw puzzle.
Yes anyone can perform construction tasks. What separates construction from the Weekend Wally’s and HomeDepot Harrys is *can you make money doing it?* Most can’t, many go bankrupt hence the reason heavy highway and civil constructors make alot of money. High risk=high reward. Having the judgement to know when to pay someone else for a task and what you can perform yourself within a window of time is key. Most of these dopes couldn’t build a doghouse in 6 months if I gave them the plans and materials.
I called and there is an offer on it for 136,900. their problems are over! Oh, the bank needs to approve the offer, so I guess they will have to wait with bated breath for a few months and keep payin and prayin whether or not the bank would rather have 136k or be owed 300k?
Not putting any offers on short sales, I just dont understand why the realtors dont ask $1. The concept is the same.
“Now Bend has had a complete collapse. Their 350K love shack has fallen in price to its true value, and their dreams of having a real estate empire have shattered. Their only alternative is to walk away and live on their actual income.”
LOL! I don’t sense a shred of pity here, NoSingleOne. And I agree, Bend, OR was definitely where the “star belly sneetches” partied with their snoots in the air.
They took out equity in the home they built to purchase the rental. They LEVERAGED their solid equity, and lost it on BOTH properties. Without having money in savings (if they did have savings, they wouldn’t have leveraged and hedged their security on a rental). Real estate is long-term, always has been, always will be. They aren’t the only ones who did it. The real estate isn’t the problem, but the decisions made by people to turn their equity - which was only on paper - to use it to buy more “stuff.” Who knew the market was going to adjust so quickly?
As the first decade of the 21st century draws to an end, many Northern San Joaquin Valley residents say: Good riddance.
Just wait until they meet the next decade, the current decade’s bigger, badder brother.
the current decade’s bigger, badder brother ??
Boy I sure hope not….
We’ve enjoyed the sneak previews.
“Just wait until they meet the next decade, the current decade’s bigger, badder brother.”
We’ve still got quite a hangover to deal with from the last, lost decade and lots of new problems facing us. We still have no new economy to replace the dying FIRE economy and we will be facing a host of Peak Oil issues no later than the next few years as oil depletion in Mexico cuts off that source of imports as well as perhaps giving us more issues along our southern border. We have immense problems facing us and we seem to be a long way from viable solutions to those problems. The past decade, with all its problems, might end up looking good compared to the upcoming decade.
In the near term, we seem to fighting like h-ll to hold onto the past. This wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing if we were using this period to make the investments to move in a different direction. Unfortunately, we aren’t. Once the fumes run out, we probably won’t have some alternate means of moving us forward, but instead be stranded with limited options. I sure hope I’m wrong though. There’s going to be very broad and deep pain if I’m not.
One definitely does get the sense that we’re painting ourselves into a corner, no?
“Call it the end of the age of exceptionalism, Flagstaff-style.”
Well, we all know of one way that Flagstaff will always remain exceptional with regard to the great Housing Bubble and Bust. Happy New Year, Ben, and all the rest of you HBB’ers!
I can’t wait for VH1s remember the 10s!
“A’Leah and Randall Knight, of Bend, built their 1,700-square-foot home practically themselves five years ago. An appraiser valued it at $350,000 just two years ago. The market was booming and investing in a second home made sense. Even worse, her husband recently had a severe pay cut, and their renter stopped paying rent. They sold the rental house. Now, trying to short-sell their home to help pay off their $300,000 debt, they have it on the market for $136,900.”
“”We bought a rental house, and then the market just crashed,’ Knight said.
These people play stupid, but look what they’ve done. They sold their investment property at a loss (for which they got a mortgage under false pretense, claiming it would be a primary residence), and now are trying to short sale the second home, which is now their primary.
Remind me again why We, the Taxpayers–through bailouts for the bank, and temporary tax exemptions for forgiven debt–are going to mitigate these savvy folks speculative loss? You and I can only write off $3000/year in stock market losses….
(And why didn’t the reporter poke holes in this story? Or the first one where the folks have to pay 51% of the income? I read the original article and nowhere did it say how much money they owed! It’s probably so much money that 31% of their income wouldn’t get it paid off in 60 years, let alone 30….
This couple is a perfect example of the arrogant jerks during the Great Housing Fraud years. Now every single one of them is getting his dick slammed in the door is sheer joy.
‘Cept that those of us who declined to participate are also getting our hangy down thing slammed as well, either through the devaluation of our investment portfolios, damage to our employers the prospect of substantial tax increases in the near future, and building inflationary pressures that will play havoc with our golden years.
Takes a bit of the fun out of the whole thing.
reuven,
Excellent observations as always. And perhaps that’s how we should have gone ‘in’ to The Boom? Sure, you can live in any neighborhood in America you would like!
( It’s just, given your, ahem, ‘income’ it will take 78 years to pay this off! Are you ’sure’ you still want to go through with this? )
Of course all it would have meant was people lying about the duration… of their mortgage ( rather than embellishing about their oh-so-wonderful rate!
The other gal that built an “indoor arena” ( for disabled children to learn to ride horses ) took the cake though IMHO. Jeez lady, they’re disabled, not made out of sugar! Just say you wanted it for yourself and call it good.
“These people play stupid, but look what they’ve done. They sold their investment property at a loss (for which they got a mortgage under false pretense, claiming it would be a primary residence), and now are trying to short sale the second home, which is now their primary.”
Ah, the unintended consequences of the Fed’s removal of being 1099′d for debt forgiveness on a mortgage. These FB’s get to short sell 2 properties without any tax consequences. Used to be they’d get 1099’s for the amount of the debt forgiven, and income tax would be due accordingly.
Walkaways in 2010 will be staggering, methinks.
Lisa,
Nicely done. As we look back, so many of these couples that “built their home ‘practically’ with their own hands” will pretty much ALL be exposed for frauds!
When you’ve done everything from the site survey to the excavation work to the form work for the foundation to shingling the damn roof! THEN you can come tell me how ‘you’ built it! But no, arguing over what wallpaper to use in the guest bath in the aisle at Lowe’s does not constitute “built”.
Ah, I was wondering, as I commented above. I remember being amazed and intimidated that so many younger people knew how to build stuff. LOL
“amazed and intimidated”
As was myself Sir! The one couple, hubby worked for Hollywood Video ( main corp. office in Wilsonville ) and she was a phys. therapist.
So I know they were ’super’ smart! It’s just I think a matter that these types had so much confidence they figured they’d get better at it as they went?
Any why not! After all they’d replaced a dishwasher and put hardwood flooring in the bathroom of their old house. How hard could it be?
DinOr and Montana,
I built my first house in 1976, several more
over the years, lots of remodels too. You can
build nice places right now for $65 per sq.ft..
Here’s a nice rule of thumb, when the rock
is up and taped, the house is 50% completed
and the difficult and expensive work now starts. So if from site prep to rock took
two months, figure on two more to move in.
Today is the last day for tax waivers on mortgage debt forgiveness. I wonder if that will get extended?
“Today is the last day for tax waivers on mortgage debt forgiveness. I wonder if that will get extended?”
Kim, I wish you were right, but we’re stuck with that for the long term thanks to Dubya’s Mortgage Forgiveness Debt Relief Act. See below.
H.R. 3648
Mortgage Forgiveness Debt Relief
Act of 2007
Permanent exclusion from gross income of discharged home mortgage indebtedness. The bill would amend current law, which requires taxpayers to include discharges of mortgage indebtedness as income and to pay tax on this income. The bill would provide a permanent exclusion for discharges of up to two million dollars of indebtedness (on or after January 1,2007) which is secured by a principal residence and which is incurred in the acquisition, construction, or substantial improvement of the principal residence. Instead of including this amount as income, the basis of the individual’s principal residence would be reduced by the amount excluded from income under this bill. This proposal is estimated to cost approximately $1.4 billion over 10 years.
What are you smoking it is a good thing to not have to pay on phantom income. Obama’s loan modification program is what is really messing up the housing price resets. People are committing all kinds of scams to keep their property and preventing real homeowners that can afford the new lower priced home from purchasing it. I have great examples of people faking an injury and kicking out renters to try and save their home. I was talking to one guy that had sucked all the equity from a home and then missed three payments so he could try and get an Obama loan mod and lower his principal and or payments. lame.
Oops… nevermind. Its through 2012.
http://www.irs.gov/individuals/article/0,,id=179414,00.html
They don’t get to short sale it, don’t worry. the bank does not approve them unless really close to the mortgage amount. just buying time and preying on future walk away folks best they can. Sometimes it takes 6 months to procure a negotiator, and if that offer is not approved, case closed. Next offer, it takes up to 6 months to be assigned a negotiator, cuz the case was closed, and back to the end of the line
So if a short sale offer is pulled, the realtor plays mum as to not get the case closed and have to get back in line
Or so I have heard
I believe the 1099 penalty (intentionally or not) was serving to keep people from walking from their mortgages. Once it went away, the rush for the exits began.
It isn’t too late to bring it back……..
“Fast forward to today. The federally funded Home Affordable Modification Program was aimed at getting banks to rework mortgages for homeowners in order to slow the pace of foreclosures. The program isn’t working like it’s supposed to. Since March, just 31,000 homeowners have won permanent relief. One big reason why is that lenders are doing what they should have been doing all along - requiring things like proof of income.”
And how, exactly, is this “supposed to” work? More pro R-E industry bias in the newspapers….
I think while it might be a hard learned lesson for many, in cases where the borrower lied about their income, the loan should be full recourse and the statute of limitations should be set aside as it is in school loans. I believe this would prevent a lot of walk aways where people potentially could afford to struggle with the payments but elect not to. Hard medicine? Yes, but it has been hard on all of us who did not lie to get a loan we could not afford.
That said, I do believe we need to see usury laws back. Many borrowers are seeing rates skyrocket while banks enjoy 0% fed loans.
If we did that, they would just file bankruptcy and the effect would be pretty much the same, except the lawyers would have a field day picking the carcases. I doubt that most of these folks have much in the way of personal assets to go after.
School loans are not dismissed in bankruptcy. Neither are loans obtained through fraud by my understanding.
GH:
That’s why lots of people took out the HELOC to pay off the student loans then default…
—————-
School loans are not dismissed in bankruptcy
Why should the borrowers be entirely on the hook? There were few loans that lenders wouldn’t fund with no concern about whether those loans could ever be paid back. I think it was mostly irrelevant whether borrowers lied about their incomes. The most that would have happened is they might’ve been put in a different type of loan with no income verification.
The lenders should mostly be on the hook for these bad loans, if for no other reason than to deter them from making these types of loans in the future. If lenders had been properly verifying incomes, there would be a much stronger case to be made against fraudulent borrowers.
Agree, Greg.
“The idea that Flagstaff could somehow remain above the economic fray was wishful thinking that, in hindsight, might have cost the region valuable time in confronting and coping with the recession’s major impacts.”
Okay..okay, that does it …Things are getting too dicey out there !!
It’s time to get our under-cover man Ben, out of his “I Caused The Housing Bubble To Bust And All I Got Was…This Lousy T-Shirt apparel, clear of Flagstaff and into the HBB Witness Protection Program. Ben, you have to leave the truck cat behind.
We move him to Vegas for safety, make him a RE agent, call him Spike and nobody, but nobody would ever know, talk to or bother him. He could have a little RE office somewhere out in the sand and bust rubble with an assistant named Suzanne.
Nobody would suspect a thing with a cover like that.
Spike, the RE Professional…sorry Ben but I kinda liked that touch.
j/k
I think I’d rather be a cop in Detroit than a Realtor in Las Vegas. Ugh!
I love the idea of a prediction thread for tomorrow, but I also hope that people would share a review of how 2009 fared vs. what you were expecting type of thread. Of course we all have our hits and misses, so don’t be shy in sharing them.
I learned that schadenfreude is simply a mask for sorrow and braggadocio a talisman against fear. Thanks to Ben for giving me an excuse to stay connected to the collective wisdom of this community, and to HBB for keeping me honest therein.
HNY to my favorite Smartarses! The fun is just beginning….
After 10 years of systematic, percolating, corrosive lies, the appellation is simple. The only name that fits the past decade is the Zeros.
I guess you’ve forgotten about “I did not have sex with that woman”– only the most memorable of the endless whoppers of the ’90s.
The Y2K decade will be remembered for the “a$$ covering” brand of bald-faced lies.
i.e “Heckuva job, Brownie” type of performance assessments and “The system worked…” style of crisis management.
Interesting juxtsaposition of those two comments. I hadn’t thought about them together before.
Each comment was equally inaine, but the MSM was still talking about the Brownie comment 3 years later, while the JN comment was ignored.
Where’s Ed Murrow when we need him?
Heckava Job Brown-Eye= The end result of appointing KnowNothings to positions that require technical expertise applicable to the positions tasks.
But let me add to the list of bald faced lies, distortions and mismanagement. There are so many, where do I start?
1) GWB, March 17, 2003 - “Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised.”
This bald faced lie was repeated over and over again by the highest levels of govt. End result? 700,000 dead human beings and spending that led to 5 TRILLION in additional debt.
2) “Iraq was involved with the WTC bombing”. Another whopper of a bald face lie by our former VP
3) July 2009, Betsy McCaughey, former lieutenant gov(r) “Congress would make it mandatory…that every five years, people in Medicare have a required counseling session that will tell them how to end their life sooner, how to decline nutrition.” Another beaut of a lie by those who hate everyone but bought and paid for white evangelicals.
4) August 2008, Sarah “empty skull” Palin: “I have protected the taxpayers by vetoing wasteful spending … and championed reform to end the abuses of earmark spending by Congress. I told the Congress ‘thanks but no thanks’ for that Bridge to Nowhere.”
THE FACTS: As mayor of Wasilla, Palin hired a lobbyist and traveled to Washington annually to support earmarks for the town totaling $27 million. In her two years as governor, Alaska has requested nearly $750 million in special federal spending, by far the largest per-capita request in the nation. While Palin notes she rejected plans to build a $398 million bridge from Ketchikan to an island with 50 residents and an airport, that opposition came only after the plan was ridiculed nationally as a “bridge to nowhere.”
Must be lying is part of the moral code held high by the flag waving pseudo-conservatives…… damn hypocrites.
Oh… I think the reason that “I” have gotten so-damn-sick of people clutching for straws and dredging up the stupid “Brownie comment” time and again is that; it pertained to an Act of God.
No one really knew in the early going just how BAD it really was and I’m sure just getting drinking water and electricity turned on in ‘parts’ of NOLA felt like they were getting a handle on it? Why things would be back to normal in NO time! ( Right ) As we now know from the benefit of 5 years of hindsight?
They had no WAY of knowing the sheer scale of the damage at the time. No resident of NOLA “profitted” during the run up to Katrina. Just… let it go…
And just let go of 700k dead people too? But lets hold onto a guys sexual proclivities where there was no harm inflicted. Nice try.
I know for a fact you can do better than EddieStyle.
exeter,
I’m just tired of hearing it is all. Where do you come off laying 700,000 corpses at ‘my’ feet?
Again, Katrina was an Act of God. ( As in not GWB’s fault for having precipitated it ) You really have to get over the BDS. Please.
“that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons”
If I recall correctly, the biggest pusher of this lie was Saddam himself.
“Katrina was an act of God”
True…..but the fact is that we are paying taxpayer money to pay guys in Washington to come up with plans for mitigating the disaster once it happens. It wasn’t like the Gulf Coast hasn’t been hit by a hurricane before.
The fact that GWB filled FEMA positions with political hacks, instead of someone with experience in the field says volumes. Just compare the “help” that NYC got after 9/11, vs. what happened in New Orleans. (Where is Wall Street located again???).
The size of the disaster required a response equal to the size of the problem. Expecting the local police to control things when their infrastructure has been trashed is wishful thinking.
The Fed response was totally inadequate. And it could have been worse, if some local commanders hadn’t sent helicopters, etc. on their own initiative, instead of waiting on Washington.
“I’m just tired of hearing it is all.”
Then don’t let the facts tire you.
Like hell they didn’t know. You live in or near the Gulf Coast, you know DAMN WELL what the general effect of any given size hurricane will be.
That’s why they have CATEGORIES. And million dollar satellites.
Cat 1, very, very bad rain storm. Cat 5, kiss your az goodbye. Simple.
DC let that whole region suffer because New Orleans corruption wasn’t DC style corruption. Period. Well that, and the GOP is the biggest bunch of racists that ever walked the planet.
“…Well that, and the GOP is the biggest bunch of racists that ever walked the planet.”
(6hrs 21 min to go…Hwy uncorks a fresh bottle of RED RED Fine! )
No one really knew in the early going just how BAD it really was
BULL on that one Dinor. Really? Really? That has got to be the last inane comment of the decade.. with one minute to go.
I am just choking with laughter reading this blog.
Yesireeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee.
The sad thing is that these people jumped in to the pool blinded by greed and ignorance.
“…700,000 dead human beings and spending that led to 5 TRILLION in additional debt.”
Cheney-Shrub Legacy Effect: #1
(Hwy inserts Neil Young’s “Living with War”…)
WJC lied under oath. Even taking the wildest accusations of purported lies by GWB as true, solely for the purpose of argument, GWB did not lie under oath. If he had, he would have been pursued.
There’s a reason why our system treats lying under oath differently than lying in other circumstances (particularly with respect to policy issues). This is in order to impress upon people the absolute necessity, on pain of imprisonment, of telling the truth. Our judicial system, creaking as it may be, would absolutely collapse without it.
Should LBJ have been subject to criminal prosecution for lying about his intentions in Vietnam in 1965?
Finally, the attempt of most liberals–wholly aside from the perjury issue–to minimize WJC’s actions as a mere peccadillo ignores their long, partisan history of excoriating Republican politicians who obtained sexual favors from their subordinates.
Remember Bob Packwood? He had to resign because he tried to snatch (!) some illicit kisses from some female aides. Remember the pre-Clintonian feminist argument that a woman cannot “consent” to sexual contact when she is in an employment relationship with a more powerful male? That that is the equivalent of rape?
Why did not NOW come out against WJC with a vengeance? The answer: abortion politics. In other words, its position was subordinated to other of its political concerns.
In my view, it is completely appropriate to hold WJC to a strict standard. He was a perjurer.
your lost.
1:02:37=fail
The “ought” to have beens.
Still prefer the “Naughties.”
OK, but I plan on a lot more naughtiness in the next decade.
LVG –
B-b-but, Clinton… Wow. That’s super strugglin’. Had to go to the warning track for that one, eh?
Now, I’m not necessarily a Clinton fan, but although Monica gave him a rusty trombone (yes, it’s in a footnote of the Starr report — but not listed under “oxidized brass instrument”), there was no intercourse. Now, that does sound like the “definition of is” excuse, but the few notches on my gun-belt (or lip-stick case a la Pat Benetar) would be greater had I counted the few acts of fellatio granted me in my halcyon days as “sex”.
Clinton is mendacious and a philandering half-truther (or half-liar), but I’m not sure that what he did in this instance 1) qualifies as a whopper or 2) has the import of the more recent lies perpetrated upon this country by Wall Street and both sides of the aisle.
MrBubble
Never forget that WJC, as is his wife, the current Prez, and about half of congress are lawyers. Among that group, half-truth telling and word parsing is endemic to the species. So, when we listen to those guys, we just have to start witht he assumption that they are lying, until conclusively proven otherwise.
We are having a high profile cop-driving-drunk case here in Rivercity. The Cop’s lawyer (one of the more dispicable ones in town) went on record in his $4million unlawful termination lawsuit against the city as saying that Alcoholism, is very much like Cancer.
Huh?
Spokaneman,
Well, if the suit is for $4 mil. ( evidently the amount the cop ‘would’ have rec’d in ben’s and compensation ) perhaps we need to take a look at ‘that’ in and of itself? Too funny.
I hope the city follows clown boy around from bar to bar and even gets some candid shots of him passed out in the backyard to build their case.
Yeah, if I ever get caught w/ my pants around my ankles and an intern’s braces caught in my zipper I’ll be sure to tell Mrs. D that it wasn’t ’sex’. Dude, I would be dead either way.
Spokaneman-
You forgot to mention the cop did a hit and run as well. He was fired, but no charges are to be filed. Then the $4M suit.
Clinton could use all the legalistic hair-splitting he wanted to.
Want the real test? Tell your wife/significant other that you don’t consider oral sex cheating.
Let me know how that works out for you.
Not saying that it’s not cheating. I agree with you there. My partner would kill me if I pulled that one.
However, I would argue that it’s not sex. Or at least intercourse. I wouldn’t argue that with her, of course. Lots of courses here. Like our New Year’s dinner. Yum. Here comes the champagne…
But here’s to the last decade. May they not echo the vapid tumult of the last century and bring reason to this dead land, this is cactus land where the stone images are raised, where they receive the supplication of a dead man’s hand under the twinkle of a fading star. Apologies to my man, TSE. We hope all are safe and broadminded, not in the way of the Louvin Brothers of course, but with true breadth. Peace on Earth and in the Purity of Essence of all our… bodily fluids.
MrBubble
” Good shooting, soldier!!! “
Another gem…
Two days ago the gem was rocket surgeon.
Yesterday’s gem was poison fart clown.
And today we have rusty trombone.
Okay- someone use all three of these gems in a single sentence. Where is NYCboy when you need him?
How about a haiku?
poison fart clown
Seeks good rocket surgeon
rusty trombone leaks
Mental image of a raised and pointing finger to emphasize the lie while uttering the smirky words.
“How’s the government responding? By letting homeowners who fudge their income numbers off the hook with little more than a wink and a nod. ‘This isn’t the kind of person the government should want to help,’ said Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research.”
This is the kind of person whom I hope moves next door to Eddie some day in his snooty high-end neighborhood.
In Wannabeville.
Eddie is doomed to spend his days in that special hell reserved for climbers who will never quite fit in to their aspirations, no matter how much they accumulate.
But he’s a cautionary example for us– and in his own whacky way, a good sport about it all.
Special Ed’s apathy and arrogance will be tempered into empathy and humility by lifes inevitable tragedies and hardships. He’s a classic example of a twenty something peon who hasn’t quite figured out he’s a peon and always will be. Just like the rest of us.
I remember reading the first HBB posts in 2004, and heavy into 2005 wondering when the “masses” would get it, that trouble lies ahead. You’d figure that when the information was put out there, and people had the chance to look into it for themselves, that eventually it would sink in.
Now 5+ years later, and many catastrophic events later, there are still people, lots of them, that think the next few years will be good.
Just goes to show how the human species has not yet fully developed its rational thinking trait, to be able to completely exceed animal instincts.
This Ought decade was a humdinger. Starting off with a bang with all the Y2K hysteria, remember how 10 years ago this coming midnight the MSM whiped everyone into a frenzy about the looming computer network crash which was going to be Armegeddon? Then we have the Presidential election where Bush somehow bests McCain (with a black baby) to be the GOP nomination, hanging chads, 9/11, Iraq War, London, Madrid & Mombai bombings, Katrina, Tsunami, SARS, swine flu, Enron, Madoff, Great Recession, Cedar Fire & Witchcreek Fire, my father dies…. bring it on. “After all, tomorrow is another day!”
The reason Y2K was a non-event for the company I work for was because they spent a lot of money and time fixing all the date problems in the code beforehand…we didn’t hide under the bed and wait for Armegeddon. I don’t understand why people think it was a big hoax. There was testing done that showed a lot of our stuff would fail, so we fixed it. There was other stuff that didn’t need to be fixed, so it wasn’t.
A side benefit was that we did an inventory of all our systems and applications and shut down some stuff that actually wasn’t being used any more…:)
My concern is that they breed.
Even animals have better instincts.
Don’t know about you, but the decade’s been good to me. Started out young and broke and ended up definitely not broke, stable within three crises (as in, three horrendous events have to happen concurrently for us to be in trouble, barring health issues), and in a really good situation with a family.
I’ve always been a cynical optimist. I believe that people act stupidly, irrationally, and vindictively, and things still generally turn out pretty well in spite of it. Besides, I like being happy, so optimism suits me.
One word: Ponzi
You win- Who do I make the check out to? Better cash it quick, tho!
It’s not really a word, but…
AAA+
(as used by S&P / Moody’s / Fitch, etc., etc.,…)
This was the decade of the cheerleader. We believed like cheerleaders. We followed like cheerleaders. We cheered like cheerleaders. We were led by a cheerleader. Unfortunately cheerleaders aren’t even part of the game. Everyone but the cheerleaders know that.
“In 1990, outstanding mortgage debt held was $3.805 trillion. Then, Fannie and Freddie weakened lending standards by handing out unsecured loans to unqualified borrowers. And, by the end of 2007 as the crisis was reaching its peak, total mortgage holdings had risen to $14.568 trillion, a staggering 383 percent jump.”
Is this accurate? I didn’t think that Fannie & Freddie securitized No-Doc and Option-ARM’s until well after the private market had invented and proliferated them. Isn’t that why such loans are called “non-conforming?”
Bust.
A truer word was never spoken. It began with a bust and has more or less ended with a bust presided over, lock, stock and barrel, (all 3 branches) by the party of “fiscal responsibility” that left a smoking ruin for someone else to clean up and blame.
Bankrupt would have been another good word. Financially, ethically, politically, socially and progressively. China is successfully building high speed trains and we are giving trillions to robber barons and closing schools and exporting jobs.
Too bad “someone else” isn’t showing any tendencies toward cleaning it up, either - only making it that much more worse. That’s what really worries me the most at this point.
One word for the decade: “irresponsibility.”
MY only comment to describe the aftermath of the bust was “LOOT”,
It was the Elite looting and ransacking our treasury!
It seems the powerfull on wall St. and the powerfull in Washington decided that they would just make a huge grab for money like we have never seen before. They just took over and grabed everything they could.
Then they tossed a few bones to the dumb masses (Cash for clunkers).
For people like myself we didn’t know what hit us. we saw the housing crash coming back in 2005, but when the panic happened the looting started and we couldn’t do anything. I screamed by the top of my lungs at my congressmen and senators not to do the bail outs, I live in California Barbara Boxer, Diane Fienstein, they are deadbeats all of them.
For them it was full steam ahead. IT wasn’t bail out’s it was looting and ransacking!
Greenspan / Bernake caused the bubble. Bush was a horrible President, who bailed out the elite. Obama took the the horrible Bush decisions and trippled it in his first year. God save us from the damage he will inflict upon us in the next three.
Everyone lets all make a new years resolution, in 2010 vote out of office any Senator or Congressmen that voted for the bail-outs,
Get your money out of CITI, Chase, BOA, Morgan Stanley
It is time for a revolution!