Obama and the Media Doing Their Best To Talk UP the Economy

Preview for Sunday 053108

Hey folks,

It's not working.

Welcome to the Big Sunday Edition of the OPNTalk Blog. Glad you could stop by. That's right. TRILLIONS spend. Nothing solved. NOTHING. As a matter of fact. Things continue to get WORSE.

Billions spent on Banks. No one can get loans. Billions spend on Housing. People losing their homes at record rates. Billions spent in Insurance. Insurance rates increasing at all time highs. Billions spend in the Auto Industries? GM to go bankrupt, and hundreds of Dealerships closing and record high Unemployment. Where oh where have the Trillions gone?

Yet, Obama and the MMD {Mass Media Drones} are now switching tactics. Instead of the constant DOWN talking of the Economy during Bush, they are now attempting to talk UP the Economy. It's just not working. Get this. This is from the AP - Has economic twilight fallen on nation's Sun Belt? just last night.

In Maricopa County, home to Phoenix, the Stress Index more than doubled from 5.12 at the beginning of the recession in December 2007 to 12.67 in March 2009, worsened by a foreclosure rate that nearly tripled.

_Mounting foreclosures in Las Vegas' Clark County drove up its Stress Index score from 10.5 at the start of the recession to 19.3 in March 2009.

_In Lee County, home to Fort Myers, unemployment has doubled and foreclosures have soared 75 percent since the recession began, lifting its Stress Index from 10.5 to 19.98.

The boom in parts of the Sun Belt was, Florida wrote in the Atlantic, a "giant Ponzi scheme" — a growth machine that banked on wishful thinking, on the hope that an unending stream of new arrivals would forever inject their money into construction and real estate.

But as often is the case with such schemes, there comes a day when the engine sputters, gasps, and conks out. A day when the faithful stop turning up.

In the Sun Belt's newer, shallow-rooted communities, the roadkill is most evident: Where once there were "boomburbs," there now stand "ghostdivisions." Where property-flipping was once almost a middle-class sport, joblessness and "For Sale by Owner" signs reign.

The fallout is traceable in other ways, too. Nevada — the only state with a lower proportion of native residents than Florida — has seen net migration plunge 61 percent in two years; Arizona, 55 percent.

Were it not for immigrants, many of them from Latin America, and for fertility, the Sunshine State would actually have lost population last year — an "astounding development in the Florida experience," says Bill Frey, a senior fellow and demographer at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C.

He said the end of steady movement of people into the Sun Belt is part of a broader trend of curtailed migration during this downturn. "The merry-go-round has stopped, in terms of people moving from place to place."

I'm so glad that the Economy is "back from the brink" Mr. President. So glad indeed. Just in Port St Lucie, up the road a bit from where I am coming to you from, there sits two planned communities. Both meant to have homes starting at the low $400,000 into the millions, there they sit with half finished homes. Signs that say now $190,000. "Reduced" "New ownership" ETC.

So where is the Economy coming back? Oh, to answer a question, "What about the Gas Prices lately? How do you defend that? We know you have friends that you like to defend all the time in Big Oil, so tell us, there is no demand, how do you defend the Gas Prices? We await your answer. Ought to be good." I'll be talking about that tomorrow in the "From the Energy Front" segment.

Coming right up today?

Response to GOP Chairman Michael Steele
North Korea Nuclear, Iran Soon To Be, Obama Over His Head
Do Not Dare To Give The President A Letter
Scientists develop new basis for H5N1 vaccine: WHO
IWA for Sunday 053109

Oh did you see this. This was just cute. I mean that. This was really cute. Nice dress too.

"I am taking my wife to New York City because I promised her during the campaign that I would take her to a Broadway show after it was all finished," the president said in a statement an aide read to the press.

Can we all say Awe? What play did they see?

The play by August Wilson is about black America in the early 1900s, with residents of a boardinghouse recalling their migration from the sharecropping farms of the South to the industrialized North.

Of course. {Sigh} Some of you will get it. Some won't.

Anyway, We have a lot of ground to cover, so let's get started. I'm about to attempt to help the GOP again. I doubt they will get it either. But I'll try again. Be right back.

Peter
Sources:
AP - Has economic twilight fallen on nation's Sun Belt?
AP - First couple's NY date: a campaign promise kept