Wait a minute, Doc. Are you telling me that you built a time machine out of a DeLorean?

Posted on May 18, 2013 by grim

From Loans.org:

Back to the Future of Home Loan Rates

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20 Responses to Wait a minute, Doc. Are you telling me that you built a time machine out of a DeLorean?

  1. grim says:
    May 18, 2013 at 6:07 am

    From Deutsche Bank:

    Housing: The best is yet to come

    This week we return to one of our favorite topics, which is the housing market. Based on client conversations, we believe investors still do not fully appreciate the direct positive effects a rejuvenated housing sector will have on the economic outlook. When combing through the GDP accounts, we estimate that total housing-related spending—beyond just residential construction—accounts for a much larger share of the economy than some market participants currently may believe. Consequently, housing and GDP growth could surprise to the upside this year relative to consensus expectations.

  2. grim says:
    May 18, 2013 at 6:08 am

    So much for the foreclosure floodgates opening in Bergen.

    Total executed sheriff sales for the week of May 13?

    Zero

    Of the two that made it to the docket – One was settled and one was cancelled, none went to the steps.

  3. grim says:
    May 18, 2013 at 6:35 am

    NYT asking the tough real estate questions:

    Q. I have a turntable and a large collection of records. Do I need to remove them before showing my home to buyers?

    But when it comes to stereos and music collections, “it really depends on the situation,” he said. “If you have a 1980s standard Sony from your teenage years, it’s just a dust collector.” It should probably be moved out along with the record collection.

    If you have attractive high-end stereo components from a company like McIntosh, however, they project a kind of status that could be desirable, he said. Your stereo and record collection could probably remain, but care should be taken to minimize cord clutter and to organize the records as neatly as possible.

    Roman Alonso, one of the partners at the Los Angeles design firm Commune, agreed that a good-looking turntable and record collection could make a positive statement about the owner’s lifestyle. “These days, a record collection is like a book collection,” he said. “It’s a library.”

    Mr. Alonso and two of the other partners at his firm have turntables at home, and Commune has put them in the homes of numerous clients, as well as the guest rooms at the Ace Hotel in Palm Springs, Calif. He recommended wireless speakers to cut down on cord clutter and a glossy turntable from a company like Music Hall.
    …
    And they might just make your living room look more stylish: “It is hip, yes, to have records,” Mr. Alonso said.

  4. WickedOrange says:
    May 18, 2013 at 7:07 am

    Gen X in the house

    Gen X on track to be worse off than Boomers in retirement, study finds
    http://finance.yahoo.com/news/gen-x-track-worse-off-005800161.html

  5. Scrapple n'Ricin says:
    May 18, 2013 at 7:33 am

    We are living in the endtimes. Prepare accordingly.

  6. grim says:
    May 18, 2013 at 8:49 am

    Surprised the proposal didn’t include a monorail, or will that be part of the next set of additions critical to ensure the opening of the mall. From the Star Ledger:

    Sports Authority approves expanded American Dream proposal

    American Dream, the controversial mega-mall complex once known as Xanadu, will be getting even bigger, with the unanimous approval today by the New Jersey Sports and Exposition Authority of plans to expand the project with an indoor amusement theme park and water park.
    …
    “It will be a fantastic entertainment and retail complex for the entire region,” said Mike Ferguson, chairman of the sports authority, following the vote. “It will be an economic driver.”

  7. freedy says:
    May 18, 2013 at 8:56 am

    In other NJ related news the Mayor of Trenton,the state’s wonderful Capital,has the
    gov paying for his lawyer as trial.

    http://www.nj.com/mercer/index.ssf/2013/05/trenton_mayor_tony_macks_lawye_1.html#incart_m-rpt-1

  8. Juice Box says:
    May 18, 2013 at 10:10 am

    Re: #6 – all of the gangland violence will be conentrated there. You should see the rapid response team the mall of America in Minneapolis has to clean up blood whenever some kid slashes another kids face over a dispute.

  9. Scrapple n'Ricin says:
    May 18, 2013 at 10:37 am

    Rename that mall Amerikan Nightmare.

    I do like the idea of letting gangs run amok in it, though.

  10. Scrapple n'Ricin says:
    May 18, 2013 at 10:39 am

    Also think the idea of turning it into a children’s casino would work. If we really want to boost our economy, we should teach grade-school kids how to gamble.

  11. Essex says:
    May 18, 2013 at 11:57 am

    Bring back the family farm.

  12. Comrade Nom Deplume, Channeling Scrapple Cannon says:
    May 18, 2013 at 1:52 pm

    [137] [prior] cobbler

    All good. Just hadnt heard from you in a while and Ottoman needed a wingman.

    Good luck with the renos.

  13. chicagofinance says:
    May 18, 2013 at 4:25 pm

    I prefer “The Green Mile Mall at Montklair Meadows”

    Scrapple n’Ricin says:
    May 18, 2013 at 10:37 am
    Rename that mall Amerikan Nightmare.
    I do like the idea of letting gangs run amok in it, though.

  14. chicagofinance says:
    May 18, 2013 at 4:30 pm

    Maybe “Lenin’s Tomb at Montklair Meadows” has a better ring…..

    chicagofinance says:
    May 18, 2013 at 4:25 pm
    I prefer “The Green Mile Mall at Montklair Meadows”

    Scrapple n’Ricin says:
    May 18, 2013 at 10:37 am
    Rename that mall Amerikan Nightmare.
    I do like the idea of letting gangs run amok in it, though.

  15. chicagofinance says:
    May 18, 2013 at 4:31 pm

    The facade would only need a slight alteration from current…..
    http://richard-seaman.com/Wallpaper/Travel/Russia/LeninsTombFromAfar.jpg

  16. chicagofinance says:
    May 18, 2013 at 5:18 pm

    “The IRS case deserves and calls out for an independent counsel, fully armed with all that position’s powers. Only then will stables that badly need to be cleaned, be cleaned. Everyone involved in this abuse of power should pay a price, because if they don’t, the politicization of the IRS will continue—forever. If it is not stopped now, it will never stop. And if it isn’t stopped, no one will ever respect or have even minimal faith in the revenue-gathering arm of the U.S. government again.”

    DECLARATIONS
    This Is No Ordinary Scandal
    Political abuse of the IRS threatens the basic integrity of our government
    By PEGGY NOONAN

    The reputation of the Obama White House has, among conservatives, gone from sketchy to sinister, and, among liberals, from unsatisfying to dangerous. No one likes what they’re seeing. The Justice Department assault on the Associated Press and the ugly politicization of the Internal Revenue Service have left the administration’s credibility deeply, probably irretrievably damaged. They don’t look jerky now, they look dirty. The patina of high-mindedness the president enjoyed is gone.

    Something big has shifted. The standing of the administration has changed.

    As always it comes down to trust. Do you trust the president’s answers when he’s pressed on an uncomfortable story? Do you trust his people to be sober and fair-minded as they go about their work? Do you trust the IRS and the Justice Department? You do not.

    The president, as usual, acts as if all of this is totally unconnected to him. He’s shocked, it’s unacceptable, he’ll get to the bottom of it. He read about it in the papers, just like you.

    But he is not unconnected, he is not a bystander. This is his administration. Those are his executive agencies. He runs the IRS and the Justice Department.

    A president sets a mood, a tone. He establishes an atmosphere. If he is arrogant, arrogance spreads. If he is too partisan, too disrespecting of political adversaries, that spreads too. Presidents always undo themselves and then blame it on the third guy in the last row in the sleepy agency across town.

    The IRS scandal has two parts. The first is the obviously deliberate and targeted abuse, harassment and attempted suppression of conservative groups. The second is the auditing of the taxes of political activists.

    In order to suppress conservative groups—at first those with words like “Tea Party” and “Patriot” in their names, then including those that opposed ObamaCare or advanced the Second Amendment—the IRS demanded donor rolls, membership lists, data on all contributions, names of volunteers, the contents of all speeches made by members, Facebook posts, minutes of all meetings, and copies of all materials handed out at gatherings. Among its questions: What are you thinking about? Did you ever think of running for office? Do you ever contact political figures? What are you reading? One group sent what it was reading: the U.S. Constitution.

    The second part of the scandal is the auditing of political activists who have opposed the administration. The Journal’s Kim Strassel reported an Idaho businessman named Frank VanderSloot, who’d donated more than a million dollars to groups supporting Mitt Romney. He found himself last June, for the first time in 30 years, the target of IRS auditors. His wife and his business were also soon audited. Hal Scherz, a Georgia physician, also came to the government’s attention. He told ABC News: “It is odd that nothing changed on my tax return and I was never audited until I publicly criticized ObamaCare.”

    Franklin Graham, son of Billy, told Politico he believes his father was targeted. A conservative Catholic academic who has written for these pages faced questions about her meager freelance writing income. Many of these stories will come out, but not as many as there are. People are not only afraid of being audited, they’re afraid of saying they were audited.

    All of these IRS actions took place in the years leading up to the 2012 election. They constitute the use of governmental power to intrude on the privacy and shackle the political freedom of American citizens. The purpose, obviously, was to overwhelm and intimidate—to kill the opposition, question by question and audit by audit.

    It is not even remotely possible that all this was an accident, a mistake. Again, only conservative groups were targeted, not liberal. It is not even remotely possible that only one IRS office was involved.

    Lois Lerner, who oversees tax-exempt groups for the IRS, was the person who finally acknowledged, under pressure of a looming investigative report, some of what the IRS was doing. She told reporters the actions were the work of “frontline people” in Cincinnati. But other offices were involved, including Washington. It is not even remotely possible the actions were the work of just a few agents. This was more systemic. It was an operation. The word was out: Get the Democratic Party’s foes. It is not remotely possible nobody in the IRS knew what was going on until very recently. The Washington Post reported efforts to target the conservative groups reached the highest levels of the agency by May 2012—far earlier than the agency had acknowledged. Reuters reported high-level IRS officials, including its chief counsel, knew in August 2011 about the targeting.

    The White House is reported to be shellshocked at public reaction to the scandal. But why? Were they so highhanded, so essentially ignorant, that they didn’t understand what it would mean to the American people when their IRS—the revenue-collecting arm of the U.S. government—is revealed as a low, ugly and bullying tool of the reigning powers? If they didn’t know how Americans would react to that, what did they know? I mean beyond Harvey Weinstein’s cellphone number.

    And why—in the matters of the Associated Press and Benghazi too—does no one in this administration ever take responsibility? Attorney General Eric Holder doesn’t know what happened, exactly who did what. The president speaks in the passive voice. He attempts to act out indignation, but he always seems indignant at only one thing: that he’s being questioned at all. That he has to address this. That fate put it on his plate.

    We all have our biases. Mine is for a federal government that, for all the partisan shootouts on the streets of Washington, is allowed to go about its work. That it not be distracted by scandal, that political disagreement be, in the end, subsumed to the common good. It is a dangerous world: Calculating people wish to do us harm. In this world no draining, unproductive scandals should dominate the government’s life. Independent counsels should not often come in and distract the U.S. government from its essential business.

    But that bias does not fit these circumstances.

    What happened at the IRS is the government’s essential business. The IRS case deserves and calls out for an independent counsel, fully armed with all that position’s powers. Only then will stables that badly need to be cleaned, be cleaned. Everyone involved in this abuse of power should pay a price, because if they don’t, the politicization of the IRS will continue—forever. If it is not stopped now, it will never stop. And if it isn’t stopped, no one will ever respect or have even minimal faith in the revenue-gathering arm of the U.S. government again.

    And it would be shameful and shallow for any Republican operative or operator to make this scandal into a commercial and turn it into a mere partisan arguing point and part of the game. It’s not part of the game. This is not about the usual partisan slugfest. This is about the integrity of our system of government and our ability to trust, which is to say our ability to function.

    A version of this article appeared May 18, 2013, on page A15 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: This Is No Ordinary Scandal.

  17. chicagofinance says:
    May 18, 2013 at 7:20 pm

    from the New York Times……

    Mr. Hackney, the former I.R.S. lawyer, said he was disappointed that the agency had not had better management to prevent the missteps, particularly the delays. But he said he feared that the politically charged investigation might descend into a witch hunt that leaves low-level I.R.S. employees too intimidated to enforce the tax code.

    “It would be tragic to see the I.R.S. be debilitated by this,” he said. “Its work is too important.”

    Outside the Cincinnati office on Thursday, employees on smoking breaks voiced many complaints. Pay freezes, mandatory furloughs and the effects of sequestration were all testing their already low morale. But the scandal, some said, had made things worse.

    “There’s a buzz in the office about this Tea Party situation,” said Neal Juarez, a case advocate in the Taxpayer Advocate Service. Like several other I.R.S. workers, Mr. Juarez was skeptical that employees in Cincinnati would have acted as they had without some direction from leadership in Washington.

    “You know what they say when there’s trouble,” he added. “You know what rolls downhill.”

  18. Anon E. Moose says:
    May 18, 2013 at 7:29 pm

    Chi [16];

    We’re going Greek – first with spending and debt, compounded by impotent and incompetent tax collection.

  19. F1rstT1meBuyer says:
    May 18, 2013 at 10:30 pm

    Hi Grim…if you have a moment, can you post up that list of things home inspectors should check on? Thanks in advance.

  20. Jason says:
    May 19, 2013 at 8:05 am

    [19] First Time Buyer,

    One thing you’ll definitely want to check for during home inspection, is what Ross Perot called “The giant sucking sound”. That’s the sound of your money getting vacuumed out of your wallet in the form of property taxes every year.

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