ch.annel2-i.s-n.ow-a.ngry

The number of chronically homeless people living in the nation’s streets and shelters has dropped by about 30 percent — to 123,833 from 175,914 — between 2005 and 2007, Bush administration officials said on Tuesday.Housing officials say the statistics, which the Department of Housing and Urban Development collects each year from more than 3,800 cities and counties, may reflect better data collection and reporting and some variation in the number of communities reporting on an annual basis. But the officials attribute much of the decline to the “housing first” strategy that has been promoted by the Bush administration and Congress and increasingly adopted across the country. In that approach, local officials place chronically homeless people into permanent shelter — apartments, halfway houses or rooms — and then focus on treating addiction and mental and health problems. HUD defines chronically homeless people as disabled individuals who have been continuously homeless for more than a year or have experienced at least four episodes of homelessness in the past three years. [emphasis mine]

I was wondering how they were pulling this trick - it seems that if you’re healthy and homeless, you’re not counted. Almost all of the homeless I see in town here are healthy - they’re just homeless and digging cans out of garbage to support their meth habits - the truly homeless, the long term guys with huge beards, they’re less and less of them nowdays - ten years ago that was the only kind you saw. Now it’s 20 and 30 somethings that look 40-50 because of their meth habits. I saw a truly homeless man in the park the other day, santa claus beard and all… reading a book. It made me feel really sad. Of course, you can’t tell a story from a glance, but he definately had the mentally disabled maybe alcoholic look, not the tweaker physique - also, he was sitting still and reading, not constantly searching for that next can for that next incremental micrometer of line of meth.

Critics of the annual report often complain that it undercounts the homeless because it does not include those in precarious living situations such as families living in campgrounds or individuals doubled up with friends or relatives.

Dennis Culhane, a professor of social policy at the University of Pennsylvania and an author of this year’s report, acknowledged that “there are a lot of people in tough housing situations who don’t get counted.” He said the government needed a standard measure and asked communities to count people living in shelters and on the street. [emphasis mine]

He described the decline in chronic homelessness as “pretty remarkable.”

I describe the decline in chronic homelessness as ‘pure fantasy’ when taking his immediately previous remark into account.  If communities aren’t counting people in shelters or on the street, who ARE they counting as homeless?

Housing bill: up to $300 billion, plus “whatever” for Fannie and Freddie.

Stimulus bill: $150 billion

We were already in a deficit when we passed those bills. That’s an extra $450 in debt, assuming Fannie and Freddie don’t get into trillion-dollar trouble. Our debt cap was raised to over 10 trillion to accommodate for possibe Fannie and Freddie fallout - so we have oh I think 800 billion or so more dollars that we could potentially be adding to the deficit this year. Are we really going for a trillion dollar deficit on a budget that used to be only 2 trillion dollars?

Are you fucking kidding me? This money doesn’t really exist, it’s all a shadow play.

“The second half of the year is shot,” said Michael T. Darda, chief economist at the trading firm MKM Partners in Greenwich, Conn., who was until recently optimistic that the economy would continue expanding. “Access to capital and credit is essential to growth. If that access is restrained or blocked, the economic system takes a hit.”

Although the homeownership rate increased slightly (just noise), the homeownership rate is now back to the levels of the summer of 2001.

So much for GWBush’s ownership society. Turned out to be smoke and mirrors and a way for Americans to promise themselves into perpetual debtslavery.

And the Church Committee itself, if people remember, actually went back to the days of Franklin Roosevelt. So it was started during ’70s under Nixon because of reports in the New York Times and other media by Seymour Hersh and reporters like him, who exposed the CIA’s domestic spying on Americans. And then the Church Committee got started in the Senate, chaired by Senator Frank Church. There was an accompanying House committee, as well. And they looked at all aspects of US intelligence, and in particular, they looked at this whole use of watch lists by various agencies like the FBI and the CIA, and they exposed, during the Church hearings—that’s how the whole NSA spying came out, because they got the whole story about how the NSA had been listening in on the phone calls of many prominent antiwar activists, African American organizations, civil rights leaders, and so on. And they exposed the various programs of the NSA.

And that’s how the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act emerged, was the Congress did not want to have the rights of Americans, the civil liberties, abused by their intelligence services anymore, and so they passed FISA as a way to require warrants, when there is any kind of monitoring of Americans in the United States by the NSA. And that was the guiding law until it was recently changed by Congress.

Interesting article. I wonder if the truth will ever come to light - during one congressional hearing on Ollie North, this database was brought up, and the head of the hearing cut off the senator and wouldn’t let any questions about this database be heard.

Michael L. Kamil, a professor of education at Stanford who lobbied for an Internet component as chairman of the reading test guidelines committee, disagreed. Students “are going to grow up having to be highly competent on the Internet,” he said. “There’s no reason to make them discover how to be highly competent if we can teach them.”

Discovering for yourself how to be highly competent will teach you more than anything else. At least this comment was buried on page four, long after most internet readers will have lost interest.

That’s right, before the bubble even started. Blaming Senator Schumer’s letter is just a wag-the-dog situation. Read more on the Big Picture.

On the BBC: A 56-year-old man from the Midwestern US state of Wisconsin has been arrested after shooting his lawn mower in his garden because it would not start.

“It’s my lawn mower and my yard, so I can shoot it if I want.” 

Click through to see his lovely mug.

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He asked people to turn off the TV cameras. Then made some off the cuff remarks, caught on cellphone - my guess is cellphones will be banned at the next Bush gathering. Gotta love the BBC, they have the story and the video.

Wall St. got drunk indeed. Where were the economic gurus under Bush’s aegis hiding during this time? Oh right, they were encouraging them, encouraging the use of ARMs and derivatives.