Last Call

Via Atrios, we learn Chicago's suburbs are getting inundated with foreclosures.

Across the six-county Chicago metropolitan area, foreclosure filings rose 6% in the first quarter to 17,819, the highest one-quarter total since the housing crisis began in mid-2006.

The shifting locus of new foreclosures shows how the recession and job losses are supplanting subprime lending as the main driver of mortgage defaults, says Geoff Smith, vice-president in charge of research at Woodstock. While the first wave of foreclosures hit hardest in poorer city neighborhoods targeted by high-interest-rate lenders with loose credit standards, the latest round is striking middle-class areas where most borrowers qualified for standard-rate mortgages.

Foreclosures in the suburbs aren't likely to abate until unemployment stops rising. That means more downward pressure on home values across the metropolitan area as foreclosed homes hit the market at fire-sale prices. Suburban communities also will face the consequences of vacant houses and dislocated families, which range from overgrown yards to increased demand for social services.

"We were able to ignore (the foreclosures) for a while, but we can't ignore it anymore," says Donna McQuade, president of the Realtor Assn. of the Fox Valley and managing broker for the Geneva office of Coldwell Banker Primus Realty.

In the far western suburbs along the Fox River from North Aurora to Elgin, nearly one in five homes listed for sale is a foreclosure or a short sale — one in which a seller owes more in mortgage debt than the home is worth, according to the association. Comparable data for last year isn't available, but Ms. McQuade says the percentage of foreclosures and short sales couldn't have been higher than 5% a year ago.

In affluent St. Charles, with a median household income of $75,181, about 9% of the 697 homes for sale are foreclosures or short sales.

This is the beginning of the second wave of foreclosures, those brought on by rising unemployment and adjustable rate mortgages resetting and exploding in people's faces. We're going to see a lot more of this in 2009 and well into 2010. All this talk about the housing market bottoming out this summer is premature. We're going to see a lot more foreclosures in a short period of time, and that's going to lower home values even more, causing banks to get hurt, causing more people to go underwater, causing more problems across the board.

This is the eye of the storm, folks. We have another year or so of serious pain to go before the real bottom hits...maybe longer.

The Obama Recession, Con't

Obama's 100 days are up and he hasn't fixed the economy yet. Time to punish him.

The new Democratic administration has made it necessary for the federal government to borrow just under one half of every dollar it must spend this year to fund its existing obligations and all the new spending the new president and his allies in Congress approved during Obama's first 100 days in office.

As the Associated Press explains, the FY2008 deficit will increase "by $89 billion to above $1.8 trillion—about four times the record set just last year." Which Orszag and others want us to believe is somebody else's fault.

The Reagan deficits, which used to be held up as an example of the former president's mismanagement of the economy, were, at their worst point, only about a tenth of what Obama has given us in his first year—no, his first days—in office. Today Reagan's $221,245,000 billion budget deficit for FY 1986 ( U.S. Office of Management and Budget, Historical Tables, annual), once the worst year on record, looks like the good old days. And that deficit occurred during a period of economic expansion, unlike the Obama deficit, which is being incurred during a serious recession.

The deficit is not the only weakness in the Obama policy. Unemployment, which is now just under 9 percent, continues to rise. And increased joblessness leads to increased government spending for things like additional unemployment benefits and food stamps. At the same time the much promised transparency in stimulus spending has yet to appear. As the AP is reporting, "Federal auditors acknowledge they can't yet track the transportation money that is leaving Washington and there is no single list of the thousands of projects planned in each state."

The days of blaming Bush are at an end. At some point Obama's White House is going to have to step up and accept responsibility for the fact that its economic program, for the moment at least, is failing, that it is not producing the promised results and that it is, as the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office suggested early on might be the case, making things worse.

This guy must have hated Bush adding $5 trillion to the national debt over 8 years then and leaving Obama with such a huge problem. It wasn't Obama who signed TARP into law, you know. How quickly people forget Bush did that on the way out the door and stuck Obama with the bill.

Look, economically Obama has a crapload of problems, and I disagree with what he's doing with the banks. But the fact remains if John McCain was President, he'd be bailing out the banks, only we'd have a spending freeze and no stimulus whatsoever. I'll take Obama's approach to McCain's worst of all options neo-Hooverism.

The Obamacare Gambit

Obama's health care announcement that several health care industry groups are signing on to pledge to reduce health care costs by $2 trillion over 10 years has garnered a lot of praise, but many people besides myself are wondering what the other shoe dropping is.

The Kroog likes the plan, but wonders what the real costs are. Jon Cohn seems to think there's a real opportunity, but doesn't trust the players. Matt Yglesias figures the health care guys will have to meet their promises, but Ezra Klein flat out smells a rat.

We'll see what legislation comes out of all of this. Without a public option as an alternative to private insurance, the plan is all but worthless.

Home, Home I'm Deranged

Latest Republican insanity: Barack Obama is destroying the economy on purpose to gain political power.

At the beginning of April, a Fox News poll asked respondents whether they believed that President Obama “wants the financial crisis to continue so government can take over more businesses and grow the federal government.” Only 23 percent said that they thought Obama wanted it to continue, but that minority view was recently endorsed by a top-ranking Republican official. Rep. Pete Sessions (R-TX), the chairman of the NRCC, told the New York Times that he believes President Obama aims to “‘diminish employment and diminish stock prices‘ as part of a ‘divide and conquer’ strategy to consolidate power”:

His counterpart at the House Republicans’ committee, Representative Pete Sessions of Texas, may indeed face an uphill fight with his argument that Mr. Obama is not trying to create jobs. In an interview, Mr. Sessions cited rising unemployment in asserting that the administration intended to “diminish employment and diminish stock prices” as part of a “divide and conquer” strategy to consolidate power.

Mr. Sessions, in his seventh term, said Mr. Obama’s agenda was “intended to inflict damage and hardship on the free enterprise system, if not to kill it.” By next fall, he predicted, voters may regain appreciation for the era of Republican governance when “many dreams were achieved,” the size of the economy doubled and employment and financial markets hit record levels.

Remember, this is a sitting member of Congress saying this, not a "crackpot" or a talk radio loudmouth or a special interest group lobbyist or a think tank shill or a blogger.

This is an elected Congressional Representative who believes this and is saying this publicly.

The GOP is insane.

[UPDATE] Naturally, Rush Limbaugh is now all over this talking point. Expect it to be standard issue GOP garbage for the next several weeks.

Mr. Popular

People still like Obama...if anything his approval ratings have gone up slightly.

President Barack Obama appears to be slightly more popular with Americans at the start of his second 100 days in office than he was, on average, during his first 100. Gallup Poll Daily tracking from May 7-9 finds 66% of Americans approving of how he is handling his job, compared with an average 63% from January through April.

Obama's approval rating has registered 66% or better in each Gallup three-day rolling average since May 2. His 68% approval rating reported on May 3 is tied for the second highest of his presidency, exceeded only by the 69% recorded immediately after his inauguration. And except for one 66% approval rating in late April, all of Obama's previous 66% to 68% readings were obtained near the start of his term.

Job approval is typically an important barometer of a president's re-election chances, and a 66% approval rating in the first half of 2012 would almost guarantee Obama's success in that endeavor. However, that is three years away, and, as Gallup presidential approval trends show, things can change -- sometimes radically -- over a president's first term. But despite today's seemingly positive environment for Obama, a separate Gallup question, asked in late April, indicates the degree to which Americans are keeping an open mind on the next election.

On balance, the majority of Americans nationwide say they would be inclined to vote for Obama in the 2012 presidential election: 53% say they would definitely or probably vote for him while 37% say they definitely or probably would not. Another 9% offer no opinion. This is based on people's early impressions about Obama, with no references to who his Republican opponent might be. (The figures are about the same among all registered voters.)

Sadly, with two-thirds of Americans liking the job the guy is doing, the Village has declared that Obama's not actually in charge of the country at all but in fact Evan F'ckin Bayh is.

Go figure.

Zandar's Thought Of The Day

Rush Limbaugh gets to vent all sort of bile and hate on a daily basis, for several hours a day, with no consequences whatsoever. The Village press accepts this as fact.

Wanda Sykes tells a joke about Rush at a once a year Washington event and the Village press declares she's over the line.

Poor Rush. He's apparently no match for a black lesbian comedienne.

[UPDATE] Andy Serwer nails it cold.

Then she got really personal. She joked that Limbaugh was a racist who doesn't want black people to "escap[e] the underclass." She accused him of being responsible for killing "a million babies a year," and aired her friend's theory that Limbaugh himself was a terrorist attack," a followup to 9/11. She also, most disgustingly, said that if conservatives kept apologizing to Limbaugh, they'd eventually contract "anal poisoning." She wondered when Republicans would finally stop "bending over and grabbing their ankles" for Limbaugh, and finally concluded that Limbaugh was just a "bad guy."

Oh wait. Wanda Sykes didn't say any of these things. These are things Rush Limbaugh has said about Obama or other Democrats in the past year, the kind of statements few reporters found offensive enough to write about, despite the fact that most of them were said with the utmost seriousness. And while Sykes is a mere comedian whose influence on the Democratic Party is negligible, Limbaugh's influence in the party is so great that Republican leaders can't even criticize him without having to issue apologies after the fact.

Once again, Rush spouts this crap daily. But his skin is so thin he has to have other wingnuts to make his crappy defenses for him.

A Stimulatin' Development

The Kroog wants another stimulus package.

The United States risks a Japan-style lost decade of growth if it does not take aggressive action to stimulate its economy and clean up its banking system, Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman said on Monday.

"We're doing half-measures that help the economy limp along without fully recovering, and we're having measures that help the banks survive without really thriving," Krugman said.

"We're doing what the Japanese did in the nineties," he told a small group of reporters during a visit to Beijing.

He said it was not clear that China would suffer sub-par growth as a consequence of the fallout of the present crisis.

"I'm mostly worried that the U.S. and the euro zone will have Japanese-type lost decades," he said.

Krugman said he expected little or no employment growth this year or next in the United States, where the jobless rate in April hit a 25-year high of 8.9 percent.

"A second stimulus is becoming clearly urgent. They need a very, very strong stimulus," said Krugman, a Princeton University professor and a New York Times columnist.

Cleaning up the bank system is more important, I think. Even more important is dropping hardcore Plan N on the insolvent ones. But of course, politically neither will be possible until 2010.

And by then it will be far too late. When the euphoria of this Dead Cat Bounce wears off and the silly talk of a V-shaped recovery and 6% positive GDP growth in 2009 is put to rest, the reality that remains will not be pretty.

Obama will not be able to blame Bush for much longer. He will be able to blame the Party of No somewhat. But in the end, it'll be the ConservaDems that kill the economy.

Bill Bennett's Head Scratcher

Bill Bennett doesn't believe Sarah Palin and Rush Limbaugh are the future of the GOP. (He will of course be made to apologize for this.) It's who he does think is the GOP's future that boggles the mind.

“One of the things the media could do – some of the media – is to move the debate off Sarah Palin and Rush Limbaugh,” Bennett, a CNN Contributor, said on State of the Union. “This is probably not the future of the Republican Party,” added Bennett.

“You don’t think Gov. Palin’s the future of the Republican Party?” queried CNN Chief National Correspondent John King.

“I do not,” said Bennett. “It could talk about a Paul Ryan or a Mike Pence. It could talk about a Bobby Jindal. It could talk even about a John Kyl or a David Petraeus. You know, there’s a lot of talent in this party.”

Bobby Jindal and talent in the same sentence without the qualifier "complete lack of"? Honestly? The GOP wants to break into the 21st century with anti-science goons like Mike Pence? They want to go with another country club "Let's have Social Security invest in the stock market" Bushie like Paul Ryan? They want another Arizona Senator and torture apologist like John Kyl? And Bennett wants David Petraeus as much as America is sick of these wars?

Bennett's wrong of course. The new future of the GOP has nothing to do with who he named. It's being decided instead by the GOP's failed past: Dick Cheney, John McCain, and Newt Gingrich.

StupidiNews!

• Pope Benedict XVI begins his controversial visit to the Middle East, staring with Israel.
• The US military denies accusations of using white phosphorus in Afghanistan, but says the Taliban may be.
• Congress takes up emergency funding for Afghanistan, Iraq, and swine flu.
• The Obama administration plans to "aggressively enforce" anti-trust legislation.
• A new cyber-bullying bill's vague language could potentially be used to censor the internet.

Last Call

The health care industry just bought a pretty big chunk of Obamacare this weekend to the tune of $2 trillion. The reality is that Obamacare will become reality, but the speed at which the health care industry has embraced it does worry me.

President Barack Obama's plan to provide medical insurance for all Americans took a big step toward becoming reality Sunday after leaders of the health care industry offered $2 trillion in spending reductions over 10 years to help pay for the program.

Hospitals, insurance companies, drug makers and doctors planned to tell Obama on Monday they'll voluntarily slow their rate increases in coming years in a move that government economists say would create breathing room to help provide health insurance to an estimated 50 million Americans who now go without it.

With this move, Obama picks up key private-sector allies that fought former President Bill Clinton's effort to overhaul health care.

Although the offer from the industry groups doesn't resolve thorny details of a new health care system, it does offer the prospect of freeing a large chunk of money to help pay for coverage.

And it puts the private-sector groups in a good position to influence the bill Congress is writing.

It's that last sentence that of course is the caveat. It assures some sort of universal health care legislation will pass now.

But what has big pharma bought for its two trillion dollars? After all, this is a mere drop in the bucket for the health care industry, literally a matter of shaving a couple of percentage points off of the rate of increase in health care costs in an industry where yearly increases in the double digit percentage range are the norm.

Clearly they've had something in mind all along. It has to be better than no health insurance for 1 in 6 Americans...but there's going to be a cost down the road. A big one.

More on this tomorrow.

Another Look At Mother's Day

This story here is for Zandarmom.

My daughter is a preschooler but I have only known her for a while. She is adopted.

After years of wanting to be parents, my husband and I were given 14 hours notice ... then a little girl walked into our house.

Trying to adopt had been a long and frustrating process. But, when we connected with an American Foster Family Agency, it happened very quickly. One night, the phone rang – the social worker told me we'd been "matched" with a 3-year-old girl.

I hung up the phone and stood still for a second. Then, I had to sit down. Within a minute, I was lying on the floor. Yeah, this was real: A little girl was coming to our home. Tomorrow.

There wasn't a baby shower, there wasn't time to discuss with family and friends, there was no way to really prepare for her arrival.

She arrived without an instruction manual. I didn't know if she had a sleep schedule, food allergies – there wasn't even a note pinned to her shirt. She just walked in and looked up at me, like "got lunch?"

There isn't a word for the elation I felt. I grinned like a maniac and jumped into parenthood.

We got to know each other: we blew bubbles in the backyard, drew with sidewalk chalk, threw the ball for our dog, (who looked up at her, like "dibs on the big bed.")

Together, we decorated her new bedroom – arranging white furniture, laying out a pink rug, messily peeling and sticking purple flower decals on the walls.

I was delighted by her: Every facial expression, every tantrum, every small thing she did was fascinating and fantastic. Mornings were now a flurry of juice spilling, tiny clothes washing and frenzied kid-chasing. It was thrilling chaos.

And my mother not only adopted one kid, but three...and still gave birth to a fourth. Thrilling chaos definitely describes my household growing up.

My mother loved us so much, she went out and got more.

Thanks, Mom. More than you know. More than I ever say, actually. And to everyone else out there, adoption is one of those things that you really should consider...on either end of the equation.

The Good Son

Dick Cheney thinks Rush Limbaugh is a better Republican than Colin Powell. My question is simple: Why is a man with an approval rating in the low 20's deciding who is and who is not a "good Republican" anyway?

Answer that for me and I'll tell you why the Democrats will continue to run the country.

Your Lips Say No, But Your Eyes Say No

You really do have to admire Fred Barnes for the consistency and depth of his level of reality denial.

Improving the party's image is a worthy cause, but it isn't what Republicans ought to be emphasizing right now. They have a more important mission: to be the party of no. And not just a party that bucks Obama and Democrats on easy issues like releasing Gitmo terrorists in this country, but one committed to aggressive, attention-grabbing opposition to the entire Obama agenda.

Many Republicans recoil from being combative adversaries of a popular president. They shouldn't. Opposing Obama across-the-board on his sweeping domestic initiatives makes sense on substance and politics. His policies--on spending, taxes, health care, energy, intervention in the economy, etc.--would change the country in ways most Americans don't believe in. That's the substance. And a year or 18 months from now, after those policies have been picked apart and exposed and possibly defeated, the political momentum is likely to have shifted away from Obama and Democrats.

This scenario has occurred time and again. Why do you think Democrats won the House and Senate in 2006 and bolstered their majorities in 2008? It wasn't because they were more thoughtful, offered compelling alternatives, or had improved their brand. They won because they opposed unpopular policies of President Bush and exploited Republican scandals in Congress. They were highly partisan and not very nice about it.

If Republicans scan their history, they'll discover unbridled opposition to bad Democratic policies pays off. Those two factors, unattractive policies plus strong opposition, were responsible for the Republican landslides in 1938, 1946, 1966, 1980, and 1994. A similar blowout may be beyond the reach of Republicans in 2010, but stranger things have happened in electoral politics. They'll lose nothing by trying.

Ahh, Freddy Freddy Freddy. Come. Walk with me, talk with me.

There are so many things wrong with this, it's difficult to measure them all. Once again Fred is convinced Americans don't want a government solution to America's problems...but nearly thirty years of letting the "free markets" work has failed. Dubya made a point of deregulating everything he possibly could, and the result has been absolutely disastrous for the country. From the environment to food and drugs to toys and building materials, from levees and schools and mines to plants and factories, and industry after industry, where regulation and oversight -- or "government interference" as you call it -- was curtailed or eliminated, we got in return disaster after disaster.

At every turn, accountability was eliminated and those who failed were rewarded by the Bush administration as Americans suffered and were hurt and sometimes killed by lack of protections dismantled by an administration beholden to corporate interests.

Americans want government working for them again. You guys had your shot. You blew it. Now it's the other side's turn. Once again Fred Barnes is trapped in an alternate reality where liberals and Democrats cannot accomplish anything, all that ever happens is an occasional backlash against conservatism that liberals misinterpret and 1994 happens again and again.

Keep telling yourself that this is only a phase. Keep telling yourselves that the GOP has nothing to lose by opposing every facet of the Obama agenda as an obstructionist party. Keep telling yourselves that the Republicans have nothing to lose.

Trouble In Sri Lanka

Tamil Tiger rebels in Sri Lanka have been fighting a deadly civil war against the government in Colombo for 25 years now and the war zone is a dangerous, deadly place for anyone caught in the crossfire.

An all-night artillery barrage in Sri Lanka's war zone killed at least 378 civilians and forced thousands to flee to makeshift shelters along the beach, a government doctor said Sunday.

At least 1,100 people were wounded in what the physician said was the bloodiest day he had seen in months of fighting between the army and Tamil Tiger rebels.

Dr. V. Shanmugarajah said many more were likely killed in the barrage, but they were buried where they fell instead of being taken to the makeshift hospital where he works in the war zone. He described the situation at the understaffed hospital as ''overwhelming.''

''Nothing is within our control,'' he said. Most doctors and nurses have long since fled, he said, and even volunteers to dig graves were in short supply.

Not every war involves Americans, and we don't often hear about the ones that don't. Something to keep in mind out there in this wide world of ours.

Happy Mother's Day

Needless to say, Happy Mother's Day to Zandarmom. I know she is missing her own mother this year.

This blog wouldn't be here without my mother encouraging me to write, to learn, to ask questions, and to use that lump above my shoulders to try to make sense of it all.

Call your Mom. She misses you.