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ollowing up on previous posts in the past couple of days about Barack Obama’s “birth certificate,” here and here, I became more curious about Barack’s mother, Stanley Ann Dunham (known as “Ann”), and spent several hours reading about her. In particular, I was searching for information about the circumstances surrounding Barack’s birth. It seems reasonable to ask at this point: Is it possible that Barack Obama, Ann’s son, was born someplace besides Honolulu? Here’s a rough sketch of what I’ve pieced together so far based on information available on the Internet, but I could use some help filling in the...

One of the biggest factors in high oil prices, according to many experts, is that investors, such as hedge funds and investment bankers, can use loopholes in commodities law to manipulate the market and drive crude oil, heating oil, gasoline and diesel fuel prices to new heights. Congress is aware of the problem and lawmakers recently passed legislation to address the “Enron Loophole,” one of the major loopholes that opens the door to abusive trading practices, but the law didn’t go far enough.

Buying into 'the petroleum for the next century' ROB CARRICK Friday, June 13, 2008 Looking to jump into an investment in a scarce resource with lots of upside potential? There's a clear case to be made for water. Oil and gas, metals and fertilizers and food are still going strong, while investors have only recently started to talk about water. And yet, water has much the same imbalance between supply and demand as traditional resources. The investment dealer Goldman Sachs recently described water as the “the petroleum for the next century.” Mutual funds and exchange-traded funds focusing on water have...

Why Can’t Our Media and Politicians Get The Oil Story Right? Of course the answer is quite simple! Our pathetic media and politicians can’t get it right because they don’t know how to analyze a market. After all, how many of them have actual experience in managing a client’s portfolio or traded a futures market? The problem is that their ignorance is having an outlandish impact on our lives as their ineptitude to understand and present the facts might very well lead to policies that will substantially hurt this country’s economy for a long time to come. We have precedence...

NEW YORK (Fortune) -- High-flying tech stocks crashed. The roaring housing market crumbled. And oil, rest assured, will follow the same path down. Not everyone agrees. In an echo of our most recent market frenzies, some experts pronounce that the "world has changed," and that the demand spikes, supply disruptions, and government bungling we face now will saddle us with a future of $4, $5 or even $10 a gallon gasoline. But if you stick to basic economics, it's clear that the only question is when - not if - prices will succumb.

More on the possible contribution of index fund investment to recent commodity price moves. We and many others have been discussing whether the surge in investment fund purchases of long positions in commodity futures contracts may have been a factor contributing to the spot prices of those commodities beyond what would be warranted by considerations of physical supply and demand. John Mauldin shares an interesting graphic from Deutsche Bank researchers, showing that the prices of a number of commodities in which no futures market exists have increased even more dramatically than those traded on major exchanges.

Bursting the Speculative Bubble - May 30, 2008 The Bubble may be ready to burst. The CFTC pushed by Congress may be sharpening the point on the pin that bursts the price balloon. Futures, Institutional Investors and Oil Prices. The volume of email commenting on the Michael Masters testimony before the Senate was surprising to say the least. While we disagree with some of his comments comparing the number of futures contracts to physical barrels, we do agree with the basic analysis and believe it helps explain some of the oil price increase over the last few ears. Since all...

Ready for the Oil Bubble? Source: http://www.star-telegram.com/104/story/651928.html ------------------------------------------------------------ One law is causing prices to go through the roof By Ed Wallace Special to the Star-Telegram "There’s a few hedge fund managers out there who are masters at knowing how to exploit the peak [oil] theories and hot buttons of supply and demand and by making bold predictions of shocking price advancements to come, they only add more fuel to the bullish fire in a sort of self fulfilling prophecy." — National Gas Week, Sept. 5, 2005 as reprinted in the US Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations’ report, "The Role of...

I’ve long been a bear on oil and energy as an investment thesis — Simply put, the end product of all energy is totally commoditized and every player in the business is totally beholden to the vagaries of the market to set the price of that end product. Intel gets to choose how much to price their processors for. And they’ve kept gross margins far above 50, 60% regardless of the cycles playing out in the broader economy. I like to invest in businesses that have lots of defend-able proprietary technologies and/or strategies in their business model. Google’s another great...

WASHINGTON - Market speculation on energy prices may have added as much as 10 percent to crude oil costs and the peak may be yet to come, a top Energy Department official said Tuesday. Guy Caruso, head of the department's Energy Information Administration, told a Senate hearing that supply and demand would suggest a price of about $90 a barrel. Prices fluctuated around $102 a barrel Tuesday — although futures prices later dropped below $100 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange — on word that the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries are likely to keep production as is...

My blogs attract some very interesting readers due to their lack of real estate cheerleading. It has always been my intent to be direct, straightforward, present the facts, and let my readers make up their own minds about current Boise real estate market conditions and activity. I was recently asked by a major lender investigating loan fraud in the Boise real estate market to help analyze the number of vacant home listings in our market. This was the second time I have been contacted by a lender who subscribes to my blog who was looking into suspicious loans in the...

NEW YORK-Wells Fargo & Co (WFC.N), the second-largest U.S. mortgage lender, said on Tuesday it would take a $1.4 billion fourth-quarter charge largely related to losses on home equity loans as the nation's housing market deteriorates. The company, which is also the fifth-largest U.S. bank, said it also was significantly scaling back making home equity loans through brokers, citing a need to tighten lending standards and reduced demand from investors to buy the loans. Wells Fargo had said in July it would stop making subprime home loans, which go to people with weaker credit, through brokers. Shares of Wells Fargo...

No one knows how severe the slump will be, but economists and real estate experts interviewed by The Times, and who were willing to make predictions, said prices could fall 15% to 25% before turning back up. Most said values would continue falling through at least next year, and some thought the market wouldn't reverse course until 2010. That could translate to big declines for home buyers who bought at the peak of the market, which various measures place in late 2006 or early 2007. For example, a home that sold for $800,000 in 2006 could fall to $600,000 over...

Let me the first to predict the republican ticket for 08. GIULIANI-HUCKABEE. Do I like it? not really. Whom do the Freepers that are in the real world (I'm outside CONUS) and get their news from other sources besides CNN and Al-Jazeera think the candidates will be.

NovaStar Financial shares sank by roughly half Thursday after the company, which has halted subprime mortgage lending, posted a big quarterly loss and said bankruptcy is possible. The company late Wednesday posted a $598 million third-quarter loss, or $64.05 per share. Results reflected a nearly ten-fold increase in bad loans, mortgage write-downs, higher legal bills, a charge to end the company's real estate investment trust status, and other items. Profit a year earlier totaled $25.3 million, or $2.91 per share, NovaStar said. In its quarterly report filed with securities regulators, Kansas City, Mo.-based NovaStar outlined several scenarios under which it...

A frantic two-hour auction Saturday in downtown Fresno was a sign of the times as bidders snapped up 48 new houses -- most for thousands of dollars below the builder's original list price.

NEW YORK (Reuters) - For a man who insists he is not running for president, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg is the subject of much recent speculation. Newsweek's latest issue carries a cover story on the businessman-turned-mayor in which a top aide, Kevin Sheekey, refers to an independent Bloomberg presidential run: "If it happens, it's a billion-dollar campaign." The fact that Bloomberg is quoted in the same piece saying "I am not running for president" seemed to do little to calm the waters. Another news report analyzed his shifting answers -- moving from "I'm not running" to "I'm not a...

French president warns US it cannot allow currency to collapse as Europe suffers from euro's rise. The French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, has warned the United States Congress that the US risks triggering "economic war" if it attempts to devalue its way out of trouble by allowing a relentless slide in the dollar. The stunning remarks came as the greenback plunged to a record low of $1.4731 against the euro, causing a chorus of angry protests from industrial leaders in France and Italy. The dollar breached $2.10 against sterling for the first time since the early Thatcher years in 1981. On...

Is it just me or are we all getting pretty tired of FNC’s abuse of “Breaking News” and “News Alerts”? It amazes me that you can’t watch one day’s worth of programming on America’s “fair and balanced” network without being assaulted by these false overtures. The producers at the FNC must think we are the dumbest viewers in the history of television news. The recent fires in Southern California provided almost every anchor on Fox with the opportunity to over-dramatize the events of the day. I’ve never seen so many “Breaking News” reports on one story in my life. And...

NEW YORK (AP) -- U.S. home prices fell nationwide in August for the eighth consecutive month, according to the S&P/Case-Shiller index released Tuesday. And things could get worse, said Yale economist Robert Shiller, who helped create the index. "There is really no positive news in today's report," said Shiller, chief economist for MacroMarkets, which collaborated with S&P on the indicator. Home prices as measured by the index have fallen more every month since the beginning of the year. August is the 21st month of decelerating returns. An index of 10 U.S. cities fell 5 percent in August from a year...

<p>America’s mortgage crisis is likely to get considerably worse because the level of fraudulent lending to unsuitable borrowers was much higher than previously estimated, Standard & Poor’s said yesterday.</p> <p>David Wyss, the ratings agency’s chief economist, said that defaults on high-risk “sub-prime” mortgages would continue to soar as unqualified mortgage-holders struggled to meet their repayments, tightening the credit markets and dragging down the American economy.</p>

NEVADA, Iowa: The ethanol boom of recent years — which spurred a frenzy of distillery construction, record corn prices, rising food prices and hopes of a new future for rural America — may be fading. Only last year, farmers here spoke of a biofuel gold rush, and they rejoiced as prices for ethanol and the corn used to produce it set records. But companies and farm cooperatives have built so many distilleries so quickly that the ethanol market is suddenly plagued by a glut, in part because the means to distribute it have not kept pace. The average national ethanol...

After perusing the blizzard of U.S. economic data that we've gotten this week, you could easily—and quite plausibly—draw this megaconclusion: The Federal Reserve will cut interest rates again, inflation is under control, and while the economy is weakening, it won't slip into recession. Here is the evidence: 1) Yes, the housing market is still dreadful. New-home sales in August hit their lowest point in seven years and are down 21 percent from a year ago. But don't forget that housing is less than 5 percent of the total economy. It's not the whole ballgame. 2) Employment remains amazingly resilient. Initial...

Bin Laden may have just escaped U.S. forces August mission in Tora Bora almost snared 'high value target' A little more than a month ago, with the anniversary of Sept. 11 approaching and fears of a new al Qaeda attack rising, some U.S. intelligence and military analysts thought they had found one of the world’s two most wanted men just where they last saw them six years ago. For three days and nights — between Aug. 14 and 16 — U.S. and Afghanistan forces pounded the mountain caves in Tora Bora, the same caves where Osama Bin Laden had hidden...

...In April, daily turnover in currency markets rose to $3.2 trillion, the bank said yesterday. That's more in value than the annual economic output of Germany or China, changing hands in currency markets every day around the world. It's also up 71% from the BIS's last survey in 2004, the largest jump in volume since the institution began conducting its benchmark survey in 1989. The currency market is "the world's biggest fruit and vegetable stall," says Jim O'Neill, global head of economic research at Goldman Sachs Group Inc. "There are so many participants in it, and it adjusts very quickly...

NEWARK, N.J. - Hovnanian Enterprises Inc., struggling like other home builders, is offering six-figure discounts on some of its properties this weekend as it attempts to draw interest in a slumping market. The sales blitz involves dropping prices by more 20 percent on some of its prime real estate. The largest discounts are on the most expensive homes, including a 3-bedroom condominium by the Hudson River in West New York, which has been reduced $240,000, or 22 percent, to $862,000 this weekend. A 25-percent discount is being offered on a 2-bedroom home in Jackson Township, N.J., which lowers its price...

Subprime Mortgage Woes Push New Foreclosures to a Record High WASHINGTON (AP) -- The number of homeowners receiving foreclosure notices hit a record high in the spring, driven up by problems with subprime mortgages. The Mortgage Bankers Association reported Thursday that mortgage-holders starting the foreclosure process in the April-June quarter reached 0.65 percent, marking the third consecutive quarter that this figure has set an all-time high. The delinquency rate, which tracks the number of people who are behind in their payments but have not yet entered the foreclosure process, was also up sharply during the spring, rising to 5.12 percent...

Metro housing slide keeps repo man busy 'Snowball effect' from mortgage woes, easy credit keeps lot overflowing By TAMMY JOYNER The Atlanta Journal-Constitution Published on: 09/03/07 Swing by Richard Grosvenor's business for a closeup of how quickly the nation's housing market is unraveling. In the last six months, Grosvenor and his repo drivers have hauled in hundreds of vehicles in the course of normal business. Richard Grosvenor stands amongst repossessed vehicles, including a Corvette taken from a plumber (left), on his 3-acre lot at Speedy Recovery in Lithonia on August 29, 2007. With credit and mortgage problems rising, Grosvenor has...

A strong economy with a weak housing sector is the picture painted by economic data released today. According to the Commerce Department, U.S. construction spending fell in July as outlays for housing plunged. Construction declined by 0.4 percent. The decline followed a 0.1 percent gain in June. Meanwhile, economic activity in the manufacturing sector expanded in August for the seventh consecutive month, while the overall economy grew for the 70th consecutive month...

State leads U.S. in investor-owned loan failures, study says Nevada had one of the hottest housing markets for investors two years ago. Now it is the top state for investor-owned mortgage defaults, the Mortgage Bankers Association reported Thursday. The Silver State leads the nation in the percentage of residential real estate mortgage defaults for investors, both in the prime and subprime mortgages categories, the association reported. The association said 32 percent of prime mortgage defaults in Nevada were for non-owner occupied properties as of June 30. Arizona, with 26 percent, came in second. Prime mortgages are loans to borrowers with...

Are you sick of all the talk about the subprime-mortgage fiasco? I know I am. Unfortunately, it's not going away. So we have no choice but to deal with it. After all, it's not just affecting consumers who took out loans they can't afford; the lenders that were, dare I say, stupid enough to offer those unqualified borrowers those loans are getting hit too. American Home Mortgage of Melville, N.Y., recently filed for bankruptcy protection. Once the nation's 10th-largest mortgage lender, the company said "extraordinary disruptions" (read: people not making their mortgage payments) effectively cut off the money it needed...

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- Earlier this year, a Wisconsin couple won a judgment against Chevy Chase Bank that said the bank deceived them over the terms of their mortgage. The judge ordered Chevy Chase to rescind the loan and certified the lawsuit as class-action, which could potentially release thousands of other borrowers who felt misled. Current Mortgage Rates Type Overall avgs 30 yr fixed mtg 6.24% 15 yr fixed mtg 5.89% 30 yr fixed jumbo mtg 7.08% 5/1 ARM 6.11% 5/1 jumbo ARM 6.57% Find personalized rates: Video More video Tim Hughes of the IG Index joins CNN to talk...

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- The Federal Reserve has been able to keep hitting the snooze alarm when it comes to interest rates for the past year, leaving the target on a key short-term interest rate at 5.25 percent since August 2006. But given what's going on in the credit markets lately, is it time for the Fed to hit the panic button? Special Reportfull coverage Sugar cane ethanol's not-so-sweet future Oil slides over $3 on economic woes House marks $16B for renewable energy Marathon to buy Western Oil Sands for $5.56B When Fed chair Ben Bernanke and the rest of...

Elizabeth and Armando Motto are living a real estate nightmare with a new breed of monster: the big homebuilder as lender. In November, 2005, the couple, who have four children, agreed to pay $540,000 for a newly built three-bedroom house in suburban Clarksburg, Md., near Washington, D.C. Rather than send them to a bank, the builder, Beazer Homes USA Inc., offered to provide a mortgage itself in an arrangement of the sort that helped fuel the long housing boom across the country. But when it appeared that the Mottos might not qualify financially for the loan, things took a troubling...

Fed leaves key short-term interest rate unchanged at 5.25%; indicates worries about credit problems. More details soon.

Several months ago Silvia Cuevas took stock of her life, and it was a profoundly unsettling experience. At 40 she had a solid job with a modest salary at the public library in Santa Ana, Calif. She'd carefully squirreled away some savings and bought herself a little house. She was financially secure - and utterly dissatisfied. All around her, Santa Ana throbbed with the feverish energy of recent immigrants eager to cash in on the promises of America. "I was going nowhere," she recalls. "How was I going to find my fortune?" Then a girlfriend introduced her to Nouveau Riche...

(Washington, D.C.) In a startling image collected by a NASA environmental satellite over two years ago, evidence of huge objects flying through the atmosphere can been seen in the wakes they produced in a low cloud layer. The image shows evidence of several unidentified objects of varying sizes, all flying in formation, at a very low altitude over the Indian Ocean. The area is too remote to be covered by radar. ecoEnquirer asked famed image analysis expert William B. Davis his opinion of the image. "This is truly amazing", said Mr. Davis, between long drags on his trademark cigarette....

Ebocha, Nigeria - Justice Eta, 14 months old, held out his tiny thumb. An ink spot certified that he had been immunized against polio and measles, thanks to a vaccination drive supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. But polio is not the only threat Justice faces. Almost since birth, he has had respiratory trouble. His neighbors call it "the cough." People blame fumes and soot spewing from flames that tower 300 feet into the air over a nearby oil plant. It is owned by the Italian petroleum giant Eni, whose investors include the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation....

SOMEONE slipped this little bomb wrapped up like a present under your Christmas tree: Starting next month, the New York Mercantile Exchange is going to let average investors speculate on the price of oil and gasoline.... ...The wire service Bloomberg reported right before the holiday that Nymex will begin trading in a weighted energy index "designed to attract small investors." Well, lucky for us! As anybody with a car knows, the price of fuel has dropped about 25 percent from its peak. That's where the Nymex's little bomb in a box comes in. After having lost a bundle when energy...

This is the fifth in an occasional series of exclusive articles in which leading conservatives who served in the Reagan Administration explain how they believe the principles of Reagan conservatism ought to be applied today and in the coming years. This week, Edwin Meese, who was Reagan’s first presidential counselor and then attorney general, addresses immigration. What would Ronald Reagan do? I can’t tell you how many times I have been asked that question, on virtually every issue imaginable. As much as we all want clarity and certainty, I usually refrain from specific answers. That’s because it is very difficult...

Oxygen may be the clue to first appearance of large animals, says Queen’s prof The sudden appearance of large animal fossils more than 500 million years ago – a problem that perplexed even Charles Darwin and is commonly known as “Darwin’s Dilemma” – may be due to a huge increase of oxygen in the world’s oceans, says Queen’s paleontologist Guy Narbonne, an expert in the early evolution of animals and their ecosystems. In 2002, Dr. Narbonne and his research team found the world’s oldest complex life forms between layers of sandstone on the southeastern coast of Newfoundland. This pushed back...

Modern Humans, Neanderthals May Have Interbred By E.J. Mundell HealthDay Reporter Mon Oct 30, 5:03 PM ET MONDAY, Oct. 30 (HealthDay News) -- There may be a little Neanderthal in all of us. That's the conclusion of anthropologists who have re-examined 30,000-year-old fossilized bones from a Romanian cave -- bones that languished in a drawer since the 1950s. According to the researchers, these early Homo sapien bones show anatomical features that could only have arisen if the adult female in question had Neanderthal ancestors as part of her lineage. The findings may answer nagging questions: Did modern humans and Neanderthals...

CORVALLIS, Ore. -- Researchers at Oregon State University have discovered the oldest bee ever known, a 100 million year old specimen preserved in almost lifelike form in amber, and an important link to help explain the rapid expansion of flowering plants during that distant period. The findings and their evolutionary significance are outlined in an article to be published this week in the journal Science. The specimen, at least 35-45 million years older than any other known bee fossil, has given rise to a newly-named family called Melittosphecidae – insects that share some of the features of both bees and...

A 380 million-year-old fossil found in Australia has filled a gap in the understanding of how fish evolved into the first land animals. John Long, lead researcher at Museum Victoria, said the perfectly preserved skeleton has revealed that fish developed features characteristic of land animals much earlier than once thought. Long said: "We've got a fish from the Devonian period about 380 million years ago and preserved in three-dimensional stunning perfection. "It has revealed a whole suite of characters that link it to the higher land animals or tetrapods, so it's filling in a blank in evolution we didn't know...

Texas Democratic Party Chairman Boyd Richie on Tuesday called for an attorney general's investigation of what he said was the use of inside information on purchases of land near the proposed route of the Trans-Texas Corridor. Richie attempted to draw a linkage between a company investing in land, one of its owners (former Texas Railroad Commissioner Barry Williamson) and GOP Gov. Rick Perry. "Inside information," in this case, could mean articles in the newspaper. The company's 2005 filing with federal regulators cited by Richie says the company, Wilson Holdings Inc., will focus on buying land "around the Central Texas region's...

Evidence for punctuated equilibrium lies in the genetic sequences of many organisms, according to a study in this week's Science. Researchers report that about a third of reconstructed phylogenetic trees of animals, plants, and fungi reveal periods of rapid molecular evolution. "We've never really known to what extent punctuated equilibrium is a general phenomenon in speciation," said Douglas Erwin of the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., who was not involved in the study. Since its introduction by Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge in the 1970s, the theory of punctuated equilibrium -- that evolution usually proceeds slowly...

You don't have to be a biologist or an anthropologist to see how closely the great apes—gorillas, chimpanzees, bonobos and orangutans—resemble us. Even a child can see that their bodies are pretty much the same as ours, apart from some exaggerated proportions and extra body hair. Apes have dexterous hands much like ours but unlike those of any other creature. And, most striking of all, their faces are uncannily expressive, showing a range of emotions that are eerily familiar. That's why we delight in seeing chimps wearing tuxedos, playing the drums or riding bicycles. It's why a potbellied gorilla scratching...

Most research professors spend their days writing grants, teaching and managing graduate students, so when Stanford’s David Kingsley, PhD, ventured from his office to his lab, pulled out a scale and started weighing 114 pairs of manatee pelvic bones, it was a sign that something was afoot. The results of Kingsley’s efforts make his departure from the routine worthwhile. He found that in almost every case, the left pelvic bone outweighed the right. Although seemingly trivial in difference—the average left pelvic bone is a mere10 percent larger than its right-side partner—that difference carries big weight in evolutionary significance. It suggests...

A MUST read for everyone!

Molecular techniques confirm fin theory Performance on the dance floor may not always show it, but people are rarely born with two left feet. We have genes that instruct our arms and legs to grow in the right places and point in the right directions. They also provide for the spaces between our fingers and toes and every other formative detail of our limbs. Evolutionarily speaking, the genetic instructions used to construct and position our limbs were being perfected more than half a billion years ago in fishes, not along the sides of the body where the fins that preceded...