As long as house buyers look at their houses as just that - houses instead of homes - there will be valuation troubles.  They have changed from the attitude of establishing one’s “castle” to one’s giant ATM. 

Example:  If I bought a car (they are horribly expensive too) and found out 6 months later it was only worth half the list price I was paying, I would probably not walk away from the loan - this happens all the time in the auto market.  Historically if a person buys a house, however, they intend to live in it for at least a few years; rule of thumb used to be at least 6 years.  The house is one’s HOME - not just an investment mechanism or leverage to buy other things.  It’s something that can be handed down to heirs etc. after the owners have expired or moved to retirement digs.

But the bankers and Wall Street have trained us like seals to view our homes merely as our financial engine.  And they bundled up mortgages like matchsticks, even without the proper documents.
The rest is our national debacle - hoodwinked and given the sidewalk shuffle by bottom-line bean counters who never did care about “the old homestead”.

As long as a person has a job and can meet expenses including the mortgage payment, that home provides a lot more than just a window to a reverse mortgage or line of credit - it’s a place to live and raise little Americans into big taxpayers - fellow citizens.

@Alan—you say “An opposition Democratic candidate must be identified NOW!”

ok, so who you got?

The debt and deficit crisis entirely a self imposed high colonic.  It was brought to us by people who have little if any idea of economics or the problems and complexities of governance.  This new ignorati glory in making pseudo-common-sense pronouncements of simple minded slogans.  They are influenced by Ayn Rand’s fiction, which they of believe is sound economic and life theory.  They are fundamentalists, literalists and uninformed.  They are the Teapublicans who with the Republicans pledged to Grover Norquist to never raise taxes.

These are the people who not understanding the gravity of their threats to destroy our economy have brought us to the down grade of of debt instruments.  The demonstrated lack of ability to govern our nation has a negative impact on the world’s economy.

Even to label the deficit as the wrong problem is giving some credibility to the misfit Republicans. I say misfit because they do not belong in our national or even humanistic argument. They only belong in an ideological argument that is misanthropic and self-serving at the same time. If we really identified their malevolence, maybe millions of people would realize that a vote for any of them is a vote for the devil.

The problem is the financial capitalist model for
the economy that we have all bought into. Property
rights “uber alles” always ends with the wealthiest
becoming the only group with ANY wealth (the rich
get richer, the poor just get f**ked.

Capitalism by its very nature IS a Ponzi/Pyramid
scheme. It requires ever expanding markets and ever
expanding production while keeping a willing (or
unwilling) slave class to produce the excess
wealth.

Democracy and Capitalism are mutually exclusive in
the long term. Welcome to the Corporatocracy!

Lafayette: The President is a Public Person.  He is exempted from being able to claim defamation of character, libel or slander.  People can make up and publish anything they want about him no matter how absurd (like the contention that he is not American but Kenyan).  It’s all legal because he’s a Public Figure.  Otherwise, EVERYONE at Fox News would either be civilly libel or criminally so.  However, the Law DOES protect that speech, and, as much as I hate Fox’s lies, the damage to the nation for changing that would be much worse.

In the early 1920’s, the President of Germany, Friedrich Ebert, sued extreme right-wingers for defamation, which was allowed under German law.  He might have legally been allowed to do it, but it was a terrible political mistake, that ate up time, energy and harmed his reputation, making him look petty.  The lesson should be clear.

pd: So they bought and paid for someone who would continue their policies of gutting this country.

Defamatory accusation without the slightest shred of evidence. A shame there is no law against libel on the internet.

Some people think “freedom of speech” includes the right to public defamation. It shouldn’t be.

It should be clear now to all concerned that our no. One problem is not the debt, not
some B.S., news story about jobs and the economy. Not the Tea Party.

The number one problem is President Obama.

The plutocracy new that a conservative would never be elected after Bush. So they
bought and paid for someone who would continue their policies of gutting this country.
They picked someone who could use liberal ideologies, liberal symbols, and who would
represent a victory for liberal symbolism. But who would use that symbolism and
ideology to betray progressives, further the plutocracy and it’s goals.

Just S Bush used conservative ideology to dupe conservatives out of their votes,
Obama did the same.

Until Obama is removed from office, Bush’s third term will continue.  The goal is to
destroy the safety net, destroy social security, Medicare, OSHA. To turn America into a
vast sweatshop, and plunder the public resources for the greed of a few.

But as happens to all psychopaths, something has gone wrong with their planning, their
delusions, have no basis in reality, leading to disaster.

That disaster is here now, the destruction of the American economy.

President Obama is the O.J. Simpson of American politics, the perfect bait for
progressives, the perfect tool of the plutocracy.

NOTHING HAPPENED

tw: And, where was our President? Hanging out. Dithering. And eventually signing whatever the Republicans wanted.

He signed onto nothing. He agreed to a bipartisan committee. How much do you give men if it turns out that that committee gets nothing done? (Believe me, the Dems are going to have their Sweet Revenge in that committee.)

And the agreement extends beyond November of next year, so Obama need only worry if we, the sheeple (aka Us Dorks) vote more of the Crazies into the HofR. Are you up to that after all this hullabaloo?

So what happened is that nothing happened. The charade was entirely manufactured by the Crazies in the HofR, who are fixated on Obama’s One Term Presidency.

Besides, even Sarah Palin says it was a “victory”. Now, how could Sarah be wrong, be wrong, be wrong. (She’s such an astute political observer. ;^)

POST SCRIPTUM

In fact, something did happen. Those nice people who brought us the Triple-A rated Toxic Waste mess also downgraded US debt - from AAA to AA+. Which means, ostensibly, that you will be paying more for your credit.

Nice people, huh? When is the AG going to investigate them for professional negligence? In ten years?

I just downgraded S&P from Nerd to Dork.

GREAT WHINERS

ER: Meanwhile, most of the world’s advanced economies, including ours, are mired in an economic “recovery” that is proceeding so slowly it feels as if we’re moving backward.

Competent observation, but even this malaise is over-worked. The hurt is NOTHING comparable to the Great Depression of the 1930s. Of course, we’ve become Great Whiners since ...

Besides, permit me to bore you with the facts of the matter. That is, there are “economic indicators” that can be interpreted as positive-looking. One of them is US housing.

Look here at this info-graphic of a 5-year downtrend in new building permits (housing starts). And this from the same source, The Economist this week:

Prices have dipped below fair value, according to The Economist’s price-to-rents ratio. Homes are now affordable. The rate of household formation, suppressed for years as people have put off renting or buying their own homes, will bounce back: few sane people want to live with their parents until they’re 40.

A big bounce is unlikely: credit for mortgages is hard to get and consumer confidence fragile. But rental markets are tightening and builders are already talking about inflection points. Not long ago “there was no light at the end of the tunnel,” says Vince Foley of Barclays Capital. “Now there’s light, it’s just that the tunnel is very long.”

So, patience, America. For the moment, as Matthew (26:41 )says: ... the spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak.

And so is finding a decent mortgage lender ...

Of the ‘debt crisis’, Eugene Robinson says “Problem solved. Now, let’s do
something that might actually benefit the country.”

For me, I cant figure out what happened. Mr Robinson says Boehner, McConnell,
Reid and Obama “spent months of bitter struggle to accomplish remarkably
little”. Others say it was a ‘manufactured crisis’, ‘unnecessary’, etc. While
Republicans crow that they got 90 - 95% of ‘everything they wanted’. Through
reading, I dont know what actually happened, except the old reliable ‘markets’
seem to think it was bad.

And, where was our President? Hanging out. Dithering. And eventually signing
whatever the Republicans wanted.

Where was our President on other major issues facing the nation? Here’s a
summary:

1.  Extending the Bush tax cuts for the rich with McConnell.

2.  Extending the Bush tax cuts for the rich with Boehner.

3.  Making the CEO of a company that paid no federal taxes, received federal
bailouts and in invests heavily in ‘job creation’ efforts in foreign countries but
not here the head of his ‘Jobs Council’.

4.  Accelerating the Bush ‘bailouts’ to banks and other financial institutions and
then insisted on a ‘hands off’ policy when the CEOs and top-level employees
received “bonuses” paid with taxpayer money.

5. Promising “change” and then keeping Bush key appointees to continue to
advise you on military and financial affairs.

6.  Extending the Bush ‘war on terror’ wasting thousands American and Afghan
lives and billions of US dollars?

7.  Setting aside all efforts to reform immigration.

8.  Facilitating the passage of a Republican Governor’s health insurance subsidy
in lieu of single payer universal coverage.

9.  Would you have halted meaningful reform of the financial system, leaving
in-place (and even larger) the six largest ‘banks’?

10.  Administering a failed ‘program’ to help middle class families holding
‘underwater mortgages’.

And, now, again failing to repeal Bush tax cuts with Grover Norquist and the
Tea Party and dismissing six plus decades of Democratic policy to defend the
status quo for corporations and the wealthy.

Who signed on with Obama? Pelosi and Reid. Bi-partisan, as they say.

I dont like it when the ‘Wall Street’ is sighted as the final arbiter of the rightness
or wrongness of political decisions, but in this case I’d have to agree with the
‘markets’, at least to the extent that the ‘deal’ is a disaster for the middle class,
the consumer and therefore to a large degree a step backwards in our
‘recovery’.

As for the other 10 issues and actions above, I’d say they tell us that if we
nominate Obama as the Democratic candidate for President in 2012, we’re in
for more Right Wing politics and Tea Party wins.

Our main problem is our pols are bought and paid for
by big money. It’s a rigged game with average
American as the sucker. Our education system is
horrible. We need to invest trillions in alternative
energy and infrastructure. We need to compete in the
modern era with the emerging countries. We piss
trillions on war and defense while we internally
destroy ourselves. There’s too much bs out there in
the corporate owned media, hence, the people are ill
informed. Health care costs are killing us. Single
payer should have been enacted, not the mess that was
passed. I have plenty of ideas. I’m not a corporation
that can give money to politicians and have them do
what I want.

Robinson is like the doctor who is terrific at making diagnoses, but is best kept far away from the operating room.

Yep, it’s about jobs and unemployment, alright.  Has been all along.  But doing nothing (thus raising taxes to Clinton era levels for all) will only force us sooner into the double-dip recession we may get anyway.

We need to stop taxing labor.  Fund social security and medicare under a consumption model instead.

Geez, wouldn’t it be weird, if now that the US went through it’s ridiculous traumas/tantrums in raising the debt ceiling, no one would lend us any money because of the stupidity/incompetence we revealed attempting to raise it?

Weird, but fitting.

Mr. Robinson is living in a fantasy world. Raising
taxes to the Clinton era will not work because we are
no longer living in the Clinton era. Our debt is 3
times that of the Clinton era. The military budget is 3
times that of the Clinton era. The Clinton era ended
with the dot com bubble bursting just like the bush era
ended with the mortgage bubble blowing up, Our problems
are much deeper than what Mr. Robinson suggests. Much
deeper than anything the political hacks in Washington
can overcome. We are now a proto-fascist oligarchy.
Don’t cry for me, America.