24thState

Housing Prices Falling, But Taxes Rising

This Associated Press Article is pretty funny, if you know how to read it.  The title says US Home Prices Tumble A Record 14./1% in 1Q.

Standard & Poor's/Case-Shiller said its national home price index fell 14.1 percent in the first quarter compared with a year earlier, the lowest since its inception in 1988. The quarterly index covers all nine U.S. Census divisions.

Oh NO!  What are we doing to do?  Here's the problem.  House prices falling isn't a positive thing, but I've been innoculated against such news after reading so many stories about people who bought a house for $200,000, saw it rocket up to $600,000, and now have to sell it for only $520,000, and are hurting because of the equity. 

So why do we need to read further than the first paragraph?

Prices nationwide are at levels not seen since the third quarter of 2004, according to Maureen Maitland, a S&P vice president. However, the index is still up 60 percent versus 2000.

So, prices are at the same place as they were in 2004.  In a rational world, this would be called a correction.  We all knew the housing market was overheated, but it's not that bad, unless you did something stupid like try to make a quick buck flipping a house, or pulled equity out of your home without leaving a cushion. 

This is not a horrible situation. This is what the market is supposed to do.  I bought my condo in 2005, at the peak.  The value has dropped, and if we sold, we'd lose money, but that's the way real estate works.  We expected to lose money if we moved in the first 3 years, and that was in a good market.  So as someone who bought within their means, it offends me that the government is offering to bail out idiots and fools and speculators who don't understand risk.

If government wants to help me, how about doing something about my property taxes, which add some $300 a month to my housing payment?  How about government at the city, state, and national level, consider cutting spending by real amounts instead of jacking up spending in boom times and jacking up taxes to cover their butts in slow economic times?

Companies like Anheuser-Busch cut 5% in their budgets every year to improve financial performance.  Why can't we get politicians who promise to do the same for local, city, and state governments, instead of urgent pleas for emergency tax increases, high assessments from the county, and pleas for bailouts from the federal government?

Democrat or Republican, I'm voting for the candidates who promise to cut away at their budgets.  Any takers?

Missouri Car Promotion In Butler: Buy A Car Get A Gun

I've worked on incentive programs for car dealers before.  They're constantly looking for new promotions to drive traffic through their doors, and they're ecstatic when they get a 20-30% increase in car sales in a given month. The reason is simple economics. The less time a car is on the lot, the more cars that can be sold. 

So what do you say when you sell 30 cars in 3 days?  Max Motors in Butler, MO, just south of Kansas City has been offering a $250 credit for a gun store when you buy a car, and its all over the news because of it.  My favorite part is the suggestion they make for a gun - a Kel-Tec pistol.

Expect to hear more about "Getting a Blast with Dave Mungenast," or "Praise Moore Mitsubishi and Pass the Ammunition" on your television. 

hattip:  Wizbang Pop!

Google Isn't Always Right, And Political Surveys Are Asinine

It's important to remember that using Google as an information source can sometimes lead to flawed results.

An example would be the reader who came to this site looking for "robin carnahan blog."

This is a blog from a Missouri citizen writing about politics.  No one pays me to write.  If you're looking for the political writings from the Carnahan family, you should be looking for FiredUp Missouri, friend.  True, they qualified for a "press exemption" back in 2006, but that only holds as long as they aren't under the undue influence of a single candidate, party, or state office.

It does underscore the sad state of the Missouri blogosphere when this blog commands the attention of so many relevant search terms for state politicians.  I'd offer it up to the Missouri GOP, but they don't understand how this all works, which is why they are so easily rolled when phone calls come into the capital.

Any of the rest of you getting these idiot surveys from your national party?  It's one of the reasons I don't give money to political parties - they use it to pay consultants to send out direct mailers that pretend to be "surveys," when they are really just pleas for money.  That always struck me as odd. If you're going to ask me for money, do you really think you should be insulting me?

Paul Kanjorksi Admits Stretching The Truth About Iraq War To Win Back Congress

Memorial Day is supposed to be a remembrance of the men and women we've lost in service to their country.  This Memorial Day, a member of the Democratic Congress admits that playing politics while our troops fight overseas was the key to winning the 2006 elections.

In 2006, 82,000 votes was the margin between winning and losing both Houses of Congress.  In Missouri, the loss of incumbent Jim Talent to challenger Claire McCaskill was sealed by just a few thousand votes.  Many of those votes were driven by antiwar groups like MoveOn.org, who spent heavily to assist Senator McCaskill to get elected.

Suckers. In this rare moment of honesty, Pennsylvania Democrat Paul Kanjorski describes what his party did to win back Congress in 2006. They played politics with our soldiers and the Iraq War, "stretching the truth as far as it could go" in order to win enough votes to win back Congress.

The Democratic Congressman probably didn't expect this to hit YouTube, but in this age of video, the truth about what politicians say to the public and what they say behind closed doors is no longer concealed.  An enterprising reporter from our Fourth Estate might be interested in such a story.  It's no small matter when a politicians admits to putting power above the lives of our soldiers.

Of course, it would not be a stretch to say that reporters in Pennsylvania, and across the country, already knew that the Democratic strategy was based on lies.  Of course, it's probably a good thing the Democrats weren't serious about ending the war.

i wonder what else they're stretching the truth about?  Global Warming?  Energy Independence?  Health Care?  Education?

hattip:  WizbangBlog

FiredUp Gets DNC Credentials At Expense Of Minority Bloggers

Sometimes these stories really do write themselves.  The DNC credentialed a slew of state blogs as part of their convention.  The only problem?  They chose the bloggers based on influence and relevance, rather than on what minority group they belong to.

So what do the Democrats do?  In an insulting and demeaning response, they say they're going to credential a second set of bloggers full of minorities in an affirmative action plan.  No, seriously.  They failed to take race into account when selecting state blogs, and instead focused on merit.  That's surely why FiredUp Missouri got chosen (Did you know they are actually a for profit Limited Liability Corporation - it's actually FiredUpMissouri, LLC).  As the largest progressive site funded by the Carnahan family and written by Secretary of State employees in Missouri, the proper justification for picking FiredUp would be convincing Robin Carnahan, an uncommitted superdelegate, to vote for Barack Obama and end the infighting by supporting her flunkies, because they are the highest trafficked liberal site.

Unfortunately for the Democrats, even in post-racial America, merit can't be seen as trumping race. 

Of course, if this were really affirmative action, deserving blogs written by white middle class or Asian bloggers would be prevented from going by a state supreme court, and then told they were racist for complaining by a syndicated columnist.  But it's close enough to point and cry laugh, and wonder if the Democrats will ever raise their actions to meet their rhetoric.

As for FiredUp Missouri, I wonder which blogger will go?  Will it be one of Robin Carnahan's staff?  That would almost certainly be a violation of the press exception for campaign finance laws.  I guess it could just be Roy Temple, but he doesn't need a press pass.

BTW - not everyone is happy with FiredUp getting the nod. Check out the first comments over at Kos. 

24thState Featured At JohnMcCain.com

John McCain's new site is up, and my experience in internet marketing and design is really paying off.  Guess who's at the top of the list for conservative sites?  Why 24thstate.com, of course.

Hoorah.

Glad to see they got my political leanings correct.  It's an interesting site overall, and TechRepublican has a good write-up of it, although their outreach could be better.  You would think someone would actually contact the blogs on the list.

Hey guys, you can buy my services to prepare that for you. I already have lists of large numbers of political blogs by states as well as that of a list of AAPC members.

Tell McCain I would donate my time, but my overhead costs have risen to cover the costs of paying for greenhouse gases and their effect on polar bears. 

Welcome, Jeff Or Mindy Mazur!

I'd like to welcome the reader from the Mazur household this morning.  I don't know if it's Mindy, the former Chief of Staff to Robin Carnahan, or Jeff, the AFCSME director and one of the only identified bloggers at FiredUpMissouri.  I'd like to think it was both (The miracle of IP addresses only tells me it's one of them).  Imagine little ol' me garnering the attention of such political heavyweights!

Maybe it was the content.  The well-coordinated telephone campaign that convinced Missouri Republicans not to bring up the Voter ID bill was funded by someone.  And the creation of an online response website and "coalition" that generated significant amounts of traffic and interest was not the spontaneous response of a concerned citizenry.  I just want to know what relationship the Secretary of State's office has to this non-partisan coalition of committed far left activists.

A lot of Republicans are unhappy at this - they're well aware that illegal votes have the potential to sway elections, and it's clear that the Secretary of State is committed to open voting, knowing full well that any "discrepancies" can be swept under the rug or blamed on low-skilled workers (like the ACORN workers).  After all, it's not who votes that counts, it's who counts the votes, eh comrade?

Mindy,Jeff -  if you have information on who is funding the Missourians for Fair Elections, either as spin or pointing the fingers elsewhere, the tip line is right there to the left.  Get it, to the left?

Who Funds Missourians For Fair Elections?

You should never trust any "political" organization with an Orwellian name.  Byzantine campaign finance rules allow soft money to be funneled to groups who act under the orders of shadowy figures who don't want their names dragged through the mud, or out into the spotlight.  And we have what appears to be one of those right here in Missouri.

The Missouri Voter Id Act stirred up a lot of emotions, and when the Supreme Court upheld Indiana's photo ID law, the progressive blogosphere turned its eyes on Missouri.

FiredUpMissouri doesn't need to be outed - everyone knows it's a creation of the Carnahan family to be used as a "progressive" news outlet that pressures the KC Star and Post Dispatch to write stories favorable to Democrats.  I tend not to read them since I get my news straight from the DNC and public relations people for Democratic campaigns, but this series of links on Missourians for Fair Elections, a supposed broad-based coalition of groups, got me thinking.  What exactly is the Missourians for Fair Elections group, who runs it, and who funds it?  And why exactly, does this coalition, which has no mention of it online or anywhere else before May, suddenly pop up all over the web as the place to go to fight a Missouri Voter ID Law?

The first part is simple. Laura Egerdal, a 24 year Washington University graduate and committed progressive activist is the writer. She's all over the web at lefty sites like TPM, MyDD, Kos, the Huffington Post, and she's a Barack Obama supporter.  She formerly hired people for Americans Coming Together for voter registration in 2004.  She's been a part of "activist workshops" like the October 8 Coalition.

Her partner in crime is Julie Terbrock, the legislative director for ACORN, another progressive activist who spends her time attacking school choice groups for being out of state.  Julie used to work with ProVote, a sister organization to ACORN, and she's held a series of positions with progressive causes.  Now she's with ACORN, a privately funded activist organization that in 2006 registered tens of thousands of  fake voters in Missouri.  You may remember them because ACORN workers were found guilty of election fraud.

So two young progressive activists, at least one paid for by the country's largest privately funded partisan operation, form the "front" for a group that calls itself Missourians for Fair Elections, and they start this coalition in May, claiming they have the broad based support of the AARP, the League of Women Voters, and the ear of Robin Carnahan, Missouri's Secretary of State (who vehemently opposes the Voter ID Act and has made the claim that there is no vote fraud in Missouri).

How about one more connection?  Julie  used to worked at ProVote with Ron Berry, who now is the Legislative Liason for.....Robin Carnahan, our beloved Secretary of State, who happens to figure so prominently in the stories about this recent fight over the voter ID Law.  This could all be coincidence, or it could be a paid political operation involving Ron Berry, Julie Terbrock, Laura Egerdal, and financiers that could be out-of-state or could be directly from the SecState office. . 

Who paid for the press release for the Missourians For Fair Elections?   The one that got posted at HuffPo by Art Levine, and at Kos, TPM, memeorandum, America Blog, and other operations?  Is this money from ACORN?  How did two women  in their 20's command such attention throughout the progressive blogosphere with a "coalition" that has seemingly been around less than three weeks?  And was there any collusion between ACORN and the Secretary of State's office?  Over 4,200 phone calls poured into Jefferson City to put a stop to the Voter ID bill.  That was an organized effort by someone - was it ProVote, ACORN, or was it authorized by the Legislative Liason for the Secretary of State For Missouri?

Did Republicans just get rolled by a fake committee sponsored by Robin Carnahan's office, and if so, how come no one is asking questions?   More on this upcoming...

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Washington University Graduates Idiots

Washington University is one of St Louis's bright spots.  It's a premiere university recognized nationally. It's the number 12 university in the (highly flawed and biased) U.S. News and World Report rankings.  And yet somehow the Admissions office made a huge mistake in 2004.  A full third of the graduating class is comprised of children who just spent $200,000 for nothing.

We expect to hear nonsense from the occasional faculty member, like the attempt to prevent Phyllis Schlafly from receiving an honor.  But when a third of a graduating class turns their back on an 83 year old woman and alumnus whom the school is honoring, it's time to say that Washington University is no longer a liberal arts school, but yet another in a long line of formerly great universities who fail in the basic instruction of their students.

The really sad part is I have little doubt that none of those "graduates" know anything about Phyllis Schlafly.  This is a school that has a womens studies program that thinks the wage gap is a bigger concern than honor killings of Muslim women in the West.  In the closeted world of academia, the president of Iran is to be applauded and welcomed, while a strong, educated woman is to be humiliated.

Real courageous of these kids.  If this is an example of one of the country's top universities, than it's clear that a bachelor's degree has no value anymore.   Shame on those students and faculty, and I wish them luck with their student loan debt.  They're going to need it.

As for the school, and it's $4 Billion-Plus dollar endowment...isn't it about time the federal government started to tax endowments to help pay for those student loans? 

36% Of Americans Believe We've Been In A Recession For Four Years

Talking down the economy during Republican presidencies is a favorite activity of the mainstream media, but the results sometimes lend us absurd results.  In 2004, prior to the presidential election, a full 36% of the American Public believed we were in recession.

Considering that number is now in the 60-70% range, is the answer that we truly have been in recessionary times for four years (or is it 8 years), or could it be that the constant drumbeat of negative news has finally gotten the better of the American people? 

It's nothing new.  The cure to our economic woes is simple.  Put a Democrat in the White House, and overnight, all the news will turn rosy.  Just as soon as the giddiness of proving the MSM still runs things goes away.