newspoodle’s posterous

"The great American sell-off continues. For sale this time: foreclosed homes throughout the United States with depreciating values. These pieces of real estate are tempting foreign big-money sovereign wealth funds to purchase them at an incredible value. Nothing can be truly considered sacred or American when everything is now for sale at discount prices."

It's Becoming a Buyer's Market!

There's one way to interpret this quote from a front page article ($) in today's Wall Street Journal:

Stuck with a growing glut of foreclosed houses, banks and investors are shedding them at increasingly steep losses, potentially adding to the banking industry's red ink this year.

Banks are selling foreclosed homes in some cases for less than half the price they fetched two or three years ago. The cuts are coming as the U.S. banking sector, slogging through its worst crisis in decades, bites the bullet out of fear that prices will keep falling.

Of course some of those homes had doubled in price over a couple of year's time so they're really just settling back down to reality. Regardless, it's becoming a home buyer's market! Those who were priced out of homes a couple of years ago or were prudent in saving up money for a home are now going to be able to reap the benefits!

Related to this is an article I found on the DrudgeReport: One Third of New Owners Owe More Than House Is Worth. Woe to those who purchased their homes with silly loans that are resetting right about now.

Best Buy will start selling the iPhone on ... [IPhone]

Best Buy will start selling the iPhone on September 7th, making it the only retailer other than Apple and AT&T to offer the device. [Associated Press]

Rove defends McCain's Lobbyist friends by saying Obama has them too…yea, right!

  Rove tries to defend McCain's lobbyist pals on H&C with his typical "Obama has them too," routine. Colmes does a good job of pointing out the fact that McCain used to be a maverick when it came to lobbyists, but not anymore. And he didn't forget about naming Rick Davis either.

 Download | Play  Download | Play (h/t Heather)

Colmes: You have John McCain come out hard against Russia, his chief foreign policy advisor got lobbyists money.  John McCain has talked about not taking lobbyist money and being a different kind of candidate back when he was a maverick. And then now he has all these lobbyists working for him.

 I wouldn't get in there and start throwing mud at McCain over lobbyists associations without then realizing what kind of lobbyist associations there are among Democrats, particularly among congressional Democrats.

I think McCain is running for president and not the congress. Rove tries to say that Obama has plenty of them working for his campaign like McCain, but of course that's false. We've posted many stories on C&L about McCain's Army of Lobbyists. Here are but a few:

The John McCain Institute of Lobbyists

McCain Campaign Manager's Alleged Russian Mob Ties

McCain Caught Off-Guard About Campaign's Lobbyist Problems

McCain makes a distinction between good lobbyists and bad

And of course this big one: McCain: The Anti-lobbyist just loves lobbyists

   Now the Washington Post follows that up with this:

In McCain's case, the fact that lobbyists are essentially running his presidential campaign — most of them as volunteers — seems to some people to be at odds with his anti-lobbying rhetoric. "He has a closer relationship with lobbyists than he lets on," said Melanie Sloan of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. "The problem for McCain being so closely associated with lobbyists is that he's the candidate most closely associated with attacking lobbyists."

Public Citizen, a group that monitors campaign fundraising, has found that McCain had more bundlers — people who gather checks from networks of friends and associates — from the lobbying community than any other presidential candidate from either party. By the group's current count, McCain had at least 59 federal lobbyists raising money for his campaign, compared with 33 working for Republican Rudolph W. Giuliani and 19 working for Democrat Clinton..read on