Because it isn’t “news” – it is sales pitch. Salespeople don’t need math skills – they just have to be able to deliver BS with a sincere look on their face.

George Ure at http://www.urbansurvival.com talks about ‘corpgov’.

He maintains that the government is currently being run for the benefit of corporations and NOT for the benefit of citizens.

If you accept this premise (and I do), then it is not reasonable to expect the truth from anyone in government or in industry.

Government and industry wonks will be ‘talking their book’ with the intent of benefitting themselves and the special interests that they represent.

People in the real estate industry are doing lots of ‘talking their book’ right now. Examples are everywhere:
> NAR saying that rents will rise 5%
> loan brokers rationalizing ARMs, IOs, etc
> realtors saying that “there has never been a better time to buy”

Understand how these people are motivated and it becomes less frustrating to listen to the BS that they are spouting 24/7.

Not understanding how these people are motivated and acting on their advice is a good way to lose money since they don’t have your best interests at heart.

Since you brought up religion …

It bugs me tremendously that any lying politician in America can gain 30% of the vote just by claiming to be a born-again Christian.

We are truly in trouble!

We’ve got a religious nutjob in America claiming he is doing God’s work in bringing on Armageddon / The Rapture

And now we’ve got a religious nutjob in Iran claiming he is doing God’s work in bringing on Armageddon / The Rapture

WOW!!!

Regardless of what GW believes with respect to religion and/or God, he is doing what needs to be done to make the terrorists think twice before hitting us again. Clinton’s religion was his polls. He did nothing substantive after the first world trade center bombing. His inaction was an invitation for more.

The US has made some mistakes, a number of the them big. For instance, we should have taken Iraq’s oil to pay for the war. But the bleeding hearts (aka weaklings) in this country would have risen up in arms over such a thing.
It seems like a lot of people have forgotten what it felt like to be watching TV on September 11 as the towers fell. I was 20 miles south of DC that morning, worrying about my children because they were reporting that a highjacked plane was right over our heads. My neighbor’s office was destroyed at the Pentagon but he was lucky enough to be away that morning. I won’t forget what the Pentagon looked like when I drove by it a few days later.

It will happen again if we show weakness. Unfortunately, the American public is wavering and our enemies know it.

Don’t forget that some people believe that the US government (or factions within it) allowed and perhaps facilitated the events of 9/11.

Governments exist primarily to protect their citizens from “the enemy”.

The “terrorists” are the perfect enemy because there will always be more of them. There is absolutely no chance of our government running out of an enemy to protect us from when they can point at anyone and label them a “terrorist”.

They have acknowledged this recently by changing the “war on terror” to the “long war”.

They want us to understand (and accept) that they will be protecting us for a LONG time.

And, by the way, in order to protect us they need to compile every little detail about each of us into a massive database. We shouldn’t mind that they are monitoring our e-mails, blog posts and telephone calls since they are only doing it to protect us from the terrorists. We also shouldn’t wonder why FEMA is building detention camps within the US borders – I’m sure that only the “terrorists” will be placed in these camps – not you or me or anyone that we know …

Unfortunately you are right that “It will happen again”. The same people that perpetrated 9/11 will create another event of even greater magnitude and use that as a reason to attack Iran with nuclear weapons.

“(Bush) is doing what needs to be done to make the terrorists think twice before hitting us again.”

Bin Laden must be laughing in his rat cave as he hears that people believe such stupidity.

Let’s review. We attacked Afghanistan. So far so good. But then, instead of focusing on Bin Laden and al quaeda, we attacked Iraq. We attacked a country that had nothing to do with 9/11. We attacked a country that had less to do with terrorism than Syria, Iraq or Saudi Arabia. We spent hundreds of billions of dollars (trillions, probably, before it’s all over), thousands of American lives, tens of thousands of innocent Iraqi lives, maimed 10,000 Americans, lost much of our standing in the world and depleted a large part of the reservoir of the American people’s will to fight. And for what? It’s not a rhetorical question. Please tell me, for what?

All we seems to have come of attacking Iraq is a chance for terrorists to kill Americans. They’ve killed thousands of Americans in Iraq in the past few years. They don’t seem to have thought twice about it at all. They’ve come from all around the world to fight “the great infidel” in Iraq. They’re killing more Americans every day. Why go to America to kill Americans when they’re sitting ducks right in your own part of the world?

If we’d been willing to spend all those lives, all that money, all that will to fight, and all that international political capital on fighting the terrorists we should be after, I’d bet we’d have found the rat cave Bin Laden is hiding in by now. But we’re not focused on him. We’re focused on Iraq. Dick Cheney keeps talking about Iraq’s “long-established ties to al quaeda.” But he has absolutely no evidence to back up this claim, and him saying it doesn’t make it true. On September 12, 2001, Bush insisted that a tie be found between Iraq and the previous day’s attacks. Do you think he did this because he somehow knew of a connection, or because he and his PNAC/neocon cronies had been dying to attack Iraq for more than a decade? (Well, they weren’t willing to die for it, but they were willing to send others to their deaths for it.)

“we should have taken Iraq’s oil to pay for the war.” We have been and we are using Iraq’s oil to pay for the war. And the “weaklings” (please explain how bleeding hearts are weaklings, but those who would blindly and weakly follow an obviously ignorant and foolish man towards the destruction of this great country are not) generally had nothing bad to say about it. The total economic impact of the war could be up to 40 times what the administration originally estimated it would cost. Not 40% more, 40 times, or 4,000% more. So the problem isn’t weaklings not wanting to use oil, the problem is that there is not enough oil to pay for the real cost of the war because an arrogant, ignorant, short-sighted administration thought things would go better than they did, despite evidence to the contrary, and didn’t see the probable outcome of the war despite the foresight of wiser men. The outcome was not unforeseeable.

George Bush Sr. on invading Iraq from “A World Transformed,” published well before his son became president:

“We would have been forced to occupy Baghdad and, in effect rule Iraq. The coalition would have instantly collapsed. … Going in and thus unilaterally exceeding the United Nations mandate would have destroyed the precedent of international response to aggression we hoped to establish.

“Had we gone the invasion route, the United States could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land. It would have been a dramatically different — and perhaps barren — outcome.”

“Incalculable human and political costs” would have been the result.”

Incalculable is right on the money. Ahh, the good old days when a Bush with some sense ruled the land.

PD, read the book “Blowback” by Chalmers Johnson. Interesting (written pre-9/11) and discusses our world position by a guy with strong ties to the military (Navy). Lots of discussion of our presence in Japan, how and why we are still there (not the usual Navy propaganda line). He discusses BinLaden as well – again, this was written pre 9/11.

I only know of 4 people(oceanside,oceanside,bonsall, poway).. out of all the people I’ve talked to over the last couple of years(one is on this board), that took the cash from selling their house and are holding on to it.. most other people had big wins in real estate, but they put that money right back into upgrading into a bigger house.

It seems these days that home equity has replaced the need for a savings account in peoples minds..

It is amazing the amount of control people have given the banks.. with complete control of the persons interest rate, seems they are indirectly in control of the presons savings(equity)… seems like the swipe at everyones savings is beggining as the cycles reverses..