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Politics : Stockman Scott's Political Debate Porch -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Mannie who wrote (7829)	10/6/2002 12:50:48 AM
From: pbull	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 89467

Irresponsible journalism. The story needs to be balanced. Home foreclosures are at the highest rate in 30 years, and mortgage delinquencies are soaring. Pretty typical, though. Newspaper publishers usually are cheerleaders for the local Chamber of Commerce. PB

To: Mannie who wrote (7829)	10/6/2002 2:27:02 AM
From: jjkirk	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 89467

Hi Scott, Thanks for that Intelligencer article....shows that we're not alone here in San Diego..still lots of refi action...me?...my second is paid off in December...sure would like to buy a new car...wife wants side airbags...ain't gonna' do it...wouldn't be prudent...<gg> Scott, last night after I posted my comment about interest rates increases affecting the housing bubble. I read Richard Russell's 10/4 commentary as reposted from Orkrious by JWRPhD.http://www.siliconinvestor.com/readmsg.aspx?msgid=18076081 I recommend the entire commentary, but this extract shows that I missed the boat...I named the "usual suspects"... "One of the big economic questions is housing, and what will happen to the "housing bubble." I'm getting a lot of e-mails from subscribers across the nation, and almost all of them talk about hard times hitting their areas. My friend Gary Shilling has been "right on" regarding deflation and this market. Want to know how the housing bubble ends? Gary talks about it in this week's Forbes magazine. Listen to what he's saying -- " What will burst the bubble? Don't look for the usual suspects -- interest rate hikes or overbuilding. Look instead for a second recessionary dip brought on by wealth losses and pink slips, pressuring consumers to retrench. When the Ralphs (common people) of the nation are laid off, they won't be able to make their mortgage payments on the homes they've bought, or to buy a house to being with. Then the bad news ripples through the move-up market. " As housing demand dries up, prices will fall and the whole mechanism will work in reverse. Those with big leverage will see their equity wiped out, forcing them to sell, pushing prices still lower. Up to now, house appreciation has been off-setting stock losses for many people. That helpful phenomenon will be history. " House-price drops typically lag the economy. In the early 1990s, Los Angeles residential real estate didn't peak until two years after overall business topped out, and then single-family house prices fell for six straight years.. . . Residential prices take a while to react largely because the market prices of people's houses are not available daily to force them to admit that their property had declined in value........." Times are a' changin' and not for the better, I fear...hope all is well with you & yours, Scott...........jj

To: Mannie who wrote (7829)	10/6/2002 9:19:54 AM
From: stockman_scott	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 89467

BUSH: A REAGAN DOLL WITH BOBBING HEAD By Richard Reeves Syndicated Columnist October 4, 2002 WASHINGTON -- My mail, like that of many members of Congress, has turned heavily against President Bush and his marching as to war in Iraq. That, I suppose, is to be expected because war fever is rising so quickly, epecially here in the war capital, that the idea that the man in the White House really means it is only now sinking in, in the calmer precincts of the United States. Mostly I get questions, and the most common one is how can this be happening without the rest of us having any say? My answers to those letters focus on the rise in presidential war-making powers that has resulted from the end of the draft and advances in the technology of battle. We have a volunteer military now, which means a professional military, and we have the capacity to inflict great damage from great distances with very little risk to our well-trained and well-equipped forces. This would not be happening if we still had a draft and the president had to go to the parents of America and ask for their children. Our kind of mass destruction takes only the few and the brave, with reserve forces used for non-combat transportation and supply services. So who's to complain about an attack? Not the Congress, which is even more influenced by flag-waving than the general public. Members of the House and Senate see themselves most at risk -- politically, not literally -- in this kind of warfare, so they gravitate to the safety of voting with the president, because he has more information. Right? Maybe he does. But he is not sharing it with the legislative branch, and that is just fine with most legislators. They can use ignorance as their escape hatch if things go badly. So what is on the president's mind? A question from Don Limbaugh in Portland, Ore., caught my attention: "Where does the Bush administration square up in terms of 'dangerousness'?" Is he Reagan dangerous? Is he McCarthyism dangerous? Is he Hitler dangerous?" My answer would be Reagan. This George Bush strikes me as a miniature Ronald Reagan, a head-bobbing doll in the back window, working from the Gipper's old playbook. On domestic politics, his timing and moves on the tax cut last year were almost exactly the same as Reagan's in 1981. On foreign policy, which Bush seems to think is military policy, Reagan knew a great deal more than Bush does, and the 40th president (and the American people of the early 1980s) knew a great deal more about the real nature and threat of totalitarian communism than any of us understand of the perils of this day. I have spent a lot of time, intellectually, with Ronald Reagan for the past year and more in researching a book on his presidency. I disagreed, then and now, with much of what he believed and did, but he understood America, and he knew most of what he needed to know and understand about its enemies. Reagan loyalists, many of them now serving Bush, exaggerate his role and achievements in the ending of the Cold War and the collapse of communism, but Ronald Reagan did have a personal sense of history. I doubt that Reagan, if he were still well, would make grand claims about winning wars and changing history. I think he would say now what he thought then, sometimes in a simplistic way: that the American system was infinitely stronger than the Soviet system, and that the decline of communism was only a matter of timing. What the "Great Communicator" communicated so effectively was a condensed, homogenized and popular sense of where Americans had been and where he wanted to take them next. More than I thought at the time, Reagan was a patient man who did know what he was trying to do. He had a sense of American strength and the opposition's weaknesses. He knew that if America prevailed, it would be by example, not by conquest and occupation. Besides, Reagan was a lucky guy. I don't see any sense of history in George Bush, so I can just hope he has some of the Gipper's luck. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- CORRECTION: In a recent column I incorrectly said that Sen. Tom Daschle was not a veteran. In fact, he served three years as an intelligence officer in the U.S. Air Force. I regret the error. COPYRIGHT 2002 UNIVERSAL PRESS SYNDICATE Originally Published on October-04-2002 uexpress.com