[cia-drugs] PAUL KRUGMAN : Housing Gets Ugly, THOMAS FRANK Thus Spake Zinsmeister & More

[MA PA]

  PAUL KRUGMAN : Housing Gets Ugly, THOMAS FRANK Thus Spake Zinsmeister & More  by PAUL KRUGMAN, THOMAS FRANK - New York Times Friday Aug 25th, 2006   Krugman: Housing Bust - A rapidly growing glut of unsold houses is a recipe for a major bust, not a soft landing. - PLUS: Frank: Karl Zinsmeister. Thomas Frank is the author, most recently, of “What’s the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America.’’ - A look at the career of Karl Zinsmeister, the president’s chief domestic policy adviser, reveals the looming exhaustion of the conservative intellectual system & more.   OP-ED COLUMNIST Housing Gets Ugly By PAUL KRUGMAN Published: August 25, 2006 Bubble, bubble,
 Toll’s in trouble. This week, Toll Brothers, the nation’s premier builder of McMansions, announced that sales were way off, profits were down, and the company was walking away from already-purchased options on land for future development. Toll’s announcement was one of many indications that the long-feared housing bust has arrived. Home sales are down sharply; home prices ... are now falling in much of the country. The inventory of unsold existing homes is at a 13-year high; builders’ confidence is at a 15-year low. A year ago, Robert Toll, who runs Toll Brothers, was euphoric about the housing boom... In a New York Times profile ... published last October, he dismissed worries about a possible bust. “Why can’t real estate just have a boom like every other industry?” he asked. “Why do we have to have a bubble and then a pop?” The current downturn, Mr. Toll now says, is unlike anything he’s seen: sales are slumping despite the absence of any
 “macroeconomic nasty condition”... He suggests that unease about the direction of the country and the war in Iraq is undermining confidence. All I have to say is: pop! Now what? Continued: http://mparent7777.livejournal.com/11676187.html GUEST COLUMNIST Thus Spake Zinsmeister By THOMAS FRANK Published: August 25, 2006 In their more grandiloquent moments, conservative publicists will say that the decades-long Republican ascendancy in American government has been an intellectual achievement, that the G.O.P. prevails because it is the “party of ideas.” And, indeed, during the last three decades a cottage industry of conservative institutes and foundations has grown into a powerful quasi-academy with seven-figure budgets and phalanxes of “senior fellows” and “distinguished chairs.” While real academics dither and fret over bugbears
 like certainty and balance, the scholars of the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute act boldly in the knowledge, to quote a seminal conservative text, that ideas have consequences. Luckily, the consequences are for other people. Now upon the national stage steps one Karl Zinsmeister, formerly the editor of the American Enterprise Institute’s flagship magazine and now the president’s chief domestic policy adviser. In right-wing circles he is regarded as an intellectual heavyweight. What his career really shows us, though, is the looming exhaustion of the conservative intellectual system; its hopeless addiction to dusty, crumbling clichés; and a blindness to the reality of conservative power so persistent and so bizarre that it amounts to self-deception or, in Zinsmeister’s case, delusion. Let us begin with Zinsmeister’s infamous remark that the people of Washington are “morally repugnant, cheating, shifty human
 beings,” a declaration he later clarified to encompass only the city’s “overclass.” One could justifiably read his words as an obvious reference to the lobbyists, think-tankers, and fund-raising Congressmen who make up the Republican machine. Continued: http://mparent7777.livejournal.com/11676428.html Threat of military action hangs over escalating tensions with Iran http://mparent7777.livejournal.com/11673514.html Democrats plan 'no confidence' vote against Rumsfeld http://mparent7777.livejournal.com/11673827.html Research Link http://mparent7777.livejournal.com/profile And More on Today's
 Newswire http://mparent7777.livejournal.com/2006/08/25/                                               MARC PARENT   CRIMES AND CORRUPTIONS OF THE NEW WORLD ORDER NEWS  http://mparent7777.livejournal.com/   http://www.tpmcafe.com/blog/14409  http://www.dailykos.com/user/ccnwon        
   
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