After dropping like a stone for the past three or four years, existing home prices in the United States went up a little teeny tiny bit in the second quarter of 2009. HOORAY WE CAN REFINANCE OUR WAY TO HAPPINESS AGAIN! So, the sales price of American houses went up by 2.9% between April Fools Day and the end of June, but they also dropped by 15% as compared to a year earlier. Never mind, we’re still doomed. [Washington Post]

Remember all that talk about how the unemployment rate fell by .1 percent last month and this proved, definitively, that happy days were here again? Remember all the sailors kissing ladies in the streets, and the wonderful ticker-tape parades? Well, everything has gone back to being terrible, according to New Statistics. MORE »

Criminy! We have been hearing a lot about mortgages that go into default or foreclosure, and how the people holding these mortgages should talk with their lenders about renegotiating their loans. As a normal person with more than two (2) neurons flickering on and off in your brain, you probably assume that the goal here is to make the loans more affordable, which is to say, LOWER IN COST. Apparently banks sometimes disagree. MORE »

GOOD LORD: Here is the most tragic thing you’ll see today, “Foreclosure Alley,” from KCET in Southern California. Thanks to commenter qwerty42 for bumming us out. [KCET via Andrew Sullivan]

Oh God now it begins: our quadrennial debate about voter fraud versus vote suppression. The head of the Republican Party in Macomb County, Michigan has decided that a wonderful way to protect against “voter fraud” will be to get lists of foreclosed homes and check those against voter rolls to make sure that people whose houses are foreclosed — and what is that, about 130 percent of all Michigan residents at this point? — don’t get to vote if they aren’t residents of those addresses anymore. MORE »

This is an actual fat cat named “Chunks” who is, of course, hiding under a chair in the green room of the MSNBC studio. Here’s how this obese monster got famous: “BLACKWOOD, N.J. — Turns out, the economy is the reason a 44-pound cat found lumbering the streets of New Jersey became homeless. The Camden County Animal Shelter said the cat’s owner came forward to say she had to abandon the tubby tabby because her home was foreclosed.” Naturally, no one cares about the owner having lost her home. MORE »

Everybody knows the three rules of real estate: Location, Refinance, Foreclosure. But our best vice president ever, Dick Cheney, is focused on the first part of that maxim by building his “retirement” house literally across the street from CIA headquarters in McLean, Virginia. MORE »