A McCain staffer was assaulted last night in Pittsburgh.
Via Drudge:
Pittsburgh Police are investigating a report by a campaign staffer for John McCain that she was mugged and the letter B was cut into her face following a robbery in Bloomfield last night.
Police say the 20-year-old woman, who is from Texas, reported that the attack occurred after she withdrew money from an ATM at Liberty Avenue and Pearl Street.
She said a man armed with a knife demanded her money. She gave it to him and began walking toward her car, which has McCain stickers.
Although the robber had moved away from her, he became agitated when he saw her car, punched her in the back of the head, pushed her to the ground and carved a B into her face, she reported.
Police said the woman declined medical treatment at the scene.
UPDATE: A McCain aide says that both the McCain and Palin have called the family of the victim.
John McCain's Pennsylvania communications director told reporters in the state an incendiary version of the hoax story about the attack on a McCain volunteer well before the facts of the case were known or established -- and even told reporters outright that the "B" carved into the victim's cheek stood for "Barack," according to multiple sources familiar with the discussions.
John Verrilli, the news director for KDKA in Pittsburgh, told TPM Election Central that McCain's Pennsylvania campaign communications director gave one of his reporters a detailed version of the attack that included a claim that the alleged attacker said, "You're with the McCain campaign? I'm going to teach you a lesson."
Verrilli also told TPM that the McCain spokesperson had claimed that the "B" stood for Barack. According to Verrilli, the spokesperson also told KDKA that Sarah Palin had called the victim of the alleged attack, who has since admitted the story was a hoax.
The KDKA reporter had called McCain's campaign office for details after seeing the story -- sans details -- teased on Drudge.
The McCain spokesperson's claims -- which came in the midst of extraordinary and heated conversations late yesterday between the McCain campaign, local TV stations, and the Obama camp, as the early version of the story rocketed around the political world -- is significant because it reveals a McCain official pushing a version of the story that was far more explosive than the available or confirmed facts permitted at the time.
The claims to KDKA from the McCain campaign were included in an early story that ran late yesterday on KDKA's Web site. The paragraphs containing these assertions were quickly removed from the story after the Obama campaign privately complained that KDKA was letting the McCain campaign spin a racially-charged version of the story before the facts had been established, according to two sources familiar with the discussions.
The story with the removed grafs is still right here. We preserved the three missing grafs from yesterday:
A source familiar with what happened yesterday confirmed that the unnamed spokesperson was communications director Peter Feldman. Feldman was also quoted yesterday making virtually identical assertions on the Web site of another local TV station, WPXI. But those quotes, which we also preserved here, are also no longer available on WPXI's site, for reasons that are unclear.
This is problematic because the McCain campaign doesn't want to have been perceived as pushing an incendiary story that not only turned out to be a hoax but which police officials said today risked blowing up into a "national incident" and has local police preparing to file charges against the hoaxster.
There's no evidence that anyone from McCain national headquarters put out a version of events like this.
After the story appeared on KDKA's site and this and other pieces in the local press started flying around the political world, an Obama spokesperson in the state angrily insisted to KDKA that it was irresponsible for the station to air the McCain spokesperson's incendiary version of events before the facts were fully known, according to two sources familiar with the discussions.
After that, KDKA went back to McCain's Pennsylvania spokesperson, Feldman, and asked if he stood by the story as he'd earlier told it, but he started backing off the story, a source familiar with the talks says. That prompted KDKA to remove the grafs.
Feldman couldn't immediately be reached, and a McCain HQ spokesperson declined to comment.
m with their government and to bond. I also love traveling and being with my daughters and if I were in her position, I would have done the same.
Copyright 2008 by The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Sec. 8. Review.
Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency.
Something like a pimp!
WOLF BLITZER ("Late Edition" host): What do you say to the president who wants you and your fellow Republicans and Democrats to quickly pass this $700 billion bailout package?
PAUL: Well, I think that's a mistake because we don't have the money. But that doesn't mean you have to do nothing. I mean, we could reform the system. We could return to sound money. We could balance our budget. We could change our foreign policy. We could take care of our people at home. We could lower taxes.
There's a lot of things that we can do. But the worst thing that we can do is perpetuate the bad policies that gave us this trouble in the first place, and that is that we no longer, over the last quite a few decades, believed in free-market capitalism. Capital is supposed to come from savings. We're supposed to work hard and save.
As a matter of fact, the Chinese work hard, right now, and they save, and they're buying up the world. But we borrow and spend and consume, and now it's caught up to us and it's undermining our whole system. ... So this $700 billion is not going to do it.
Paul also argued that ...
... contrary to the White House's contention, this plan does not help Main Street.
"This is Wall Street in big trouble and sucking in Main Street, now, and dumping all the bills on Main Street. ... And you can't solve the problem of inflation, which is the creation of money and credit out of thin air, by more money and credit out of thin air, and not changing policy. We have to change basic policy.
"Yes, it would be painful, but it wouldn't last so long. What they're doing now, they're propping up a failed system so the agony lasts longer. They're doing exactly what we did in the Depression."
"So, yes, there are going to be losses, but everybody lived beyond their means when the prices of houses were going up. Nobody cared about it. They kept borrowing against it. Oh, yes, that was fine and dandy. Everybody was making money, and the owner of the home kept borrowing and living beyond their means. Now they have to live beneath their means.
"What the government is doing now -- and this new program is trying to prop up prices. You want the price structure to adjust. You want the price of houses to go down. You don't want to fix the price of housing. You can't price-fix. We've had too much of that.
"We need a market economy. We need to believe in ourselves. We need to believe and understand how the economy got us -- how the government got us into this mess. And believe me, it wouldn't be that tough. It would be a bad year. But, this way, it's going to be a bad decade."
Paul had nothing but disdain for Republican presidential nominee John McCain's suggestion to create a new government entity to deal with the crisis, calling it "just more of the same, more government, more programs, more spending, more regulations, trying to prop up a system that has been undermined."
He did say that Democratic candidate Barack Obama "has a pretty good grasp on how to attack this politically and go after McCain, but he doesn't have any answer. He's not talking about the Federal Reserve system. He's not talking about balanced budgets. He's not talking about bringing troops home from Afghanistan."
And, as Paul has said before, his choice for president will be "neither one of those two. They don't offer any alternatives."
Agence France-Presse
September 23, 2008 07:39am
The plan would allow the US Treasury to sell new debt to purchase the vast amounts of mortgage securities and other "toxic'' assets that have caused a freezeup of the financia
l system.
Markets welcomed the announcement of the plan last week, but analysts say the sobering reality may make it highly complex to implement. Some critics say it gives unparalleled authority to the government in the finance system.
The plan is "three pages long'' and "asks for a staggering sum of money with wide-ranging powers to buy the broadest amount of mortgage-related securities with a minimal of oversight,'' said Andrew Busch at BMO Capital Markets.
"This is a huge leap of faith and I suspect that leaders of Congress and the presidential candidates will urge caution or act cautiously.''
One key question is how the government will value the dodgy mortgage-backed paper that the banking
system refuses to buy.
"The Treasury did not provide much detail on how the assets will be priced, other than through market mechanisms where possible,'' said economist Brian Bethune at Global Insight.
"We expect discounts on asset transactions will be anywhere from 20 per cent to 80 per cent, depending on the quality of the assets or the asset package involved.''
Some analysts point out that if The Treasury pays fair value -- Merrill Lynch, for example, sold some of its distressed securities for 22 cents on the dollar -- it could create fresh losses for banks and lead to more failures.
Mark Zandi at Economy.com said the idea was positive but may be hard to implement.
"In practice, a reverse auction for mortgage assets may be tricky to pull off,'' he said. "Auctioning mortgage-backed securities could prove especially problematic, since each security is so idiosyncratic.''
Beyond the technical questions, the plan dubbed by some as "the mother of all bailouts'' has raised hackles among some who fear it gives too much power to the government in the financial markets, especially with a clause providing immunity from lawsuits.
Robert Brusca at FAO Economics said the bailout plan "really isn't a plan and may not bail anything out ... The crux of it seems to be to dump the losses on taxpayers.'
"It gives the Treasury imperial power with respect to a simply huge amount of funds,'' said Yves Smith, a financial analyst with the website Naked Capitalism. "Thi
s is a financial coup d'etat, with the only limitation the 700-billion-dollar balance sheet figure.''
Some lawmakers also were sceptical about the carte blanche authority the proposal would give the government.
Texas Republican Representative Jeb Hensarling said lawmakers should carefully study options before approving the plan.
"Congress is being asked to support an uncertain entity, costing an uncertain amount of dollars, for an uncertain duration,'' he said.
"My fear is that taxpayers will be left with the mother of all debts, the federal government becomes the lender and guarantor of last resort, and our nation finds itself on the slippery slope to socialism.''
Despite the protests, many expect the plan to be approved to help stave off a further meltdown of the financial system with dire economic consequences.
"We were on the edge of the abyss last week,'' said Ed Yardeni at Yardeni Research.
"The question is whether so much government intervention will avert the most dreaded consequences of Wall Street's excesses, namely a financial meltdown and an economic depression .... The answer, I think is that it will work, and that the economy should grow next year.''By Javier Blas and Chris Flood in London
Published: September 22 2008 21:15 | Last updated: September 22 2008 23:05
Crude oil prices jumped $25 a barrel on Monday – the largest one-day rise – as financial investors betting on falling oil prices were forced to cover their positions ahead of the expi
ry of the current benchmark futures contract.
The jump to an intraday high of $130 a barrel – a rise of about $40 a barrel from last week’s low – was exacerbated by a weakening US dollar and data showing w
eaker supplies from Mexico, Nigeria and Saudi Arabia in recent weeks and surging imports by China.
NEW YORK (CNN/Money) - The American appetite for habitation grew even stronger -- impossible as that seems -- in January, the government said Wednesday, renewing concerns that the U.S. housing market is in a dangerous bubble, like stocks in the 1990s.
Don't bet on it, economists say.
New home construction starts rose in January to an annual pace of 1.85 million units, the fastest pace in 16 years, according to a Commerce Department report, confounding economists' expectations for a decline.
Though the number of construction permits issued for new housing -- a leading indicator for the market -- fell, all of that weakness was in multi-family housing. Permits for single-family units, which make up about 80 percent of the housing construction market, rose 0.3 percent.
Last week, the National Association of Realtors said the median home price jumped 8.8 percent in the fourth quarter, the biggest gain in more than 20 years.
While the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB) said its index of builder optimism dipped a bit in early February, it still is at historically high levels, despite the kind of frigid weather in the eastern United States that ordinarily dampens construction activity.
"It would be tough to maintain the super-strong building pace recorded for the past several months," said NAHB President Kent Conine, a Dallas homebuilder. "But the market fundamentals remain solid, and the current level of builder optimism regarding the single-family segment reflects that."
The biggest "market fundamental" in housing is mortgage rates at or near record lows. For several months, low rates have encouraged more home-buying, driving up demand for homes and pushing prices ever higher.
The housing market has, in fact, been one of the lone bright spots of an otherwise dreary economy. Higher home values have made homeowners feel wealthier, encouraging consumer spending, which makes up more than two-thirds of the total U.S. economy.
Low rates also have encouraged a frenzy of refinancing, which has allowed homeowners to lower their monthly payments and tap into their swelling home equity.
Meanwhile, corporate scandals and an agonizingly long bear market in stock prices have made home ownership even more attractive -- a house can't lie about quarterly earnings, and even if its value falls, at least you can live in it.
"As the equity market melted down, interest rates came down, and the housing sector has continued to thrive while the business sector has gone through hell -- and homes have to be filled up with goods, once they're bought," said Rory Robertson, interest rate strategist at Macquarie Equities USA.
Housing has been so relentlessly strong for so long that some observers occasionally fret that the market is artificially strong, that prices are due to suddenly collapse, crushing consumer confidence.
But people have been wondering about a "housing bubble" since early 2001, and it hasn't popped yet.
For one thing, housing, like politics, is always local. There are some parts of the country -- Sacramento, we're looking at you -- where bubbles seem to have formed, with prices rising higher than the market apparently can support.
But on a national level, economists believe the supply of available housing is low enough to keep demand strong and keep prices from falling suddenly.
"1.85 million new homes being built per year in a population of 290 million and growing doesn't seem to be outrageous," Robertson said.
Economists warn that the housing market should slow down when interest rates start to rise, but that's not expected to happen for quite some time -- not until the situation in Iraq is cleared up, at the very earliest.
And the only thing that's going to bring interest rates up significantly in the short term is stronger economic activity, anyway, which will offset a good bit of the damage to the housing sector.
"If we're in a situation where rates are higher because the economy's great, the housing market is going to be last thing I'll be worried about," said Brown Brothers Harriman economist Lara Rhame, a former Fed economist.
For the most part, economists expect a gradual slowdown in the housing market through 2003 -- the National Association of Realtors, for example, thinks home-price growth will slow to 3.0 percent by the fourth quarter.
But one thing's for certain: the housing sector can't be the horse that pulls the world's biggest economy forever, especially if labor market weakness continues -- people have a hard time making mortgage payments when they don't have jobs.
"As the economy gets more and more dependent on housing being the key driver of growth, the economy becomes more and more vulnerable to that sector slowing down," Rhame said. 
Media claims about a “housing bubble” are nothing new. Since before the 9/11 terror attacks, the media have been calling the housing market a “bubble” while predicting an imminent, devastating decline. Not only have they been wrong in forecasting such a top, they have thoroughly mischaracterized what an investment bubble is. Now that the market for homes has finally slowed a bit, the
media are declaring the bubble has burst.
In the wake of the subprime mortgage and credit crisis in 2007, Greenspan admitted that there was a bubble in the US housing market, warning in 2007 of "large double digit declines" in home values "larger than most people expect."[28] However, Greenspan also noted, “I really didn't get it until very late in 2005 and 2006.”[29]
Greenspan admitted that the housing bubble was “fundamentally engendered by the decline in real long-term interest rates”,[30] though he also claims that long-term interest rates are beyond the control of central banks because "the market value of global long-term securities is approaching $100 trillion" and thus these and other asset markets are large enough that they "now swamp the resources of central banks."[31Mortgage delinquency and foreclosure rates soared nationally in the first quarter from the comparable 2007 period, with 89 percent of the increase coming in already hard-hit California, Florida and Nevada.
The Mortgage Bankers Association Delinquency Survey, which covers 45.2 million first-lien mortgages on one- to four-unit residential properties, showed that the delinquency rate rose to 6.35 percent of all loans in the 2008 quarter, from 4.84 percent of all loans in the first quarter of 2007.
What this means in numbers is that of the nation's 45.2 million mortgages, 287,172 were at least one payment behind. A year ago, when there were 43.9 million loans, the comparable number was 212,476 loans.
The 30-year delinquency rate is still below levels seen as recently as 2002, the association said.
The percent of mortgages in foreclosure nationally almost doubled, to 2.47 percent from 1.28 percent, while the number of foreclosures started in the quarter was 0.99 percent of those 45.2 million mortgages, compared with 0.58 percent in the 2007 first quarter.
The rates of both were the highest since 1979, the association reported.
"The magnitude of the national increases is clearly driven by certain loan types and certain states," said Jay Brinkmann, the association's vice president for research and economics.
The banks that made these shitty loans and the greedy de-regulated sons of bitches on Wall Street that backed them soon found themselves hit hard by the "Subprime Crisis":Washington - The embattled investment bank Lehman Brothers was expected to file for bankruptcy before
the start of trading later Monday, hours after financial services firm Merrill Lynch agreed to sell itself to Bank of America.
Negotiations throughout the weekend failed to produce a buyer for the venerable Lehman Brothers, leading to the bankruptcy plans, the Washington Post reported early Monday on its website.
In a deal announced late Sunday, Merrill Lynch & Co, a stock brokerage and investment bank, agreed to be bought out by Bank of America Corp for 50 billion dollars in stock. The takeover comes as the Lehman's troubles dragged most other financial services stocks down, too.
The Lehman collapse follows more than a year of turmoil arising from the collapse of the US housing
bubble and a high rate of mortgage defaults, which undermined Wall Street's market for mortgage-backed securities. The action was seen as a step to help calm financial markets heading into an uncertain start of trading on Monday morning in New York. Markets in Asia were already plummeting in early trading amid the worries from Wall Street. Earlier this year, the Federal Reserve helped engineer the sale of another troubled investment banking firm, Bear Stearns. More recently, the federal government acted to take over the government- chartered Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which undergird the US mortgage lending markets.
And now, although the entire crisis happened on Bush's watch and was fueled by his economic policies... John "The Reformer" McCain has come out swinging. In addressing the chaos on Wall Street, he "laid into Obama, accusing him of taking campaign cash and counsel from some of the big-business architects of the crisis.
“Senator Obama may be taking their advice and he may be taking their money, but in a McCain-Palin administration, there will be no seat for these people at the policy-making table,” McCain said of his running mate, Alaska Governor Sarah Palin.
“This is the problem with Washington, people like Senator Obama have been too busy gaming the system and haven’t ever done a thing to actually challenge the system,” he said i
n the battleground state of Wisconsin.
“Maybe just this once he could spare us the lectures, and admit to his own poor judgment in contributing to these problems."
Okay...
When Obama recovered from the stupor induced by that absolutely crazy ass statement, he responded: "“his big solution to this worldwide economic crisis was to blame me for it.”
“This is a guy who’s spent nearly three decades in Washington. After spending the entire campaign saying I haven’t been in Washington long enough, he apparently now is willing to assign me responsibility for all of Washington’s failings,” he said.
“I think it’s pretty clear that Senator McCain is a little panicked right now. At this point he seems to be willing to say anything, or do anything, or change any position, or violate any principle to try and win this election.”
The right wing has been blaming all of this the whole time on the greedy home buyers who
wanted more house than they deserved:
A simple look at the blunt reality reveals that borrowers themselves should assume primary responsibility for the current subprime crisis. Millions of borrowers, all over the country, knowingly signed mortgage
contracts they cannot now afford to honor.
Provided that lenders did not engage in force or fraud—and there’s no particular evidence they did so on a large scale—borrowers should do whatever they can to live up to the contracts they signed. The policies of lenders and government certainly helped the current crisis develop—but ultimately, do not absolve borrowers of responsibility for their debts.
And in most cases, the mortgage lenders not only are innocent of the predatory practices borrowers complain about but also are feeling the pain right along with them. These lenders do not revel in the current circumstances. A lender typically loses about a third of its loan value through foreclosure; thus, no lender (or mortgage-backed securities marketer) has an incentive to make or purchase a loan
it genuinely believes a borrower cannot pay.
With a very few exceptions, lenders have no desire to serve as landlords or take away people’s homes: A foreclosure causes almost as many problems for the lender as it does for the borrower. True predatory
lenders, who engage in fraud or make loans they know borrowers cannot pay, inevitably end up in either jails or unemployment lines.
The government played some role in the crisis as well. Its tax system encouraged Americans to take out very large mortgages to get out of paying federal income tax. And the government’s 2005 bankruptcy reforms meant that rather than having their debts wiped clean, most middle-class Americans who file for bankruptcy have to set up five-year payment plans with creditors.
Not one of these factors, of course, mitigates the facts of the situation. Mortgage borrowers who signed legally binding contracts should have to honor those contracts, or at minimum, renegotiate terms with their lenders. Any suggestion that borrowers should avoid responsibility would undermine the fundamental principles of contract law that lie at the base of any modern capitalist economy.
Had they been responsible, after being approved for the loans, the greedy homeowners would have doubled back and re-reviewed all of their financials, gone over their application again with a fine tooth comb and then made a responsible decision as to whether or not they deserved this loan. Accordingly therefore, Bush's solution to the whole fiasco is to pump $700 billion into bailing out the financial institutions and banks. He will give them almost a trillion dollars to preserve profits and operations and guarantee all those shitty loans they should have never made in the first place while leaving the irresponsible and greedy scheming home buyers to fend for themselves and pay those same companies their tax dollars are bailing out.President Bush acknowledged that the program will put a "significant amount of taxpayers' money on
the line," but said that not acting would be riskier.
The Bush proposal that would dole out huge sums of money to Wall Street firms and bankers is a mere three pages in length and fails to specify which institutions would qualify or say what — if anything — taxpayers would get in return.
"It's a rather brief bill with a lot of money," said Sen. Chris Dodd, D-Conn., the Banking Comm
ittee chairman. "We understand the importance of the anticipation in the markets, but we also know that what we're doing is going to have consequences for decades to come. There's not a second act to this — we've got to get this right."
And the same people who can't understand why the liberals just can't let the market work, well , they've put a freeze on selling at a loss to prevent people from taking their bleeping money and running.
In a dramatic move to protect the beleaguered financial services industry, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) said Friday that it is temporarily banning short sales of nearly 800 stocks, including Minneapolis-based U.S. Bancorp, Ameriprise Financial Inc. and Piper Jaffray Companies.
Short-selling -- in which traders profit when a stock price goes down -- has long had a legitimate place in the stock market. But critics accuse short-sellers of hastening the recent failures of investment banks Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers.
"Unbridled short-selling is contributing to the recent, sudden price declines in the securities of financial institutions unrelated to true price valuations," according to an SEC statement. "Financial institutions are particularly vulnerable to the crisis of confidence and panic selling."
Financial firms have been particularly vulnerable, because they constantly need to replenish their pools of capital, experts say.
Widespread short-selling might push down a bank stock to the point where it can't raise money to stay afloat.
"The SEC wanted to put in some circuit breakers and give the industry some time and breathing space," said Felix Meschke, a professor of finance at the University of Minnesota's Carlson School of Management.
Unless it is extended, the SEC ban will run through Oct. 2.
