Itz News to Me

For all the scorn and blame that has been heaped on mortgage brokers during the last year, realtors have surprisingly escaped getting their fair share of the blame for the recent unrealistic run-up in real estate prices. I have long contended that they, in fact, are the number one reason that prices ran up as far and as fast as they did. Now they want to put the blame on lenders and brokers and the buyers, but never nor at any time on the real estate agents who are still spending every minute of every hour trying to convince people that *NOW* is the time to buy a house.

Forget the fact that they know prices are declining and will likely continue to do so over the next couple of years. Forget the fact that they know their buyers can’t afford the house they’re showing them. Forget the fact that even in a tough market that they’re unwilling to reduce their commission rates. And that’s where we come to the reason for today’s rant: the monopolistic behavior of the NAR.

You would think that the same market forces which affect most other markets in this country would affect real estate as well, but you would be wrong. Because of the near-monopoly that the NAR and its members exercise over the listing services, those who might compete with them are effectively shut out of the market. They have to pay higher prices for access to the listings, if they’re allowed access at all. Now, a light may be breaking into the darkness, as the NAR has been forced into a settlement with the Department of Justice to allow internet-based agencies to have fair access to those listings.

Given their history of manipulative behavior, I would bet that they’re still going to have to be dragged kicking and screaming into compliance with the agreement over and over again. But it’s a start. Once we can break the NAR strangehold on real estate, we might once again see some rationality in the marketplace.

Popularity: 4%

Obama cited his great-uncle’s part in the liberation of Auschwitz (now corrected to Buchenwald after getting busted for stretching the truth yet again), in his Memorial Day remarks….The question that the media needs to ask, but won’t of course: was your great-uncle a “typical white person” like your grandmother?

Popularity: 3%

More and more stories like this are surfacing, and men are starting to take notice…and righteous offense.

There’s a big thick line between women achieving equality of the sexes and adopting an unsubtle outright anti-male attitude. That line was crossed some time ago, and I’m pretty sure that the feminists who thought/think it’s funny aren’t going to like it when the men inevitably begin to seriously push back against the anti-male bias prevalent today.

Advertisers and the mainstream media will soon enough find out that women aren’t the only ones with their hands on the household wallets. When enough of them start to feel the pinch, maybe they’ll rethink their attitudes. I’m not holding my breath though…

Popularity: 5%

In yet another reminder of how “global warming” has become more religion than science, Al Gore has begun channeling Jerry Falwell over the Myanmar cyclone…

Repent of your carbon-emitting ways or the next storm will be visited upon you, so sayeth Al Gore…Is it too much to ask that he even show the modicum of decency not to use the death of 50,000 people to push his junk science/get-rich-quick scheme?

Don’t answer that….We both already know the answer…

Popularity: 5%

…not because of the color of their skin….

The next time someone decides to spout off about how our justice system is so horribly unfair to blacks as evidenced by the fact that they constitute such a high percentage of our prison population, point them to this editorial (replete with facts and everything) and tell them to have a nice big plate of “Shut your pie hole, you race-baiting jerk.”

Popularity: 5%

…so says David Lightman of McClatchy Newspapers….

Never mind that Obama is a neo-Marxist…

Never mind that Obama thinks that I’m a bitter, gun-loving, Jesus-nut too stupid to figure out things for myself…

Never mind that Obama wouldn’t even be a U.S. senator were it not for the fact that he was the last man standing after scandal eliminated a rival that would have easily dusted him in an actual election…

Never mind that he doesn’t have a single legislative accomplishment to show for his time in the U.S. Senate….

Never mind that he can’t bring himself to actually denounce the idea that the U.S. brought 9/11 on itself or that the government created AIDS to kill colored people…(He only denounced what he called “controversial statements.” He never specified which statements. His lawerly parsing wasn’t an accident.)

Never mind that he thinks I am gullible enough to believe he belonged to a church for twenty years and had no idea what they stood for…

Never mind that he thinks it’s OK to hold fundraisers at the home of an admitted domestic terrorist…

Never mind that he’s involved in corrupt land deals with enemy agents and political fixers….

Never mind that he thinks people who wear flag pins are false patriots…

Never mind that his wife is a bigot of the first order…

Never mind that his first instinct, when he got in political trouble, was to throw the grandmother who loved and raised him under the bus…

Never mind that he is unable to make the distinction between having a difference of opinion and planting a bomb…

Never mind that he is the favorite candidate of Hamas and the Iranian regime…

I haven’t even gotten to the color of his skin because I could care less. Unlike Obama and Lightman, I judge people on the content of their character. I have seen Obama’s character and found it sadly lacking.

I could go on for pages, but why should I? After all, according to both Obama and David Lightman, the only reason I wouldn’t vote for him is because I’m clinging to my fear and dislike for “people who don’t look like me.”

Too bad neither of them would ever have the courage to say it to my face.

Popularity: 7%

In an effort to unseat Al Gore as the sorest loser in electoral history, Robert Mugabe is holding partial recounts in a transparent attempt to rig the results of the presidential election which he already lost.

If you can’t read this story and think “sounds exactly like Florida in 2000″ then you’re either struggling with reading comprehension or are too busy playing the Democratic version of all three monkeys in the “See No Evil. Hear No Evil. Speak No Evil” trio…

Popularity: 6%

Roger Simon, who is a Hollywood writer by trade and ought to know, does the best job ever of explaining why fabulously wealthy celebrities often take up leftist causes which, by their very lifestyles, expose them to regular folk like you and me as complete and total hypocrites:

Much of this public liberalism of the excessive knee-jerk variety stems from a form of self-loathing. These same people do not want to be bastards – life just put them in that position. But, at the same time, they do not want anyone to take away what they have – the vast acclaim and fortune – even if deep down they wonder if they are worthy. What to do? What to do?

The solution is to create another self, a kind of mini-me, who goes out and loudly proclaims what a fine liberal humanistic person he or she is- a public projection to obfuscate the private self. Sometimes this results in actual good works, but usually it is basically blather (see Streisand’s website) or dopey showing off like Sean Penn putting in an appearance with Hugo Chavez.

Popularity: 17%

Al “The Science Is Settled” Gore has made himself a career out of being a failed environmental snake oil salesman after being tossed on his can after a career as a failed political snake oil salesman. Much like Enron, you can almost trace the arcing career paths in both arenas: from nearly achieving the pinnacle of each field, he was exposed as an empty shell filling himself only with what he thought it would take for people to like him. And today is the day his failure in enivornmental science really become evident after the latest IPCC release shows that everything Al Gore said about global warming is a complete fabrication.

And who are these people who exposed Al Gore’s deceits? The usual skeptics who alarmists liken to Holocaust deniers for having the nerve to challenge their propaganda? Nope. It’s Al “I’ll Say Whatever It Takes for People to Like Me” Gore’s fellow Nobel winners: IPCC. Ouch…that’s gotta hurt…again…

Popularity: 14%

Just hours after getting caught with their hands in the cookie jar for planting questions and swearing they’d never do it again, Hillary Clinton’s campaign did it again.

This time they tried to claim it was just an innocent conversation between old acquaintences. Problem is, they weren’t. And it wasn’t. It was the same old sleazy underhanded Clinton tactics: they just figured that lightning couldn’t possibly strike twice. Who would think to even check so soon after such an embarrassing incident after all?

This brazen huckstering shows that for Hillary there is no such thing as spontaneity: if it’s not in her script, it doesn’t happen. And we thought Al Gore was stiff and robotic in 2000? He’s looking like a freewheeling firebrand by comparison to the rigidity of Hillary Clinton and her handlers. Not that I’m complaining, mind you…The more the American public sees of who and what she really is, the less likely we’ll have to hear from her after November 2008.

Popularity: 15%