TGIF
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Sen. Edward Kennedy rushed to hospital
BOSTON (Reuters) - Ailing U.S. Sen. Edward Kennedy was taken to a Cape Cod hospital on Friday after police received an emergency call he was not feeling the well, the Boston Herald said on its website.
"It was a 911 rescue call. The caller said he wasn't feeling well. He was taken to Cape Cod Hospital by Hyannis Rescue Squad," the Herald quoted police Sgt. Ben Baxter as saying.
Baxter told the newspaper that Kennedy, 76, was conscious and alert when he was picked up by an ambulance.
The longtime senator and patriarch of America's most fabled political family was diagnosed on May 17 with brain cancer. He made a dramatic appearance at the Democratic National Convention in Denver last month in support of Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama.
(World Desk Americas)
VRS looking interesting here for quick play
"The enemies of freedom do not argue;
they shout and they shoot."
--William Ralph Inge
(1860-1954) English author, Anglican prelate
Source: The End of an Age
Mostly oil and gold shorts in last 3 months ... juniors are regular basket cases and which will survive the bloody massacre is anybody's guess ...
Cheers from the Great White North
GM Bossman!
Great stuff!!!
Thanks
Porn passed over as Web users become social: author
Tue Sep 16, 8:40 AM
By Belinda Goldsmith
CANBERRA (Reuters) - Social networking sites are the hottest attraction on the Internet, dethroning pornography and highlighting a major change in how people communicate, according to a web guru.
Bill Tancer, a self-described "data geek," has analyzed information for over 10 million web users to conclude that we are, in fact, what we click, with Internet searches giving an up-to-date view of how society and people are changing.
Some of his findings are great trivia, such as the fact that elbows, belly button lint and ceiling fans are on the list of people's top fears alongside social intimacy and rejection.
Others give an indication of people's interests or emotions, with an annual spike in searches for anti-depression drugs around Thanksgiving time in the United States.
Tancer, in his new book, "Click: What Millions of People are Doing Online and Why It Matters," said analyzing web searches did not just reflect what was happening online but gave a wider picture of society and people's behavior.
"There are some patterns to our Internet use that we tend to repeat very specifically and predictably, from diet searches, to prom dresses, to what we do around the holidays," Tancer told Reuters in a telephone interview.
Tancer, general manager of global research at Hitwise, an Internet tracking company, said one of the major shifts in Internet use in the past decade had been the fall off in interest in pornography or adult entertainment sites.
He said surfing for porn had dropped to about 10 percent of searches from 20 percent a decade ago, and the hottest Internet searches now are for social networking sites.
"As social networking traffic has increased, visits to porn sites have decreased," said Tancer, indicated that the 18-24 year old age group particularly was searching less for porn.
"My theory is that young users spend so much time on social networks that they don't have time to look at adult sites."
SOCIETY CLICKS TO CHANGE
Tancer said the change in communication patterns was one of the most noticeable shifts in society in the past five years -- a key point for marketers seeking to learn about their audiences.
But analyzing data also showed what preoccupied people, allowing Tancer to predict the outcome of reality TV shows.
"I noticed in our data that some of the top search terms are about tropical storms in the United States," said Tancer.
"Before Hurricane Katrina rarely would you see a search on tropical storms but the devastation from Katrina has made us as a society much more sensitive to tropical storms."
Tancer said the current obsession with celebrities was also reflected through web data, with celebrity websites garnering more attention than sites devoted to religion, politics, well-being and diets combined -- and no sign that this is waning.
This celebrity mentality had also overlapped into the November presidential election in the United States with surfers looking for images of Republican vice presidential candidate Sara Palin rather than looking for her policies.
"A lot of the focus around the candidates in general is image based. People want to know how tall Barack Obama is and also to search for their families," he said.
"You have to get far down in the search terms to link the search for a candidate with any issue."
But Tancer said the speed at which information spread on the Internet had meant in some cases it was consumers generating the story and the media is last to record it -- or fact-check it.
"With the explosion of this type of false information on the Internet I think we will see someone come forward and develop a new type of software that can filter for the most accurate information," he said.
"Maybe accuracy is the next thing we will all search for."
(Editing by Miral Fahmy)
Copyright © 2008 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved. Republication or redistribution of Reuters content is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Reuters. Reuters shall not be liable for any errors or delays in the content, or for any actions taken in reliance thereon.
Copyright 2008 © Yahoo! Inc. All rights reserved.
Posted by: RockJohny Date: Sunday, September 21, 2008 1:59:29 PM
In reply to: BullNBear52 who wrote msg# 17683 Post # of 17685
yea i'll see surge protectors on clearance every so often and always pick one up
Home Depot had some top-end ones for $20, like 75% off...
you have to realize that surges arn't just from lightning strikes but every time you flick a switch and notice the TV or other lights blink, you just caused a surge that can wear on electronics
so the good ones condition the current and take out the top ends of the surge wave
i'll keep the newest on my computer and put the older on my less expensive items...
good to protect any and all computerized components like dish-washers etc
Post 3 and 6 show the wrong symbol ... sorry for da confusion
"It does not require a majority to prevail, but rather an irate,
tireless minority keen to set brush fires in people's minds."
--Samuel Adams
I love your pt of view. I wish you were an employer ...
Ummm, is that a trick question?
Hey Chu!!, where did you get my license --- give it back!!
I am looking at buying the new Apple IPOD Touch 32GB and look what I found:
Applications - It’s great to have the ability to buy (or get some free) applications right on the iPod Touch. Furthermore, with the software update this new iPod Touch comes with, the Application installation process is so much smoother than it had been even on my iPhone. It now works how you want it to, seamlessly. I like having a weather application that includes doppler radar images, and that is free. I also have several games on it. There is a great variety of applications available from hundreds of third-parties right on the iPod itself, so you are certain to find something that interests you. I really like the new release of Spore, for the iPod Touch and iPhone. Apple is really pushing the games and quietly suggest they are challenging Nintendo and Sony. They are innovative and interesting games, but I think they have a ways to go, to challenge those game makers.
so far so good here
Twitter
Will this ever take off?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter
http://twitter.com/
Kitchen Stories (Sweden)
Pretty funny movie if you like weird humour.
Houses always increase in value in the long run.
FALSE. House prices cannot increase more than incomes in the long run. This is obvious if you think about it. If house prices go up more than people can afford to pay, buying stops, like it has stopped now.
For example, prices in the Netherlands are about the same as they were 350 years ago, in terms of how many years of work it takes to buy a house. Warren Buffett and Charles Schwab have both pointed out that houses don't increase in intrinsic value. Unless there's a bubble or a crash, house prices simply reflect current salaries and interest rates. Consider a 100 year old house. Its value in sheltering you is exactly the same as it was 100 years ago. It did not increase in value at all. It did not spontaneously get bigger, or renovate itself. Quite the opposite - the house drained cash from its owners for 100 years of maintenance, taxes, and insurance - costs that always increase and never go away. The price of the house went up about as much as salaries went up.
My grandmother always used to complain about the cost of milk. "Why, when I was a girl, a gallon of milk cost a dime! Just look at how much people are overcharging for milk now." I asked her how much people got paid back then. "Oh, about $15 a week", came the reply. Hmmm, sounds very much like the reasoning people use now when they talk about how much their father's house appreciated "in the long run" without considering that salaries rose a proportional amount.
As a renter, you have no opportunity to build equity.
FALSE. Equity is just money. Renters are actually in a better position to build equity through investing in anything but housing. Renters can get rich much faster than owners, just by investing in conservative stocks. The stock market has always been much better than the housing market in the long run.
Owers are losing every month by paying much more for interest than they would pay for rent. The tax deduction does not come close to making owing competitive with renting.
Owers are losing principal in a leveraged way as prices decline. A 14% decline completely wipes out all the equity of "owners" who actually own only 20% of their house. Remember that the agents will take 6%.
Owers must pay taxes simply to own a house. That is not true of stocks, bonds, or any other asset that can build equity. Only houses are such a guaranteed drain on cash.
Owers must insure a house, but not most other investments.
Owers must pay to repair a house, but not a stock or a bond.
Renting is just throwing money away.
FALSE, renting is now much cheaper per month than owning. If you don't rent, you either:
Have a mortgage, in which case you are throwing away money on interest, tax, insurance, maintenance, costs that increase forever.
Own outright, in which case you are throwing away the extra income you could get by converting your house to cash, investing in bonds, and renting a similar place to live for much less money. This extra income could be 50% to 200% beyond rent costs forever, and for many is enough to retire right now.
Either way, owners lose much more money every month than renters and that's assuming prices stop falling! Currently, yearly rents in the San Francisco Bay Area are about 3% of the cost of buying an equivalent house. This means a house is returning about 3%, and it is a bad investment. Pretty much any other investment is better. If you don't like risk, put your money in US Treasuries, where the dollar value is guaranteed not to fall. If you don't mind some risk, you may want buy the stocks that make up the market indexes.
Landlords are loaning a house to their tenants at a 3% interest rate. This is a fantastic deal for renters. When it is possible to borrow a million dollar house for 3% yearly rent at the same time a loan of a million dollars in cash costs 6.5% interest, plus 1% property tax, plus 1% maintenance, something is clearly broken. Renters are enjoying an extreme discount.
To add insult to "owners", their property is declining in value. Renters do not have to worry about the massive losses owners are experiencing. Here's a great quote from NPR:
Underwater owner: "We would do it [pay the mortgage] if the equity was there, but in a case where we're already so behind... Imagine that for five years, say, we're gonna pay four grand a month and then we're just gonna be back up at what we bought the house for. We feel like we're throwing away money."
There are great tax advantages to owning.
FALSE. Everyone automatically gets a $9,500 tax deduction, just for breathing. You have to have interest expenses greater than $9,500 to get any advantage from the mortgage interest deduction. And even then, the tax advantage is not significant compared to the large monthly loss from owning.
Compare the cost of owning to renting.
Many people believe you can just reduce your income tax by the amount you pay in interest, but they are wrong. Buyers may not deduct interest from income tax; they deduct interest from taxable income. Interest is paid in real pre-tax dollars that buyers suffered to earn. That money is really entirely gone, even if the buyer didn't pay income tax on those dollars before spending them on mortgage interest. You don't get rich spending a dollar to save 30 cents!
Buyers do not get interest back at tax time. If a buyer gets an income tax refund, that's just because he overpaid his taxes, giving the government an interest-free loan. The rest of us are grateful.
If you don't own a house but want to live in one, your choice is to rent a house or rent money to buy a house. To rent money is to take out a loan. A mortgage is a money-rental agreement. House renters take no risk at all, but money-renting owners take on the huge risk of falling house prices, as well as all the costs of repairs, insurance, property taxes, etc. Since you can rent a house for 2% of its price, but have to pay 6% to borrow the equivalent amount of money, it is much cheaper to rent the house than to rent the money.
All real estate is local, so you cannot say anything about the national market.
FALSE. Lending is global. ALL loans are harder to get. This will drive prices down everywhere.
A rental house provides good income.
FALSE. Rental houses provide very poor income in bubble areas and certainly cannot cover mortgage payments.
Remember that it's pointless to do the work of being a landlord if you can make more money with no risk, no work, and no state income tax by buying a US treasury bond. And money in treasury bonds would be liquid and secure.
That said, there are parts of the US where it does make sense to buy because mortgage payments are less than rents in those areas. They are generally rural areas away from the coasts, and have not seen the same bubble that the coasts have.
OK, owning is a loss in monthly cash flow, but appreciation will make up for it.
FALSE. Appreciation is negative. Prices are going down, which just adds insult to the monthly injury of crushing mortgage payments.
As soon as prices drop a little, the number of buyers on the sidelines willing to jump back in increases.
FALSE. There are very few buyers left, and those who do want to buy will be limited by increasing difficulty of borrowing now that many subprime lenders have gone bankrupt.
No one has to buy, but there will be more and more people who have no choice but to sell as their payments rise. That will keep driving prices downward for a long time.
House prices never fall (in my city).
FALSE. San Francisco house prices dropped 11 percent between 1990 and 1994. Buyers in San Francisco in 1990 did not break even in dollar amounts until about 1998. So those buyers effectively loaned their money to the sellers for 8 years at no interest, losing all the while to inflation. With inflation, 1990 buyers truly broke even only about the year 2000, ten years after buying.
Los Angeles' average house plummeted 21 percent from 1991 to 1995, and of course there have been many similar crashes all around the US. The worst may have been after the oil bust in the 1980's, when Colorado condos lost 90% of the value they had at their peak.
Your city may be special, but it was just as special when it was half as expensive ten years ago, so being special does not account for the run up in prices, and will not protect it from falling back to what it was.
House prices don't fall to zero like stock prices, so it's safer to invest in real estate.
FALSE. It's true that house prices do not fall to zero (except in Detroit), but your equity in a house can easily fall to zero, and then way past zero into the red. Even a fall of only 4% completely wipes out everyone who has only 10% equity in their house because realtors will take 6%. This means that house price crashes are actually worse than stock crashes. Most people have most of their money in their house, and that money is highly leveraged.
We know it will be a soft landing, since it says so in the papers.
FALSE. Prices are falling off a cliff. No one knows exactly what will happen, but it looks like prices will continue to fall for several years. As Yale professor Robert Shiller has pointed out, this housing bubble is the biggest bubble in history, ever. Predictions of a "soft landing" are just more manipulation of buyer emotions, to get them to buy even while prices are falling.
Most newspaper articles on housing are not news at all. They are advertisements that are disguised to look like news. They quote heavily from people like realtors, whose income depends on separating you from your money. Their purpose is not to inform, but rather to get you to buy. When you see an statistic that says everything is fine, look at the source. Is it from someone who needs you to believe in the housing market so that they can take your money?
The bubble prices were driven by supply and demand.
FALSE. Prices were driven by low interest rates and risky loans. Supply is up, and the average family income fell 2.3% from 2001 to 2004, so prices are violating the most basic assumptions about supply and demand.
The www.census.gov site has data for Santa Clara County for the years 2000-2003 which shows that the number of housing units went up at the same time that the population decreased: year units people
2000 580868 / 1686474 = 0.344 housing units per person
2001 587013 / 1692299 = 0.346
2002 592494 / 1677426 = 0.353
2003 596526 / 1678421 = 0.355
So housing supply in Santa Clara County increased 3% per person during those years. There is an oversupply compared to a few years ago, when prices were lower.
At a national level, there is a similar story in the years 2000 to 2005:
2000 115.9M / 281M = 0.412 housing units per person
2005 124.6M / 295M = 0.422
At a national level, there is 2.4% more housing per person now than in 2000. So national prices should have fallen as well.
The truth is that prices can rise or fall without any change in supply or demand. The bubble was a mania of cheap and easy credit. Now the mania is over.
They aren't making any more land.
TRUE, but sales volume has fallen 40% in the last year alone. It seems they aren't making any more buyers, either.
Japan has a severe land shortage, but that hasn't stopped prices from falling for 14 years straight. Prices in Japan are now at the same level they were 23 years ago. If we really had a housing shortage, there would not be so many vacant rentals.
If you don't own, you'll live in a dump in a bad neighborhood.
FALSE. For the any given monthly payment, you can rent a much better house than you can buy. Renters live better, not worse. There are downsides to renting, such as being told to move at the end of your lease, or having your rent raised, but since there are thousands of vacant rentals, you can take your pick and be quite happy renting during the crash. There are similar but worse problems for owners anyway, such as being fired and losing your house, or having your interest rate and property taxes adjust upward. Remember, property taxes are forever.
Some people want the mobility that renting affords. Renters can usually get out of a lease and move anywhere they want within one month, with no real estate commission.
It is much easier and cheaper to rent a house in a good school district than to buy a house in the same place.
A fun trick to rent a good house cheap: go to an open house, take the real estate agent aside, and ask if the owner is interested in renting the place out. Often, desperate sellers will be happy to get a little rental cash coming in and give you a great deal.
The biggest upside is hardly ever mentioned: renters can choose a short commute by living very close to work or to the train line. An extra two hours every day of free time not wasted commuting is the best bonus you can ever get.
Owners can change their houses to suit their tastes.
FALSE. Even single family detached housing is often restricted by CC&Rs and House Owner's Associations (HOAs). Imagine having to get the approval of some picky neighbor on the "Architectural Review Board" every time you want to change the color of your trim. Yet that's how most houses are sold these days.
In California, the HOA can and will foreclose on your house without a judicial hearing. They can fine you $100/day for leaving your garage door open, and then take your house away if you refuse to pay. There's a good HOA blog here.
The house down the street sold for 25% over asking, and that proves the market is still hot.
FALSE. Realtors try to create the false impression of a hot market by deliberately "underpricing" a house. Say a seller's agent knows that house will probably go for $400,000. He places ads asking $300,000 instead. (Bait-and-switch is illegal when selling toasters, but apparently not when selling houses.) The goal is to first of all prevent buyers from knowing what a realistic price is, and secondly to get buyers to blindly bid against each other. There are four players in this game and three of them are against the buyer -- the seller, the seller's agent, and the buyer's agent. Yes, the buyer's own agent works against the buyer, because there is no commission if there is no sale. There's a saying in Las Vegas: "There's a patsy in every game, and if you don't know who the patsy is, you're it."
If you want to prove your agent is not on your side, ask to see houses "for sale by owner" or houses listed by discount brokers. If the agent cannot make a commission, you will not be told about the house.
There is a way around the conflict of interest inherent in being a buyer's agent: let the seller's agent be your agent too, just for that one house he's trying to sell. Then the seller's agent has a big motive to lower the price, because he will get double the comission if you buy it rather than some buyer with his own agent.
Update: the underpricing game is now over. You are free to bid far lower than the asking price. You might be pleasantly surprised to find out how desperate the sellers are. Another good reason to start low: you can always raise your offer, but you can't lower it. A suggestion from a reader: have all your friends bid extremely low for the house before you, then your own low bid will seem more reasonable.
I was lucky that my realtor told me to increase my bid by $50,000. Otherwise I would have lost, because my realtor knew about a secret bid $40,000 above mine.
FALSE. Your agent gets paid nothing if you don't buy the house, and he gets more if you waste more money by bidding too high. Those are two big motives to invent false bids.
The MLS proves things are great.
FALSE. The MLS is a used-house sales tool designed to look "official" so you will believe it and then bid foolishly. It does not include most foreclosures, new houses by builders, houses for sale by owner, and any other case where the agent cannot make a commission. The MLS is not at all credible as a list of what's really out there.
All sorts of funny things happen in the MLS (Multiple Listing Service, a private database controlled by real estate agents). For example, if a house just doesn't sell, realtors can remove its record in the MLS so that you cannot see that it failed to sell. Then the house comes back on the market at a lower price, and unsuspecting buyers think it's on the market for the first time. Their realtor can "prove" it's a new listing by showing the MLS record to the buyer: "See, here's the listing date, just came on the market. Better hurry and buy it, this one is hot."
There is nobody checking that the MLS shows true transaction prices. The MLS prices are often just wrong.
Furthermore, the MLS will not list any house for sale by owner or for sale through a discount broker, or bank-owned property, or extreme discounts from builders, or many other cases where you could save huge amounts of money. Those cheaper prices are just not in the system, because if you save money, they lose money. Even if some cheaper properties are listed, your agent is not likely to tell you about them if they require more work on his part, or get him a smaller comission.
Rich Chinese (or Europeans, or Arabs) are driving up housing prices.
FALSE. The percentage of US houses bought by rich foreigners is tiny. Furthermore, American housing is clearly a bad investment at this point. Foreigners can just wait and watch both the dollar and American housing continue to fall, and then buy for much less in a few years. Rich foreign investors are not dumb enough to buy into a badly overpriced market, but your broker is hoping that you are.
There's always someone predicting a real estate crash.
TRUE, yet irrelevant. There are very real crashes every decade or so. Even a broken clock is right twice a day.
But housing was high when interest rates were 21%, so higher interest rates don't matter.
FALSE. Inflation was much higher then, so fixed debt was easier to pay off with increasing salaries. Now we have adjustible mortgages and stagnant salaries.
House price increases exactly mirror the increase in mortgage debt. According to the Washington Times: "Consumers have doubled their mortgage debt from $3.5 trillion to $7 trillion since 1996, borrowing and spending profusely on the assumption that house prices will keep rising." So the increase in house prices is not backed by assets. It's backed by debt. The debt in turn is backed by the houses. It's just smoke and mirrors.
Local incomes justify the high prices.
FALSE. Most bankers use a multiple of 3 as a "safe" price to income ratio. We are well beyond the danger zone, into the twilight zone. The price to income ratio is currently around 10.
You have to live somewhere.
TRUE, but that doesn't mean you should waste your life savings on a bad investment. You can live in a better house for much less money by renting during the crash. A renter could save hundreds of thousands of dollars, not only by paying less every month, but by avoiding the devastating loss of his downpayment.
Newspaper articles prove prices are not falling.
FALSE. The numbers in the papers are not complete and have murky origins. Those prices are "estimated" from the county transfer tax and making that tax public record is optional. A buyer who does not want you to see how little he paid has only to ask to put the transfer tax on the back of the deed and it will not show up on computer searches of the deed, which show only the front. Others voluntarily pay more tax than they have to, in order to inflate the apparent price to fool the next buyer. At a tax rate of about $1 per thousand of sale price, as in San Mateo county, you have to pay only $100 extra tax to make your purchase price look $100,000 higher.
Even though you can in theory go to your county building and get sale price information, in reality the county will give it to you in a painfully slow and inconvenient way. For example, in Redwood City's county building there are PC's where you can look at data for any particular house, but you cannot print, you cannot save to a floppy disk, you cannot email data out. All you can do is write things down manually, one at a time. And that's how real estate interests like it. Your elected representatives are serving realtors, not you.
Supposedly impartial sources like Dataquick are paid for entirely by people with a large financial interest in "proving" that prices are not falling, like realtors. This makes it unwise to take their numbers at face value.
For the obviously biased sources like the National Association of realtors, you can be sure that their sales price numbers do not include the effective price reductions from "incentives" like upgrades, vacations, cars, assumed mortgages and backroom cash rebates to buyers.
If you remember the definition of the median (the number for which half the prices are above, and half the price are below) you'll see that the elimination of sales at the low end of the market makes the median rise, even though the actual price of all houses is falling. And this is what is happening, as first-time buyers find themselves completely priced out of the market. So a rise in the median price can mask the fact that the price for every house is falling.
Here is a good example of a newspaper lying about the crash in prices by using the median: San Francisco Chronicle Headline Lies About Housing Prices
Finally, note that housing prices per square foot have been falling much longer and by a larger amount than "average house price".
My appraisal proves what my house is worth.
FALSE. "An appraisal in its typical residential real estate form is little more than a comparative analysis conducted by someone with no skin in the game offering confirmation that other lemmings are paying too much for their houses as well." -from an article on morningstar.com
Amazingly, government house price measures do not include houses with mortgages greater than $417,000. This excludes well over half of all houses in California. So the government can report a slight price rise, but fail to mention that prices actually fell for the other 60% of houses in California.
Foreclosures destroy neighborhoods, so we should stop foreclosures.
FALSE. Empty houses destroy neighborhoods. Houses remain empty only because the prices are too high. "Anti-foreclosure" programs just keep prices too high, and keep houses empty. In areas where there are jobs, if prices were allowed to fall enough so that salaries can easily cover the cost of owning, people would move in and take care of the houses. In areas without jobs, the first priority should be jobs.
It's not a house, it's a home.
FALSE. It's a house. Wherever one lives is home, be it apartment, condo, or house. Calling a house a "home" is a manipulation of your emotions for profit.
As a realtor said to me, "a house is a wooden box that sits out in the rain and slowly rots. No one would buy in this market if they really thought about how much pain it's going to cause them in the long run. That's why we have to sell them a home, not a house."
If you don't buy now, you'll never get another chance.
FALSE. This argument was also popular in 1989 in Los Angeles, just before a huge crash. It's silly. If no one like you ever gets another chance to buy a house, then you will not be able to sell your house in a few years either, because there will be no more buyers like you ever again.
Here is a great quote from June Fletcher, a Wall Street Journal reporter, that says it all: "The real issue isn't whether you will be stuck being a renter all your life, she says. Its whether you'll get so scared about being shut out that you'll buy at the market's peak and be stuck in a property you can't afford or sell."
Property in the Bay Area is a luxury good, and so will be less affected by economic downturns.
FALSE. 82% of last year's Bay Area mortgages were ARMs, and ARM loans are not taken out by the rich. People on the border of bankruptcy take out ARMs because they can't afford fixed rate loans. The rich don't have loans at all.
Many of these ARM loans have exceptionally deadly repayment terms, and so are known as "neutron mortgages". Like the neutron bomb, they destroy people, but leave buildings standing. They are also known as "suicide loans".
Housing will be permanently higher since downpayments are now obsolete.
FALSE. The current wave of defaults is making downpayments suddenly seem like a good idea again. Lending standards are already improving.
House ownership is at a record high, proving things are affordable.
FALSE. The percentage of their house that most Americans actually own is at a record low, not a high. We do have a record number of people who have title to a house because they have dangerous levels of mortgage debt, but that is no cause to celebrate.
Houses are worth whatever fools will pay for them.
FALSE. At interest rates of 6%, houses are worth at most 17 times what you can rent them out for per year. You can get 6% with no work and very little risk in the bond market, so why accept less than 6% return (called rent) on your capital in the very risky housing market?
Here is a page explaining how to value a house.
If yearly rents are less than 6% of the price of a house, watch out, because house prices are likely to fall.
Rents could shoot up, making it a better deal to buy.
FALSE. Rents are limited by the money people actually earn, not by how much they can borrow. Try walking into a bank and asking for a million dollar loan to pay rent with.
It would take another 911 terrorist attack or a major earthquake that wipes out this area in order for the price to fall by 50%.
FALSE. Even with a 50% decline in prices to $350,000 or so, the median price in the Bay Area will still be roughly double the median price in most of America, and the median Bay Area household income of about $70,000 will still not be sufficient to buy a house. So a 50% decline is well justified by the fundamentals.
You can easily verify for yourself that rents are less than half of long-term house ownership costs. Just look in the papers at sale prices, multiply by 6%, and divide by 12 to get the approximate monthly interest payment + property tax + repairs. Costs are actually about 8% with all that, but the income deduction brings it down to about 6%. Then look at the rental rates for equivalent houses. Which loss per month is larger?
You failed to factor in emotion. More houses are sold on emotion than will ever be sold based on perceived value. They buy all they can afford plus.
FALSE. Buyer emotion doesn't matter at all to the lenders, not on the way up or on the way down. Most people will borrow more than they can afford, but only if the lender goes along. The whole thing was a party of cheap and easy credit. When the credit machine gets sober again, millions of people are going to be ruined. Foreclosure rates are already going up exponentially.
It's unpatriotic to talk about mispriced houses. It might drive down prices.
FALSE. Lower prices are better for America, especially for new families. Aren't lower food and energy prices better for America? Housing prices are the same: lower is better. Most Americans directly benefit by a decrease in house prices. Only the banks benefit from increased mortgage debt.
If you own a house, lower prices have very little effect. If you want to sell and buy another house, higher prices mean you'll just have to pay more for the next house, while lower prices mean you will get a discount when you buy. If you want to buy a bigger house, you come out ahead with lower prices.
My wife will divorce me if I don't buy a house.
FALSE. She will divorce you if you do buy a house and go bankrupt trying to pay the mortgage. She won't divorce you if you rent a much nicer place than you can buy, and then take her to Paris for a month each spring, which you can do just by avoiding that suicidal mortgage.
If she's religious, you could also point out Proverbs 22:7: "The rich rule over the poor, and the borrower is servant to the lender."
I just want to own my own house.
TRUE, most people do and that's fine. Buyers will get their chance when housing costs half as much and they have saved a fortune by renting. House ownership is great - unless you ruin your life paying for it. If you can save even just 10% on the price of a house, you can retire several years earlier than you would otherwise. If you can save 50%, then you can easily take a ten year vacation and still come out ahead.
Cheap housing is good for us all! High housing costs take away from families' ability to save for retirement, fund their children's education, travel and lead a quality life.
As reader Sean Olender put it: "Many people have forgotten that the number one restriction on their future freedom to do what they want, when they want, and to go where they want isn't the Iraqis, or Iranians, or North Koreans -- it's their mortgage lender."
The real reason commodities are tumbling
JOHN HEINZL
September 10, 2008 at 6:00 AM EDT
To hear Donald Coxe tell it, the commodity selloff ripping through Canada's stock market is no accident. It is the result of a deliberate, brilliantly executed plan hatched at the highest levels of the U.S. Federal Reserve and Treasury.
Mr. Coxe is no paranoid conspiracy theorist. As the chairman and chief strategist of Harris Investment Management in Chicago, he is one of the most respected investment authorities in North America. He also happens to have lost about 10 per cent of his personal wealth in the commodity rout, which came at the worst possible time for his Coxe Commodity Strategy Fund that started trading in June.
“This has done more damage to my personal wealth than anything in the last 20 years,” he said in an interview yesterday. But he has too much respect for how the U.S. authorities engineered the collapse in commodities – a move he said was necessary to shore up the global financial system – to be bitter.
“My attitude is, goddamn it, they're good … it was brilliant.”
To understand why commodities are plunging now – the S&P/TSX plummeted another 488 points yesterday – you have to go back to mid-July, when the U.S. Federal Reserve and Treasury first announced steps to support mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
The move, which ultimately led to the Treasury taking control of Fannie and Freddie this week, touched off a chain-reaction of market events that culminated with the wrenching decline in commodities.
According to Mr. Coxe, the Fed's ultimate goal was to trigger a rally in financial stocks, which would, in theory, help banks hammered by the credit crisis raise fresh capital and repair their balance sheets. To accomplish this, the decision to support Fannie and Freddie was deliberately announced on a Sunday, which had the effect of maximizing the reaction from thinly traded financial stocks on overseas markets.
Because many hedge funds were using massive leverage to short financials and go long on commodities, when North American markets opened and banks initially rallied, the funds were forced to cover their short positions.
At the same time, the U.S. dollar was rallying because the risk of holding Fannie and Freddie paper had diminished. The rising dollar, in turn, made commodities less attractive, giving funds that were already scrambling to cover their financial shorts another reason to dump oil, grains and other commodities.
The losses were swift and dramatic. On the Friday before the July 11 announcement, crude oil closed at $145.18 a barrel. Over the following five days, it plunged 11 per cent. “Leverage was being unwound dramatically,” Mr. Coxe said on a conference call last week. “We had a true panic.”
As oil and other commodities were tumbling, fears about the slowing global economy were mounting, giving resources another push downhill. This was also in keeping with the Fed's wishes, because lower commodity prices would help quell fears about inflation.
Mr. Coxe has no proof that the Fed and Treasury acted in concert to boost financials and sink commodities. He is basing his assertions on conversations with hedge fund managers and on years of watching financial markets. “There's no doubt whatever in my mind” about what happened, he says.
The future is less certain, however. Now that Freddie and Fannie have been nationalized, the credit crisis is still very much alive and financial stocks are looking as shaky as ever. As for commodities, once the current storm passes, Mr. Coxe is confident they will recover.
KEX makes a new 52 week low
COV hurting again .... guess investors want to see results as in sales and nothing is happening!!!
ENA hitting new lows ...
looks like butting head with big boys in same arena is not impressing investors
ENA hitting new lows ...
looks like butting head with big boys in same arena is not impressing investors
"There is no flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent
people."
--U.S. historian Howard Zinn, 1993
Dog takes the stand in French court
Published: Sept. 10, 2008 at 7:59 PM
PARIS, Sept. 10 (UPI) -- A court official in Paris said a dog named
Scooby has become the first animal called to testify before a court in
France.
A veterinarian recommended Judge Thomas Cassuto call Scooby to the
witness box to see how the animal reacted to a suspect, The Daily
Telegraph reported Wednesday.
The dog is believed by authorities to have been with his 59-year-old
owner at the time of her death by hanging. Police ruled the death a
suicide but a murder investigation was opened at the behest of the
victim's family.
The hearing was convened to determine whether enough evidence exists to
go forward with the inquiry.
A witness said the dog "barked furiously" when presented with a suspect
at the hearing, the newspaper reported.
Cassuto praised Scooby, who was named after cartoon mystery solving dog
Scooby Doo, for his "exemplary behavior and invaluable assistance."
A spokesman for the Palais de Justice in Paris said the incident marked
the first time an animal has been called to testify in France. He said
he was "almost certain" the testimony was unprecedented on the global
scale as well.
Source:
http://www.upi.com/Odd_News/2008/09/10/Dog_takes_the_stand_in_French_court/UPI-92721221091186/
Beautiful pics and great information. I almost feel confident enough to go out and buy the parts and build one myself!! Thanks Bruce this is a "keep" post for sure!!
Pamela Anderson Strips on DeGeneres Show
48 Ways to Be Nice and Improve the World Around You
Forty-eight almost effortless ways you can do a little good in the world
Robyn Lehr
How to Be Nice to Your Friends, Family, and Those Who Need a Little Extra
# Channel your second-grade teacher and playfully give out gold-star stickers to all the people in your life — young and old — who somehow make your day a little easier.
# If you know someone is going out to dinner to celebrate a special occasion, call the restaurant in advance and say you’ll pick up the cost of her wine or dessert.
# When someone is moving to a new city, supply friends and family members with stamped, preaddressed postcards. (Hand them out at the going-away party.) By the time the family pulls into the new driveway, there will be warm wishes awaiting them.
# When you run across a newspaper or magazine article you think someone you know would find interesting, take a moment to clip it out. Attach a Post-it note that reads “Thought you’d enjoy” and drop it in the mail. This takes less time than writing a letter, but the gesture still shows the other person you’re thinking about her. Laura Noss, who owns a public-relations firm for nonprofits in San Francisco, says her father, who lives in Cleveland, does just that. “It means so much that when he’s reading something, he’ll rip it out, fold it, attach a message, put the postage on it, and send it to me,” she says. “I save almost all of them.”
# Similarly, when a young person in your hometown does something to merit a mention in the newspaper (the high school quarterback saves the big game in overtime or your neighbor gets elected student-body president), clip out the photo and article and send it to the person’s family. Chances are, they’ll want to collect every copy they can. (One notable exception: the police blotter.)
# If you travel a lot on business, record yourself reading your children’s favorite bedtime stories; they can listen to your voice as they flip through the book. Finish each night’s reading with a countdown of the days until you’re back home with them.
# Every day for a year, jot down one thing you love about your child/husband/friend (he has a crooked smile; she snorts when she laughs). At the end of the year, give the person your one-of-a-kind, 365-item list.
# When you develop photos from a vacation or a major life event that an elderly relative missed, get an extra set of prints and send them to her.
# When guests are leaving, escort them to their car, not just to the front door. If you’re driving someone home, wait until she’s inside the house before you pull away.
# Hide messages for your family to find throughout the day, like “Thanks for doing a load!” in the dryer, or a silly joke in your child’s lunch box.
# If someone you know is going through a difficult time, call to let her know that you’re thinking about her, but make sure your message doesn’t leave her with a sense of obligation: “Just wanted you to know I’m thinking about you, but don’t worry about calling me back.” When a friend was being treated for breast cancer in a hospital outside her home state, Sandy Donaldson, a community-relations coordinator in Newport News, Virginia, rented her friend a beeper and entered the names of the woman’s friends in its contact list. Whenever her friend got beeped, she could look and see who was sending kind thoughts her way. “The only rule was that she was not allowed to call anyone back,” says Donaldson, who didn’t want her friend to feel any more burdened during her illness.
# When a neighbor is grieving, leave a basket on her front porch, filled with blank thank-you cards she can send to people who have brought flowers or made donations.
# When stocking up on school supplies, pick up a few extras and give them to your child’s teacher to pass on to students whose families might not be able to afford them.
# Donate two tickets to a major sporting or theatrical event to an organization like Big Brothers Big Sisters. That way, a Big Sis can take her Little Sis to something out of the ordinary that she otherwise might not be able to afford.
How to Be Nice to Your Neighbors
# Make a list of local shops, restaurants, hair salons, and other services for new neighbors. When her friends Anna and Matt Dowling moved to her city of Portland, Oregon, Erica Heintz put together a binder of information, including MapQuest driving directions to various locations from their new address. “It was the perfect housewarming gift,” says Anna. “For the first few months, we kept that binder with us in the car at all times.” If the neighbors have kids, draw a street map and highlight the homes of families with children around the same age.
# Take a dozen fresh-baked cookies to your local fire or police station. Bring the kids along to say thank you for their constant service.
# When someone leaves a pie plate or a casserole dish at your house, return it with something tasty inside.
# When a guest brings a bottle of wine to a party you’re throwing, jot her name on the label. Down the road, when you finally pop the cork, dial up your friend to let her know you’re having a drink in her honor.
# Shovel the snow from your neighbor’s driveway after you’ve tackled your own.
# Send a note to a former teacher, telling her how much she inspired you. (If she’s no longer at the same school, the office may be able to tell you where she is now.)
# Invite someone who has moved here from another country to share your holiday feast. Pinky Vincent, who came to New York City from India three years ago, still remembers how lonely she was at first. “I had no family members here or family friends,” she recalls. “But people I met invited me over for Christmas or Thanksgiving and made me a part of the family.”
How to Be Nice to People on the Job
# When the temperature dips, offer your mail carrier or the teenager shoveling your walk a fresh cup of coffee or hot chocolate. Buy lidded disposable cups so they can have it “to go.”
# If someone goes beyond her job description to help you, call or send an e-mail to her supervisor praising her. The employee will get a small career boost, and the boss will probably be thrilled to hear something other than complaints.
# Avery Horzewski, a communications consultant in San Jose, California, likes to give chocolates or Starbucks gift cards to grocery clerks, delivery people, and others who are especially friendly or helpful.
# Bring in a box of doughnuts for your building’s maintenance staff. Just don’t consume all the jelly-filled ones before you pull into the company parking lot.
# When you make an in-person donation to a nonprofit organization (such as an animal shelter), also drop off something to brighten the day of the people working in the trenches.
# Lindsey Schocke, an administrative assistant in Atlanta, knows how stressful starting a new job can be. So whenever her company hires somebody, she makes a point of extending a lunch invitation. “I can answer some questions for them,” she says, “and then they have a friendly face to say hello to until they get to know everybody.”
# Overtip your breakfast waiter. He probably put forth just as much effort as someone on the evening shift would, but his take-home pay is probably lower.
How to Be Nice to Strangers and the World Around You
# At a tourist spot, ask people if they would like you to take their picture in front of a beautiful view or a historic monument.
# Subtly alert people when they have food in their teeth, an undone zipper, or toilet paper stuck to a shoe. They’ll be far less mortified than if they find out two hours later.
# Pay for the drive-through order of the car behind you.
# Leave your extra change in the soda machine for someone else to find. Better yet, leave enough change for a soda.
# Athena Williams-Atwood, the president and CEO of Inspired Action, a consulting firm in San Francisco, carries rolls of quarters with her for parking. “If I see someone else’s meter running low,” she says, “I just pop a couple of quarters in. I may have saved that person $30 or $50 — all for 50 cents.”
# Stop your car to let someone merge into traffic from a side street, or wave someone into the parking spot you were both eyeing.
# When an elderly person is crossing the street slowly, walk alongside her at the same pace the whole way across. She’ll feel less embarrassed when the light changes if you’re in the intersection with her.
# Trade your low ticket number at the deli counter for that of someone who seems to be in a hurry (or is shopping with children).
# If you’re at an event or a party where you know lots of people, look around to see if anyone is there alone. If so, introduce yourself — and then introduce her to others.
# When someone looks lost, stop and ask him if he needs directions. “I’ll never forget the people who have helped me when I was traveling,” says Real Simple staffer Melinda Page. “One man in Italy saw me looking at a map in confusion, asked if he could help, then walked five minutes out of his way to show me the place I was looking for, because it was hard to explain.”
# Give blood. To find out where to donate, go to the website of the American Association of Blood Banks, at www.aabb.org.
# Carry plastic bags when you’re hiking or camping, and pick up litter that you find along the way.
# Instead of tossing magazines and old books into the recycling bin, drop a stack off at a local women’s shelter or your gym.
# If you use public transportation on your commute to work, offer a fellow passenger your newspaper rather than tossing it in the trash.
# “Adopt” an animal (via donation) from your city’s zoo or aquarium. You’ll get a photo and a bio of your new family member, and you can take your kids to visit it.
# Plan a “kindness field trip,” such as driving around town handing out cold drinks to people working outside, or sending flowers through the deposit tubes at drive-through banks.
Attention All Canadians!!
If you are buying a new high efficiency furnace and/or air conditioner for your home, check out the federal and provincial rebates as well as the OPGA. The rebate is actually greater than the difference in price between a regular 80% efficiency furnace and a high efficiency 94%. You have to get an audit to qualify but you also get a rebate on the cost of the eco-audit. The higher priced high efficiency furnace (only about $500 more pays for itself in about 5 years with all the added benefits of a better furnace air conditioner.
gold and oil shorts still purring
APTD might be one to watch with volume
Good morning all!!
Polish man accused of imprisoning daughter, fathering her 2 children
Tue Sep 9, 10:13 AM
By Monika Scislowska, The Associated Press
WARSAW, Poland - Polish police are investigating claims that a man imprisoned and raped his daughter, fathering her two children.
The 21-year-old woman told police she was held captive for six years and forced to give the two boys up for adoption. Police were trying to find the two children to carry out paternity tests.
The case bears a striking similarity to that of Austrian Josef Fritzl, accused of holding his daughter in a cellar dungeon for 24 years, repeatedly sexually abusing her and fathering her seven children.
The case in Poland involves a 45-year-old man identified only as Krzysztof B., in keeping with Polish privacy laws. He was being held pending the outcome of the police investigation.
Police detained him on Friday in the eastern city of Siedlce after his wife and daughter came forward with the allegations.
"We have the hospital records of the children, and we will try to find them and carry out DNA tests" to determine their paternity, national police spokesman Mariusz Sokolowski told The Associated Press on Tuesday.
The woman told police that her father raped her repeatedly while keeping her captive in a room with no door handles. Krzysztof B.'s wife, identified only as Teresa B., corroborated the account, police said.
In an interview with private TVN24, the victim's mother was quoted as saying she was aware of what was happening with her daughter, but did not go to police for fear her husband would make good on threats to kill her.
The case has been handed over to prosecutors who are now conducting the investigation, regional police spokesman Jacek Dobrzynski said, adding that police want to move the family members from their home to protect their privacy.
The man was being investigated on several counts of sexual assault of a minor, incest and armed assault, said prosecutor Miroslaw Zoch in Siemiatycze.
He cautioned, however, that it was too early to say whether the man fathered the two boys. "We must first verify the evidence gathered by the police," he said.
Sokolowski said the woman did have contact - albeit limited - with the outside world, including visits to hospitals to give birth to her sons.
He said the first boy was born in February 2005 in the southwestern city of Wroclaw, where the family lived until about three years ago, and the second in January 2007 in the northeastern area of Siemiatycze, where the family now lives.
Police said the daughter told them she was accompanied by her father, who then forced her to give the children up for adoption.
"The main problem was the extreme psychological pressure she was under, the intimidation," Sokolowski said. "We are also looking for people who might have known about the situation."
Robert Maksimiuk, director of the Siemiatycze hospital, told The AP that doctors there recalled the 2007 birth, but had no indication that anything was wrong.
"The mother and the child were fine after the birth," Maksimiuk said in a telephone interview from the hospital. He added that both parents of the woman giving birth were with her.
A few days after birth, the woman wrote to a family court in nearby Bielsk Podlaski, asking that the child be put up for adoption and saying she had no means to raise it, Maksimiuk said.
"A doctor talked to her to persuade her to take the child home, but to no avail," Maksimiuk said. The woman was discharged from hospital on Jan. 15, he said.
Police say the woman told them she was acting under pressure from her father.
Copyright © 2008 Canadian Press
Copyright 2008 © Yahoo! Inc. All rights reserved.
Lynne Spears: You're still my brave little girl
NEW YORK - The mother of Britney Spears says that the singer has overcome the tabloid nightmares of the past few years and believes that that little by little, her daughter is regaining her "glorious voice."
Lynne Spears writes of her famous child and her other celebrity daughter, Jamie Lynn, in "Through the Storm," to be published Sept. 16 by Thomas Nelson, a leading Christian publisher. The Associated Press obtained an early copy.
The 211-page book, which includes several pages of family photographs, tracks Britney Spears' life through her precocious early years - she was singing and dancing by the time she was three - through her explosive rise to her pill-addicted, near-tragic fall.
Lynne Spears describes young Britney as a confident, outgoing girl whose talents were so obvious that family friends would insist she would one day be on Broadway. Spears rejects the image that she pushed Britney into show business, and writes that the singer was always focused on achievement and would constantly practice to the music of Madonna, Whitney Houston and others.
In "Through the Storm," Lynne Spears presents herself as a loving, selfless (she gave up her job as a school teacher for her daughter's sake) but increasingly powerless parent. After the jolting, but pleasant surprise of Britney Spears' debut smash, " ... Baby One More Time," Lynne Spears says she felt she was losing control when a 1999 Rolling Stone magazine story featured a racy cover of the singer in panties and a bra.
Lynne Spears recalls feeling "shock and dismay" at seeing her daughter shave her head, at her brief marriages to childhood friend Jason Alexander and dancer-rapper Kevin Federline, and her highly publicized custody battles over her two children. She also recalls feeling she had been "punched in the stomach" when she learned that Jamie Lynn Spears was pregnant at age 16.
She praises Federline as a "caring daddy" and says Britney Spears is "an amazing mother," but only when at her best. Lynne Spears also writes warmly of her daughter's former boyfriend, Justin Timberlake, but says the willful nature of the young couple helped break them up.
The bottom came in the past two years with Britney Spears' increasingly disturbing public behavior and her drugged private life in her Malibu, Calif., house. Lynne Spears writes that she was distraught as then-manager Sam Lufti told her he was grinding pills and putting them in Britney's food, hoping to induce a coma that would enable doctors to cure her of all addictions.
Britney Spears was hospitalized twice this year, the second time in February, when paramedics took her to the psychiatric ward of the UCLA Medical Center, where her mother says she finally received the care she needed.
It was, Lynne Spears writes, a "turning point" for the entire family.
On Sunday night, Britney Spears had clearly recovered from last year's fiasco at the MTV Video Music Awards, when she bumbled her way through a performance of "Gimme More." This time, Spears nabbed three VMAs, including video of the year.
FNM nice bounce today
CBS halts no help
ENA collapse
NT sucks wind
"A hunch is creativity trying to tell you something."
-- Frank Capra
Obama: McCain-Palin 'lying' about maverick claims
FARMINGTON HILLS, Michigan (AFP) - Barack Obama ripped into John McCain and Sarah Palin as never before Monday, accusing his Republican White House foes of "shameless" dishonesty with their claim to be "mavericks" ready to shake up Washington.
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McCain and Palin were "lying about their records," the Obama campaign said after the Republican running mates advertised themselves in a television spot as the "original mavericks" who would stand up for hard-pressed voters.
Some of the White House race's most savage exchanges yet came as polls showed the contenders deadlocked or McCain pulling into a post-convention lead after he electrified the Republican base -- and appeared to confound the Obama campaign -- by adding Alaska Governor Palin to his ticket.
"I've got to admit, these folks are shameless," Obama told a rally here, displaying a passion and an intensity rarely seen from the Illinois senator.
He noted that Palin had originally supported an infamous "Bridge to Nowhere" project in Alaska, and had hired a Washington lobbyist to secure millions of dollars in federal funding for the small town of which she was mayor.
"When John McCain gets up there with Sarah Palin and says 'we're for change'... you've got to ask yourselves, what are they talking about, how do they have the nerve to say it?" the Democrat added.
"It's empty words. You're just saying it because you realize, gosh, Obama's been talking about change and it seems to be working, so maybe we should say it too," he added to mocking laughter from a crowd of 1,500.
While other polls have Obama ahead in all-important battleground states such as Michigan, Pennsylvania and Colorado, his campaign has clearly decided it is time to take off the gloves against McCain and, in particular, Palin.
"You can't just make stuff up, you can't just reinvent yourself," he said earlier in Flint, Michigan, in response to Palin's boast that she had intervened to kill the federally funded bridge.
"The American people aren't stupid."
An ad by the Obama campaign featured a photo of Palin wearing a T-shirt extolling the scrapped bridge, which would have connected a handful of Alaskans to an airport at vast expense, and highlighted McCain's lock-step voting record with President George W. Bush.
"Politicians lying about their records? You don't call that maverick -- you call it more of the same," the announcer said, breaching one of the last taboos of US politics by accusing the Republicans of outright dishonesty.
Obama spokesman Bill Burton said: "Despite being discredited over and over again by numerous news organizations, the McCain campaign continues to repeat the lie that Sarah Palin stopped the Bridge to Nowhere.
"McCain and Palin will say or do anything to make people believe that they will change something besides the person sitting in the Oval Office," he said.
With polls showing four-fifths of Americans believe the nation is on the wrong track, the "change" mantle has emerged as a central motif of the election campaign and one that McCain is claiming for himself despite his Republican Party's widespread unpopularity.
The tactic appears to be working. A USA Today/Gallup survey showed McCain ahead by 50 to 46 percent among registered voters, a turnaround from one week ago when, just after the Democratic convention, Obama had a seven-point lead.
Twenty-nine percent of respondents said the choice of Palin had made them more likely to vote for McCain, while 21 percent said they were now less likely to back the Republicans.
Polls by CNN, Rasmussen, and the Washington Post had McCain essentially tied with Obama, after the Arizona senator trailed by as much as nine points last week.
"We're going to work for you and we're going to drain the swamp in Washington, DC," McCain told a rally in Lee's Summit, Missouri after his campaign aired its "original mavericks" broadcast.
"We'll take them on and we'll defeat 'em because America knows it's time for change and it's time for the right change."
McCain praised Palin's history of fighting corruption in her own party and pork-barrel spending while governor of Alaska, and touted his own reputation of bucking the party line.
"I will veto every pork barrel earmark spending bill that comes across my desk. We will stop it, my friends, because it breeds corruption and we can no longer stand for that," the Arizona senator said.