RateWatch Moves to BabyWatch

Today is the due date.

No kid yet, but Jeanette has gotten serious.  I've lost the pool now, but it would be nice to have the kid, as I am under the usual injunction (largely self-imposed) not to go anyplace I can't get back from in less than twenty minutes.  We don't anticipate that this labor will take much time.  The body knows the score, so to speak, and although Jeanette is not as young as she once was and doesn't have the physical strength she did, she is also wiser and tougher than ever, so she's not going to call for help until the baby is right on top of us.  Usually we have the baby about the point that the unborn child's arrival starts to seriously impinge on everything else.  I'm cancelling appointments, so that's the stage we're in.

And I got an email from a friend asking if I wanted to meet two 11-year-old Ukrainian kids in case we wanted to adopt them.  I told him I didn't, knowing that once I did meet them, I'd be in real trouble.  We've talked about adopting several times, but never got very close to actually doing it, mostly because we're still bringing new children into the house by ourselves, and a lot cheaper.  Still, the fact remains that we have more to give.  We have warmth and shelter and love enough for more than we have, even counting this one we don't have just yet.  Though it's frequently close, we always seem to have enough money for them all, too.  Should we not be willing, even eager, to sacrifice as much as necessary of this world's goods to care for those that have so little of them?

More later, as events warrant.  Bonds are essentially flat.  Rates have dropped again, to 6.25-6.375% on conventional, 6% on FHA.

Warning: Presidential Politics

Occasionally, I have to post things when answering the same question one person at a time gets wearing.  Some of you know I once had a role in Presidential politics, so I get asked my opinion on the election fairly often.  Here is my opinion, for what it's worth.

I do not think Barack Obama is the spawn of Satan's bowels. But he is a persistently liberal
senator with almost zero significant life experience. I grew up on
Capitol Hill in DC and I have run a Presidential campaign. I know
some of these people personally. I don't think Democrats are scum
and Republicans are angels, I have no truck with political talk
shows (they make me tired), and I left politics because there
wasn't much place for a guy like me. I just couldn't hate people
hard enough. So take this for what it's worth.



More than anything else, this is what the election comes down to
for me:



McCain and Palin have both - BOTH of them - done hard jobs in
obscure places for practically no compensation. They have some
actual experience with the world that most people in the country
live in, and McCain has some experience with the worst the world
has to offer. Both of them are real people. They have problems, and
they make mistakes. Palin is the better of the two, mostly because
she's been a real person more recently, and her political career
consists of hard battles against corrupt rich people who still hate
her and want her drowned in the Bering Strait. But I also can't
find it in my heart to dismiss a guy that set his own broken arms
in a POW prison camp.



Obama and Biden, by glaring contrast, have ZERO relatable
experience in the real world. Neither has ever had a paying job of
recognizable substance outside of the government. Biden, for his
part, became a Senator almost 40 years ago, and his greatest moment
in the sun came when, while getting nine votes as a Presidential
candidate, he openly plagiarized Neil Kinnock in a campaign speech.
He has spent almost two-thirds of his live as a US Senator, and
never had a job. Obama's private-sector experience is smaller than
my 16-year-old son's. Neither of these men have any inkling what it
is like to be a real person. And they are both perfect - well,
Biden says silly things occasionally, but aren't those just lovable
personality quirks?



I don't know Obama personally, but I do know Biden. He is and
always has been mostly about himself. He's never had to work for a
living and is perfectly comfortable stealing other people's ideas,
work, speeches, what have you if he has a need for it, on the
perfect justification that he's important. Obama appears to me to
be the personification of the entitlement class, able to get ahead
mainly on the shoulders of others without proving in any serious
way that he's got substance. He became Senator through the
implosion of the GOP in Illinois (their candidate, after he got the
nomination, was caught in a sex scandal). He's had patronage and
shelter every step of the way in his political life. Although he
has rhetorical gifts, he has never used those gifts to take a tough
stand on any issue, never proposed a controversial bill - or even
held HEARINGS on one - never authored a paper on anything
moderately unpopular. His major contribution to American political
thought is a book about hope.



I would hire him. But I wouldn't put him on my City Council. And I
wouldn't hire Biden to walk my dog, and that's personal experience
talking. I wouldn't hire McCain, but if I didn't, he'd have a
competing shop open across the street in two weeks. I'd hire Palin
in a heartbeat, but in two weeks she'd have MY job.



That's where it is for me.



We talk a lot in this country about how we want our leaders to
listen to the little guy, to care what happens to the average Joe,
to have respect for regular folks. Then we elect people who have
never had to pay their mortgage by phone on the very last day of
the month and wonder why they seem so tone-deaf. But how could they
hear us? They don't live in this country. They don't speak the same
language we do.



We can debate political philosophy all day, and I like doing that
more than most. None of these candidates - with the possible (but
unprovable) exception of Sarah Palin - come anywhere near my idea
of what is right and proper for government to be doing. So I chuck
that. What I'd settle for is someone that once had something really
hard to do, and did it the best he could. Not emotionally hard -
being black in this country is hard, and burying your wife is
excruciating - but "you're going to hate me for this but I'm going
to do it because it's the right thing to do" hard. One pair has
that. One has not.



I guess the word for me is "courage". McCain and Palin have
courage, proven and demonstrated over and over. Obama may have it,
too, but how would we know? And Biden does not. Seems to me, this
is a time for courage. So I'm voting for that. It's little enough,
but it's something.

So, Jones, How Bad is It?

This economy thing, I mean.  The answer is, pretty bad, I think.  A
tumbling stock market is very bad for nearly everyone, because not only
does it remove several hundred billion in wealth from people's 401(k)
and IRA accounts, it takes out huge amounts of bank reserves and
available expansion capital.  And it hurts confidence in the economy,
which causes people to hoard, which takes money out of circulation and
essentially makes it impossible to ameliorate the conditions above.

The government is pretty close to powerless against the market, and always has been.  Further evidence of this this morning.

My
advice remains: focus on the stuff you can control, work hard, be kind
to children and strangers, call your mother and tell her you're fine. 
Put some seeds in a small pot in a sunny window and keep them damp.  Do
real things that have lasting value.  Pray.  Pray very, very hard. 
Exercise.  Breathe deeply.  Sing.

You should do this stuff even
when things are well.  When, as right now, they are decidedly not well,
you should do them even harder.

Rates are falling, if you can get a loan.  We can, as of this morning, do loans under FHA down to a 540 credit score instead of last week's 580, so for some of you, now's the time to get out of that subprime deal.  Call us.