I recommend she study for the ministry and pray full time.

Good to see you, Chuck!

Folks, I recommend the following blog for day-to-day coverage of the unfolding financial clusterf--k....

http://theautomaticearth.blogspot.com/

Scary times.

Not the time you want to have Phil Gramm's buddy in the White House.

The flip side: if Obama wins, he'll have to deal with the fallout, and probably get tagged with some blame by GOP drones and the lazy media.

If you'll notice, Obama has been alluding to "tough choices ahead" and so on a little bit in speeches.

Chuck,
So how much money did you personally make as a real estate agent fleecing everyday mom's and dad's?

How many years did you run a real estate company?

I'm sure the 5-10%/year appreciation in home values from 2002-2007 wasn't a problem for you when you were charging families 6% on every home you sold, but now it's Bush's fault..
I get a laugh out of the NAR and agents like yourself. Get a real estate license in 30 days and charge 6% on every house. You like to point the finger at Bush, the blame should be laid at the feet of the lenders and the NAR.

You are one of a kind...

Dow Futures +261
Naz Futures +40

Time to cut and run, the surge was a total failure.......

F.O yourself

BAGHDAD — At first, I didn’t recognize the place.On Karada Mariam, a street that runs over the Tigris River toward the Green Zone, the Serwan and the Zamboor, two kebab places blown up by suicide bombers in 2006, were crammed with customers. Farther up the street was Pizza Napoli, the Italian place shut down in 2006; it, too, was open for business. And I’d forgotten altogether about Abu Nashwan’s Wine Shop, boarded up when the black-suited militiamen of the Mahdi Army had threatened to kill its owners. There it was, flung open to the world.

Two years ago, when I last stayed in Baghdad, Karada Mariam was like the whole of the city: shuttered, shattered, broken and dead.

Abu Nawas Park — I didn’t recognize that, either. By the time I had left the country in August 2006, the two-mile stretch of riverside park was a grim, spooky, deserted place, a symbol for the dying city that Baghdad had become.

These days, the same park is filled with people: families with children, women in jeans, women walking alone. Even the nighttime, when Iraqis used to cower inside their homes, no longer scares them. I can hear their laughter wafting from the park. At sundown the other day, I had to weave my way through perhaps 2,000 people. It was an astonishing, beautiful scene — impossible, incomprehensible, only months ago.

When I left Baghdad two years ago, the nation’s social fabric seemed too shredded to ever come together again. The very worst had lost its power to shock. To return now is to be jarred in the oddest way possible: by the normal, by the pleasant, even by hope. The questions are jarring, too. Is it really different now? Is this something like peace or victory? And, if so, for whom: the Americans or the Iraqis?

There are plenty of reasons why this peace may only amount to a cease-fire, fragile and reversible. The “surge” of American troops is over. The Iraqis are moving to take their country back, yet they wonder what might happen when the Americans’ restraining presence is gone. The Awakening, a poetic name for paying former Sunni insurgents not to kill Americans or Iraqis, could fall apart, just as the Shiite Mahdi Army could reanimate itself as quickly as it disappeared. Politics in Iraq remains frozen in sectarian stalemate; the country’s leaders cannot even agree to set a date for provincial elections, which might hand power to groups that never had it before. The mountain of oil money, piled ever higher by record oil prices, may become another reason to spill blood.

But if this is not peace, it is not war, either — at least not the war I knew. When I left Iraq in the summer of 2006, after living three and a half years here following the collapse of Saddam Hussein’s regime, I believed that evil had triumphed, and that it would be many years before it might be stopped. Iraq, filled with so many people living so close together, nurturing dark and unknowable grievances, seemed destined for a ghastly unraveling.

And now, in the late summer of 2008, comes the calm. Violence has dropped by as much as 90 percent. A handful of the five million Iraqis who fled their homes — one-sixth of all Iraqis — are beginning to return. The mornings, once punctuated by the sounds of exploding bombs, are still. Is it possible that the rage, the thirst for revenge, the sectarian furies, have begun to fade? That Iraqis have been exhausted and frightened by what they have seen?

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/21/weekinreview/21filkins.html?_r=1&ref=world&pagewanted=all&oref=slogin