Charles Djou R-HI wins Special Election!!!
Can you say
Hau oli La Hanau Charles Djou!
CNN h/t HA headlines
…Republican Charles Djou took advantage of an intra-party fight among Democrats to snatch a House seat that Democrats had held for 20 years in Hawaii.
Djou, a Honolulu city councilman, won 67,274 votes or 39.5 percent of those cast.
The special election was for the state’s 1st congressional district, which opened up after 10-term Democratic lawmaker Rep. Neil Abercrombie stepped down earlier this year to concentrate full-time on his bid for Hawaii governor.
The seat includes Honolulu and some surrounding suburbs. President Obama, who spent parts of his childhood in the district, won 70 percent of the vote in the 2008 presidential election….
Happy Birthday to the King
Courtesy of MemphisKisses
Homerecorded – Elvis Presley with Anita Wood at Home from his Friend Eddie Fadal.Recorded Summer 1958 Waco /Texas
The King, who’d have been 75 on Friday 08 Jan 2010,maybe Elvis didn’t invent rock and roll. The roots of the music were there in the blues stomping of a previous generation.
But it would have stayed obscure and marginal without Elvis. He took the backwoods music of black America and made it global. And he did it with a musical talent, charisma and the most astonishing raw physicality that white America had ever seen.
After Elvis, Bill Black and Scotty Moore finished recording That’s All Right, Mama at Sam Phillips’ Sun Studios in 1954, bass player Black said “Damn. Get that on the radio and they’ll run us out of town.”
When it was played the reaction was astonishing. Kids besieged the station, demanding the record be played again. A week later, Sun Records had received 6,000 advance orders.
Overnight almost, the teenager was invented and the rock era began.
HAPPY BIRTHDAY ELVIS
Housing Update: Median Home Price drops 16.8% y/y….MBA makes 700B downward revision to ’09 originations forecast…
Ouch: National Median Home Price at $173,000 for May, a drop of 16.8% year over year….May existing home sales up 2.4%, same as April….much lower than needed for this inventory, especially since roughly 45% of the sales are foreclosure sales to investors….dollar is extending its losses and markets are down, DOW off 40 now to 8298….10 yr yield 3.63%….Gold 918….Oil down to 67…
So taking a closer look at the incredible revisions by MBA yesterday, it appears as though the Making Home Affordable Program has been a failure to date. Not the EPIC FAIL of Hank Paulson’s original plan, but a FAIL nonetheless….
MBA dropped the hammer on the outlook yesterday:
…The Mortgage Bankers Association cut its forecast of home-mortgage lending this year by 27% amid deflating hopes for a boom in refinancing. The trade group said Monday that it now expects $2.034 trillion of originations of mortgages for one- to four-family homes in 2009, down from a forecast of $2.780 trillion in March, when falling interest rates spurred expectations for huge volumes of refinancing….
Here are the numbers, of the millions of homeowners facing foreclosure, a grand total of 13,000 loans have been modified/refi’d. Yep.
…Meanwhile, the MBA said, the volume of refinancing under the Obama administration’s Home Affordable Refinance Program so far has been “very low.” This program is designed to help borrowers whose loans are backed by government-owned investors Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the biggest providers of funding for U.S. mortgages.
“While the number of loans completed under this program is likely to increase, it is difficult to craft a scenario under which origination volumes would come anywhere close to reaching the numbers originally envisioned for the program, particularly under our higher rate environment,” the trade group said.
So how low is it? Let’s check in on the housing beat with Diana Olick of CNBC who has the real scoop:
…Today the Mortgage Bankers Association put out a revision in its 2009 originations forecast. A big revision. A $700 billion revision. “$84 billion of the drop is due to lower purchase originations and the rest is due to lower rate/term refinances and very low volumes in the Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac Home Affordable Refinance Program (HARP).”
…The MBA had raised its forecast by over $800 billion in March following the drop in interest rates associated with the Fed’s announcement on the Treasury bond and mortgage-backed securities purchases programs as well as the implementation of the HARP….
……The refi’s dropped off for two reasons, one being the interest rate rise, and the second being the poor results on the HARP….While generally accepted estimates were that around 1.5 to 2 million borrowers might avail themselves of this program, with many more potentially eligible, to date only about 13,000 loans have been completed,” notes the MBA’s chief economist, Jay Brinkmann. …
Did anyone else catch Larry Kudlow get curt and rather harsh with Diana on The Call last week? Diana makes it clear in this blog report her position and reporting on the housing market is based on the facts, not the ‘Goldilocks wannabe green shoots’ scenario we all know Larry wants to find…..the harsh reality of our housing market, and it is pretty damned harsh here in AZ lemme tell ya:
…A lot of folks out there contend that I am overly bearish on the beat I cover. Some go so far as to call me “miserable,” while others claim I choose to see the glass half empty. I am and do neither. I’m not a bear; I’m a realist. It’s your right to have an opinion, but it’s not my job. My job is to gather for you and funnel to you the facts: The numbers, the trends, the industry forecasts and the experts’ analyses. I have no agenda and frankly gain nothing from being either a bull or a bear. If anything, I’d be better off personally as a housing bull. CNBC doesn’t allow me to own stock, but I can own a house, and I do. If you think housing has bottomed, that’s your opinion, but that’s just what it is: Opinion.
Happy Valentines Day!!!
2010 Updates: THR Livefeed has ‘Lost’ Valentines …
The Victorian Valentines are so beautiful, read more about the holiday here
Cindy Adams dishes on traditional Valentine’s lore:
In Ancient Rome, St. Valentine performed marriages for the soldiers of Emperor Claudius, who’d banned the rite because he did not want emotional ties that could make his troops less bold in battle.
In the Middle Ages, folk of young ages drew names from a bowl to see who their Valentines might be. Those names were then pinned on their cuffs for a week. The forerunner of the phrase “wearing your heart on your sleeve.”
Wedding rings grew out of the custom of locking a bride in irons with the best man assigned to guard her prior to the ceremony.
Per the Times of London, every Valentine’s Day morning some unknown writes a note saying, “Are you there, Moriarty?” — addressed to Mr. Sherlock Holmes — and plops it through the letterbox of the Abbey National branch that now stands at 221B Baker Street. I don’t know why. They don’t even know why.
Old wives’ tale: Feb. 14 is the date centuries ago when migratory birds returned to England to mate.
More old wives’ tales: The first feathered friend a single maiden sees on Valentine’s Day will foretell her future mate. A bluebird is a sign he’ll be happy but poor. A crossbill means cranky and quarrelsome. Sparrow? The guy’s a farmer. Robin? He’s a sailor. Blackbird? A clergyman. And if she sees a woodpecker, the old broad will stay an old-broad spinster….
Moderate in the Middle 
