I am posting a link to this column by the most rational Bob Herbert not because it is a breathless revelation of new and startling information: No, unfortunately, it is a recitation of facts which we all have known for some time. But it is a very good presentation of those facts, which in the present situation, can't be reprised often enough. Oil and Blood - New York Times

Just found this fascinating uber column by Carol Lloyd in the SF Chron. on real estate as entertainment...goes with my fave book "Sex and Real Estate" by Harvard cultural theorist Marjore Garber. "Real estate today has become a form of yuppie pornography” she wrote, and this was in 2001. Prescient

From Carol Lloyd:
Art, film, music, literature... San Francisco has always been a city for culture vultures but now real estate has captivated our insatiable appetite for spectacle. The high-tech economy has exploded the cost of Bay Area housing to surreal proportions and we have all become compulsive witnesses to its grotesque drama. We gaze at the pictures in realty windows; we amuse our voyeuristic impulses at open houses. We trade tales of eviction, memorize exorbitant prices, compare the changing faces of neighborhoods.

So while the business and real estate pages explore the ups and downs of interest rates and the dos and don'ts of buying a home, here is a place where you can follow the cultural theatre of our real estate market gone mad.
Surreal Estate? You Bet

Here is the first news I have seen about a small dent in the upward momentum, and what will happen when the bubble starts to sag- Thse of your following the real estate bubble will want to check outhe whole thing.
Housing Goes Frothy to Flat in Denver Area - New York Times: "With economists warning that prices in hot markets cannot continue to rise as sharply as they have in the past few years, the experience of Denver's homeowners may foreshadow what could happen if those markets start to cool. Denver's circumstances are in some ways particular to the area, driven largely by job losses in the telecom sector, but they illustrate how a moderate slowdown could play out for homeowners in other parts of the country and stand as a potent reminder that galloping price appreciation is not the norm. "

Well, I really have not been reading ALL of the blogosphere on the Rove flame-out, but here is a small bit which really captures the modern insanity of deception and spin w=in which we find ourselves.
Media Notes Extra: "Craig Crawford ponders whether it was all a Rovian plot:
'If Karl Rove planned this -- which I doubt -- he really is a genius:
'1.) He leaks to Time's Matt Cooper in such a way that he avoids the law's intent requirement for criminal liability (Newsweek notes that Cooper's email shows nothing indicating Rove knew or revealed that Valerie Plame was an undercover agent, only that she worked at the CIA).
'2.) The ensuing grand jury investigation dramatically weakens the news media and future leakers, as reporters must decide whether to testify or go to jail, and even turns Rove's foes in the public against the reporters involved because they are seen as protecting him.
'In other words, by making himself a protected source who loses that protection, Rove makes it easier for the government to use federal courts to target all leakers. This would give Machiavelli a migraine.'"

Judge in Indian royaltt payments case "condemns Interior Department as a callous and clueless agency "
OU OU OU
The judge really lays it on, but doyou think it will do one bit of good" judgeing from recent responses from equally callous republican congressmen, we are a long way from any kind of resolution.
more late. Judge | www.azstarnet.com �: "Lamberth wrote in his opinion Tuesday that 'one would expect, or at least hope, that the modern Interior Department and its modern administrators would manage it in a way that reflects our modern understandings of how the government should treat people.

'Alas, our 'modern' Interior Department has time and again demonstrated that it is a dinosaur - the morally and culturally oblivious hand-me-down of a disgracefully racist and imperialist government that should have been buried a century ago, the last pathetic outpost of the indifference and Anglocentrism we thought we had left behind.' "

100% Death Tax on the Middle Class
while bleeding heart Compassionate Republicans rail against the estate tax on the weatlhy, health problems and medicaid rules actually impose a 100% death tax on the middle class, as elderly aprents are forced to sell the family home to finance long term care.

The Middle Class Struggles in the Medicaid Maze - New York Times

Time to begin campaign against extending tax cuts for the wealthy
Do Tax Cuts for the Wealthy Stimulate Employment? - New York Times: "Economists from both sides of the political aisle argued from the beginning that tax cuts for the wealthy made no sense as a policy for stimulating new jobs. And experience has proved them right. Total private employment was actually lower in January 2005 than in January 2001, the first time since the Great Depression that employment has fallen during a president's term of office."

Annie Lamott is not mincing words- she saw the photo of bush in the patriotic hoop skirt just the same way I did!
but she also says that the end, ACT III is coming. See, Nina? I told you it was inevitable.
"The methedrine-like Mission Accomplished militarism has turned to chaos, ugly revelations, and melt down.
I keep hearing the Leonard Cohen song in my mind, "There are cracks in everything; that's how the light gets in," and this regime is finally and seriously cracking up. "

TPMCafe || Hope on the Fourth of July: "We are SO watching you, Mr. Bush.


I saw his Iraq speech at two in the morning here. FABULOUS. 9-11, 9-11, 9-11, stay the course course course, boo hoo big crocodile tears for our dead soldiers, 9-11 9-11 course course boo hoo."

More on my favorite obsession, the housing bubble. as the bublle seems to deflate in australia, this article covers the effects.
It is impossible to say for sure how the situation will work out here - or in the United States, for that matter. But so far, despite predictions that housing prices in Australia would plummet by as much as 20 to 30 percent, there are no signs of a crash. Prices have leveled off noticeably or dropped slightly, at least in Sydney, Melbourne and Canberra. They continue to rise at a modest rate in Perth, Darwin and Brisbane, the major cities in resource-rich states, where the local economies are being buoyed by China's insatiable demands for raw materials.

Nationwide, for the year ending March 31, the rise in house prices was 0.4 percent, the lowest since 1996, according to the Australia Bureau of Statistics.

"It's been an orderly correction," said Mark Steglick, managing director of Gowings Properties, a Sydney property development company, who said that there had been few foreclosures or forced sales since the boom ended. "There's not blood on the streets."

Looking ahead, local housing experts expect prices to flatten out, perhaps remaining stagnant for a number of years to allow gradually rising incomes to catch up with the sharply higher level of home values.

But there are significant differences within the market that may provide some clues as to how housing booms elsewhere could run out of steam.

Prices for investor-owned apartments have fallen considerably more than for owner-occupied houses. Nationwide, prices are down about 10 percent from the peak.

The most expensive homes, particularly those along the coast, have held up better than the rest of the market. "My jaw drops at some sales," Mr. Steglick said, describing a house in Vaucluse, a posh Sydney suburb, that recently sold for $17 million Australian dollars ($12.7 million). The home does not even have direct access to the beach, though it does have spectacular views of the soaring Opera House and of the Sydney Harbor Bridge. It last sold in 2001 for 12.1 million Australian dollars.

Australia is no stranger to booms and busts in housing prices. The latest boom began in the mid-1990's, following a bust brought about by the recession of 1990, one of the worst in Australia's history, and far more severe than the downturn in the United States at the time. Unemployment soared to more than 10 percent as interest rates reached as high as 17 percent.
Those high rates knocked many potential buyers out of the market, but even more importantly they also saddled many existing homeowners with a greater debt than they had assumed when they took out their loan.


Hole in the Housing Bubble - New York Times: "In the last two years, though, the Australian housing boom has come to a halt, in a move that many experts see as the first signs of the end to a housing bubble, not just in Australia, but also in the United States as well as several other rich countries around the world. "

Now this is a peculiar, and perhaps out of blog-character article for me to post. it is personal. But something about this family home on Martha's vinyard spoke to me. And its not about martha's vinyard, either. it s the idea of a large family home for gatherings. Now my sister Amy once said that she wanted to have a family home that the kids and their kids could return to. But I don’s want to live in a vast home that I have to care for. But a family vacation home could be, should be a little less formal, less everyday.
I like family reunions, and I remember in years past suggesting that we should get a house somewhere, but all the other members of my family believer in variety.
“Why would you want to do that?” they ask.
So every other summer is adventure time. We all think about where to go, consult on the accommodations and the plan, it seems like a lot of work to me.

But what I picture is a family compound where the kids know what to expect. They can anticipate, and then savor experience for anticipating again.
Maintaining such a fantasy place seems like a lot of work to them.
Well, see you at the summer place, in my dreams.
. An Island, A House, A Family, Summer - New York Times: "A big house, like a long life, can accommodate many contradictions. "

In Freedom Drag, honestly when I saw this I thougt it was a guy in a skirt- like mother what's her name and the pulchinella's in the Nutcracker
Bush Makes Third July 4 Visit to West Virginia - New York Times: "Enlarge This Image"

hi friends, I have been struggling with impulses to write commentary myself, but in the meantime, Kathe Pollit says it best:
The Nation | Subject To Debate | If the Frame Fits... | Katha Pollitt: "'Reframing' abortion is actually a kind of deframing, a way of taking it out of its real-life context, which is the experience of women, their bodies, their healthcare, their struggles, the caring work our society expects them to do for free. "