House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn of South Carolina is saying that he will not be voting for his party’s nominee for U.S. Senate because the candidate has been indicted on a felony charge.

With so many House seats in play, it is difficult to reduce it to a Top 50 list.  But we're attempting it here.  And it is important to note that of the Top 50, 46 are currently held by the Democrats.

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AP - A bombing in southern Italy has damaged the apartment house of a magistrate who investigates the 'ndrangheta crime syndicate.

Politico - They say they are increasingly alarmed about economic and polling data in recent weeks.

Sadly, each passing day brings with it more depressing economic news. Today's latest is that housing sales dropped 27% in July, the weakest showing in 15 years. That the housing market remains a complete disaster, common knowledge to most of us, appears to still be a secret to those in Washington. This latest news reinforces that it is time to put aside the Washington "PR fixes" and get down to real solutions that address what is both a devastating crisis for many American families and a major barrier to any economic recovery.

To properly address the housing crisis we have to first stabilize the market. We can only stabilize the housing market by first stopping the downward spiral that it is currently caught in. What downward spiral? Today, each foreclosure, auction, and new house for sale puts increasing downward pressure on prices. As home prices drop, more mortgages become "underwater", which leads to increasing cases of homeowners walking away and more bank foreclosures. This in-turn drives home prices down even further, and the cycle continues and continues.

To date none of the DC solutions have had a prayer of addressing this core problem; they were just band-aids. Not surprisingly, these DC solutions have only succeeded in allowing our politicians to say that they've tried to address our housing crisis versus actually doing so.

* The first attempt at a federally run loan-modification program appears to have failed: 50% of participants have dropped out since the program started.
* The recent homebuyer tax credit only succeeded in making folks who were going to buy a home anyway buy it earlier, so they could get $7,500 from Uncle Sam. Immediately after the credit expired, a huge decrease in home sales resulted.
* Ironically, the brutal economic climate, which has allowed interest rates to stay at historic lows, is the only federal intervention that has worked in the housing market's favor.

We must go beyond these superficial gestures to fix a problem of this size. How about some fresh thinking on the subject? That's why I'm proposing:

Banks becoming equity partners with homeowners. Let's explain that with an example:

Jim has a $100K mortgage from the bank for his $120K house. If the house is currently appraising for $75K, the bank would readjust Jim's mortgage to $75K and take, say, a 20% ownership stake in the house. The result would be that Jim's monthly payment would be substantially reduced and he becomes much less likely to "walk away" from his house. The bank has a loan which has immediately become more solid and, say, in 10 years when Jim sells his house, the bank, as a 20% equity partner, can share in the upside.

While the fine print still need to be worked out, this type of private-sector administered program actually cuts to the core of the issue and establishes the foundation for a sustainable housing market. There are other measures as well -- going to a 50 year mortgage (Japan and other nations already offer them), etc., that also warrant discussion and would also help.

Washington's failure to deal with the housing crisis represents a truism in politics and life: there are no short-term solutions to long-term problems. Sadly, short-term thinking and fixes are all Washington appears to be capable of. Housing, jobs, our national debt - these are not intractable problems, just difficult ones. Yet until we elect officials who demonstrate the capability for fresh thinking and are focused on solutions not ideology, we'll keep getting more of the same: band-aids.

This is the first in the series "A Business Plan for America" that will outline critical public policy proposals that are free of partisan politics, ideology, and dead ideas.

AP - The White House, in an effort to turn up the heat against al-Qaida's branch in Yemen, is considering adding the CIA's armed Predator drones to the fight, two U.S. officials said Wednesday.

Politico - Republicans must win if they have any hope of winning a House majority in November.

For the past three years, Jean Chandler, 42, has been trying to figure out what to do with the six giant cedar wood doors piled up in the office of his new New Orleans house. He ended up selling them on Craigslist last week for $35 apiece-- finally ridding himself of the last remnants of the house he lost in Katrina.

"The doors, for me, kind of symbolized the last of the aggravations I can't deal with anymore... the impediment of stuff," Chandler told HuffPost. "Before Katrina, you have a life, there's an organic flow to life, and after, your life is disjointed. It's in boxes. Now I can finally put a bookshelf up in my office where those doors were all piled up so I don't have to dig through a box every time I'm looking for a book."

Right after Katrina devastated New Orleans, displacing hundreds of thousands of residents, Chandler found his old Mid-City house--which was propped up on 3-foot stilts--completely flooded under 4 feet of water. He said he considered salvaging other pieces from the old house that made it charming and unique, like the claw-foot bathtub and antique toilets, but he couldn't bring himself to do it.

"Imagine a line four feet high in your house," Chandler said. "Everything below it is basically the most disgusting sewer you've ever seen, and everything above it is pristine-- just the way you left it. All our possessions below that line, a surprising amount things, we had to put into tubs so it wouldn't turn into one big ball of mold. It was such a huge strain."

As Katrina approaches its five-year anniversary, New Orleans has made enormous strides toward recovery. The city's GDP is almost $9 billion higher today than it was in 2005, its population is about 80 percent of what it was before the storm, and city officials say the quality of public education has gone up significantly. But only one in three New Orleans residents polled by the Kaiser Family Foundation this year said their lives have returned to normal since Katrina, and 70 percent of them said they feel that the nation has forgotten the challenges they still face.

Barry Lemoine, a public school teacher in the New Orleans suburbs, said the scars the storm left on the city are apparent in the every day conversations of New Orleans natives.

"Everything you hear is in terms 'before Katrina' and 'after Katrina,'" he said. "You hear somebody give directions, and they say, 'You know where the Shell station used to be? You remember where the chicken place used to be?' I think [Katrina] was psychologically damaging as much as physically."

Former New Orleans pastry chef Patrick O'Connell, 43, has been essentially homeless for the past five years.

"When Katrina hit, I stayed in New Orleans," O'Connell said. "I remember waking up in 4 feet of water-- I thought I had wet the bed. Then I realized everything I owned was floating around me."

O'Connell said he had planned to use his life savings to rebuild the Lakeview house he had shared with his father, but his plans changed when the house was burglarized one year after Katrina.

"They tied me up and made off with appliances and anything they could walk out with," he said. "It was like the Wild West out there in Lakeview-- primitive living."

Having been laid off from his job after the storm, O'Connell no longer had any money to rent, buy, or renovate a home. He has been couch-surfing ever since.

"I'm starting over right now," he said. "I finally got an apartment, and I have an interview tomorrow at a little gourmet shop on Magazine Street. I don't own many things anymore, but at least I have a place to live."

New Orleans' already struggling economy was dealt a second and third blow by the recession and Gulf oil spill, but jobs in the city should be increasingly plentiful now that the city's main industry--tourism-- seems to be making a comeback. ABC News reports that visits to New Orleans jumped to 7.5 million in 2009--up from 3.7 million visitors in 2006-- and raked in $4.2 billion dollars for the city. While the 70,000 tourism jobs in New Orleans is still well below the 85,000 jobs that existed before Katrina, this year the city reported its largest Mardi Gras celebration in 25 years.

In addition to an influx of tourists, New Orleans has also experienced a shift in its permanent population as contractors, architects, volunteers and entrepreneurs have flocked to the city to capitalize on rebuilding efforts.

According to a recent Kaiser Family Foundation report, about 1 in 10 people currently living in New Orleans was not living there before the storm. The report describes this outsider population as "substantially younger, more educated, [and] more likely to be white" than the New Orleans natives.

Chandler said he can definitely feel the difference in population.

"It feels like New Orleans is on the map now as a place to live, whereas before, people from Michigan, Seattle, wherever wouldn't have even considered it," Chandler said. "For the most part, it's a good thing-- the influx of young people from other states are not as tolerant of catastrophe. We've got traffic cameras now. You can get shot really easily about 4 blocks from my house, but if you're speeding down that same street, you'll get a ticket in the mail."

The main fear among locals, according to Chandler, is that out-of-state entrepreneurs will take the gentrification too far, negating some of the flavor and quirky cultural aspects of New Orleans that made the city special before the storm.

"We always used to say, New Orleans isn't really Southern America--it's Northern Costa Rica," he told HuffPost. "But that's kind of changing. The 9th Ward 'Yats' are gone... now it's hipsters in striped socks. They come in and say, 'Oh, it's so Boho down here. Let's go enjoy the freedom!' Then they try to make it just like where they came from."

On the whole, however, New Orleans residents seem to be optimistic about the city's recovery. Seventy percent of residents polled by the Kaiser Foundation said the recovery and rebuilding efforts in New Orleans are moving in the right direction, up from only 56 percent in 2008.

"South Louisiana is nothing if not resilient," said Barry Lemoine. "And hey, at least more attention is being paid now to coastal preservation. What can you do but move on and make the best of a bad situation?"

The Week - House Minority Leader John Boehner demanded mass firings in the West Wing. Would Obama be smart to listen?

When Barack Obama became our president, many of us bought into the idea that his victory signaled a "Post-Racial America," or at least an America that was very much past the old way of dividing its citizens along racial and ethnic lines.

We were clearly wrong.

It's clear now that it will take far more than the first black president, or biracial president depending on one's way of looking, to get us to that long awaited land of post-race.

And we should have known that. After all, look how long it took to get to this place at all. Generations of racial divisions don't evaporate in one Presidential election cycle or term in office.

But what is more surprising, at least to me, is that in many ways it appears President Obama's victory and presence in the White House has actually caused a lot of people to get worse about their issues regarding so-called "race." Some on the right, possibly angry that a man with his complexion is the leader of this country, have been emboldened to speak with even more venom on matters of ethnic difference. The Tea Party, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, The Birthers, the Arizona immigrant crackdown, even Dr. Laura and the whole "N-Word" controversy (because her issue was as much about Obama and Blacks complaining as it was anything else) -- they have all seemingly gone truly insane since Obama came into office. How else to describe some of the totally illogical and outrageous things we've heard from these guys of late?

But it is not just the people on the right. For some on the left, I think the expectation of a drastic change, in a short amount of time, an expectation that did not come to fruition, at least in the way many had hoped, also made them crazy too. It was as if some of us expected Obama to do the impossible in an incredibly short period of time, even after coming in on the heels of a long Bush legacy. And for some blacks, the fact that racism still exists, that their/our lives did not change because a man that looks like us is in the White House, caused many to also get more frustrated. We've always had incidents of ethnic tensions and animosity, but it's hard not to think some of the tensions are worse now. The recent attacks on New York City's Staten Island, of blacks assaulting Mexicans and Mexican-Americans, is I think, a factor of the new tensions, and somewhat related to the anti-immigrant talk in the country now, led in part by Arizona's silly and misguided focus on Mexican immigrants.

Even the major brouhaha in New York, and the ensuing national debate over the so-called "Ground Zero Mosque," is a sign to me of a country not going forward in the way many of us had expected. The religious intolerance -- and that's what it is on this issue, since Islam is being acquainted with terrorism when Islam did not attack the World Trade Center, idiot terrorists did -- is another indicator that our prejudices have become more open rather than better.

But maybe the positive in this, the silver lining if there is one, is that things have to get worse in order to get better. So maybe all of this coming out in the open, as painful as it is to watch and hear, is a step in the right direction. Maybe getting all these feelings out in the open is indeed a sign of progress. After all, we do have to deal with these underlying frustrations, prejudices and issues and until we put it out there, there can be no dealing with it.

So looked at that way, maybe the "Post-Racial America" is indeed closer. We just have to get through this growth period before we get there. Let's just hope it doesn't get too much uglier before it gets better.

US President Barack Obama is to give a major speech to mark the end of American combat operations in Iraq on August 31, the White House said Tuesday.

A top U.S. business group on Tuesday urged the House of Representatives to quickly approve a bill that chips away at the U.S. embargo on Cuba by ending decades of restrictions on travel to the island.

When Barack Obama became our president, many of us bought into the idea that his victory signaled a "Post-Racial America," or at least an America that was very much past the old way of dividing its citizens along racial and ethnic lines.

We were clearly wrong.

It's clear now that it will take far more than the first black president, or biracial president depending on one's way of looking, to get us to that long awaited land of post-race.

And we should have known that. After all, look how long it took to get to this place at all. Generations of racial divisions don't evaporate in one Presidential election cycle or term in office.

But what is more surprising, at least to me, is that in many ways it appears President Obama's victory and presence in the White House has actually caused a lot of people to get worse about their issues regarding so-called "race." Some on the right, possibly angry that a man with his complexion is the leader of this country, have been emboldened to speak with even more venom on matters of ethnic difference. The Tea Party, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, The Birthers, the Arizona immigrant crackdown, even Dr. Laura and the whole "N-Word" controversy (because her issue was as much about Obama and Blacks complaining as it was anything else) -- they have all seemingly gone truly insane since Obama came into office. How else to describe some of the totally illogical and outrageous things we've heard from these guys of late?

But it is not just the people on the right. For some on the left, I think the expectation of a drastic change, in a short amount of time, an expectation that did not come to fruition, at least in the way many had hoped, also made them crazy too. It was as if some of us expected Obama to do the impossible in an incredibly short period of time, even after coming in on the heels of a long Bush legacy. And for some blacks, the fact that racism still exists, that their/our lives did not change because a man that looks like us is in the White House, caused many to also get more frustrated. We've always had incidents of ethnic tensions and animosity, but it's hard not to think some of the tensions are worse now. The recent attacks on New York City's Staten Island, of blacks assaulting Mexicans and Mexican-Americans, is I think, a factor of the new tensions, and somewhat related to the anti-immigrant talk in the country now, led in part by Arizona's silly and misguided focus on Mexican immigrants.

Even the major brouhaha in New York, and the ensuing national debate over the so-called "Ground Zero Mosque," is a sign to me of a country not going forward in the way many of us had expected. The religious intolerance -- and that's what it is on this issue, since Islam is being acquainted with terrorism when Islam did not attack the World Trade Center, idiot terrorists did -- is another indicator that our prejudices have become more open rather than better.

But maybe the positive in this, the silver lining if there is one, is that things have to get worse in order to get better. So maybe all of this coming out in the open, as painful as it is to watch and hear, is a step in the right direction. Maybe getting all these feelings out in the open is indeed a sign of progress. After all, we do have to deal with these underlying frustrations, prejudices and issues and until we put it out there, there can be no dealing with it.

So looked at that way, maybe the "Post-Racial America" is indeed closer. We just have to get through this growth period before we get there. Let's just hope it doesn't get too much uglier before it gets better.

The top Republican in the House of Representatives called on Tuesday for President Barack Obama to fire his economic team in a campaign-style speech meant to focus voters on the weak American economy.

AP - With a broad grin and aw-shucks approach, Bill Burton is a marked contrast with his boss, the always ready-for-battle White House press secretary Robert Gibbs.

Okay, here's a heavy-handed analogy, followed by a brief quiz:

So, some guys burn a house down.

Then they walk away.

Another guy comes along, sees the charred remains and wants to rebuild. He tries to gather materials but is thwarted by the friends of the guys who burned the house down.

Having little choice, he tries to get money to buy materials from those same guys.

They take the money, give him some materials to rebuild, but when he tries to use them, they knock the materials out of his hands. He bends down to pick them up and they knock them out of his hands again.

Sometimes they trip him.

Sometimes they make up scary stories about him.

They force him to give time and energy towards things that make no sense instead of toward rebuilding the house they burned.

And they never really let him get started with the rebuilding of the house they burned down.

Question: is the whole thing the new guy's fault?

Answer: if you are a Republican, then yes.

It's perverse, isn't it? It's an approach that echoes the arguably impotent "Just say no" anti-drug campaign that squeezed its way out from under a big Republican's behind. It's a way to say "Hey! I'm taking action!" when, really, you aren't doing anything except making a loud noise.

In this case though, denying any culpability despite having committed the aforementioned fictional analogous act in broad daylight is the height of sociopathy.

That is, unless it's a tactic. In which case it is a premeditated strategy based on studies of power and human behavior which probably rival similar studies as researched by academics connected to historically oppressive political movements enamored with such a manipulative and disingenuous endgame.

It's weird that such insensitivities seem to regularly spring from the right wing's well. After a while, you'd have to think that the welfare of American citizens isn't something they're really interested in at all.

And there's other stuff, too.

Like allowing the fringe to swamp the middle and looking the other way as chaos replaces order. This is clearly delineated every single day in the deeds and words issued from the right wing (or the GOP and Fox News by extension. No, wait... the other way around. No, wait...)

Another broad analogy would be to say that they are basically committing a perpetual hit and run on America. They have decided that the old ways of playing by sets of rules that apply to all ideological persuasions are obsolete, that the purposeful alignment with forces which resist any regulatory mechanisms and that almost by definition will most certainly become juggernauts of instability may net the newly ruthless right wing sponsors a quick return.

Given what the world witnesses every day, that would seem to be a reasonably accurate description of Things Right Wing. For they have decided that there's gold in them there hicks. And by obstructing almost all attempts to rebuild the country which was purposely effed-up by their own dastardly deceptions, by owning the means to disseminate their misdirected messages of mayhem, by owning all the tools which would facilitate a steady and necessary recovery, they retain the right to taunt, torture and otherwise ruin whoever comes along to fix it.

The problem is that such an approach will just as certainly burn the ground out from under them and all the unknowing, unseeing enablers that comprise their fringe infantry.

And when their own house burns, will there be anyone to help them rebuild?

Reuters - A top U.S. business group on Tuesday urged the House of Representatives to quickly approve a bill that chips away at the U.S. embargo on Cuba by ending decades of restrictions on travel to the island.

AP - The White House says President Barack Obama will have no further comment on the mosque near Ground Zero in New York and the administration will not get involved in talks about relocating the controversial facility.

Reuters - The White House is reviewing all options for responding to a court ruling stopping federal funding of human embryonic stem cell research, a spokesman said on Tuesday.

CQPolitics.com - Republican candidates for the House are doing better than Democrats at bringing in local dollars.

Gulf Finance House EC, the Bahrain- based investment bank, appointed Deutsche Bank AG as its restructuring adviser.

NEW YORK — New York Rep. Charles Rangel has shot back at President Barack Obama’s recent comment that he “end his career with dignity.”

Speaking at a candidate’s forum Monday night in New York City, Rangel said the president hasn’t “been around long enough to determine what my dignity is.”

The 80-year-old congressman said it was more likely he would protect Obama’s dignity over the next two years.

A House ethics panel has accused the 20-term Democrat from Harlem of ethics violation charges. Rangel has vowed to fight the charges and is refusing to resign. He says he is focusing on his re-election.

Obama said three weeks ago that he was sure Rangel wanted to “be able to end his career with dignity” and said he hoped it would happen.

___

Information from: The New York Times, http://www.nytimes.com

Vice Presidet Joe Biden reacted with a bit of sniping sarcasm to House Minority Leader John Boehner’s (R-Ohio) suggestion on Tuesday that the president hit the reset button and fire his top two economic advisers.

“After months of promising a look at his party agenda for his plans for America,” Biden said, “his chief proposal, when you look at it, apparently was that the president should fire his economic team. Very constructive advice and we thank the leader for that.”

Speaking at an event touting the impact of the stimulus on the fields of science and technology, the vice president tailored the first portions of his remarks into a comprehensive rebuttal to Boehner’s speech earlier in the day.

“Mr. Boehner and his party ran the economy and the middle class literally into the ground,” Biden said at one point. “I’m still waiting for what it is that they are for… I know what they are against. What I don’t know, other than a tax cut for the top two percent of the taxpayers in America, I don’t know what they are for.”

The critiques echoed those offered by others in the Democratic Party, including several members of the House, who hosted a pre-buttal conference call mocking Boehner for a lack of substantive ideas for economic recovery.

“John Boehner and the Republican leadership wouldn’t know a new idea if they tripped on it,” Rep. Debbie Wasserman-Schultz (D-Fla.) told reporters on a Monday conference call organized by the Democratic National Committee.

But it was not anticipated that Boehner would call for the firing of both Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and chief economic adviser Larry Summers. And with hopes of drowning out the Ohio Republican’s much-publicized address, the White House re-calibrated Biden’s remarks and alerted reporters to tune into the speech minutes before it happened.

UPDATE: Here are some more excerpts from Biden’s remarks in which he goes after not only Boehner but also the Minority Leader’s deputy, NRCC Chair Pete Session (R-Tex.).

Let’s just review a little history here: For eight years before we arrived, Mr. Boehner and his party ran this economy and the middle class into the ground. They took the $237 billion surplus they inherited from the Clinton Administration and left us with a $1.3 trillion deficit, and, in the process, quadrupled the national debt – all before we had turned on the lights in the West Wing. They gave free rein to the special interests to write their own rules at the expense of everybody else. And the sum total of it was the greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression–a crisis that wreaked havoc on families and businesses across this country–a crisis from which we are still digging out.

The head of their campaign committee, Representative Pete Sessions, said that if they were to take control of Congress this fall–which, by the way, they won’t–that they would go back to “the exact same agenda” they were pushing before President Obama took office. They think the policies they had in place during the Bush years–the ones Mr. Boehner helped craft and sell–were the right ones. Well, let me tell you, there are millions and millions of Americans who saw their paychecks shrink or their jobs, houses, and savings vanish. Mr. Boehner is nostalgic for those good old days… the American people are not. They don’t want to go back. They want to move forward.