Ted Kennedy’s been dead for what, a decade or so, in Kennedy-zeitgeist years? It is high time America’s other Senators begin tactlessly speculating about who will get his ritzy deluxe Capitol Building office! Here are the specs: third floor, the Capitol Building, Mall views, “a rustic coffee table that appeared to be hewn out of the old deck of a sailboat,” etc. etc. “It sounds pretty,” said Alabama Senator Richard Selby. First, that coffee table thing actually sounds a bit kitschy. And second, hey, fuck you Richard Selby, show some RESPECT. That office belongs to Ted Kennedy’s ghost until Senate Rules Committee chairman Chuck Schumer gives it to someone else… But WHOM? MORE »

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 »

Sad news! While sales of peasant dwellings have begun to creep upward due to the first-time home buyer tax credit, low mortgage rates, expanded FHA loans, and of course FIRE SALE PRICING on foreclosed homes, homes costing more than $750,000 have been difficult to move in this market. Wealthy home owners (or “the middle class,” as they’re known in pricey markets like New York, DC, and the Bay Area) are finding it difficult to sell their million-dollar shacks. However, at least some of them are able to rent out their sad dwellings for, oh, $7500 a month, so don’t feel too bad about this problem yet. MORE »

Is that insanely cheap for commercial real estate? Seems like! Anyhow, the haunted million-square-foot carcass of the former AIG headquarters at 70 Pine and 72 Wall Street in beautiful New York City appears to have found a buyer for the bargain-basement price of $100 million. Who’s the lucky winner, Donald Trump? The Cato Institute? The buyers “would have been carefully vetted,” a source told the New York Post, from which we can conclude it’s just Tom Daschle wasting the last of his lunch money. [New York Post]

The best thing to happen in all of Texas last year was when a few Democratic anarcho-syndicalists burned down Rick Perry’s governor’s mansion with a flaming bag of Barney Bush’s poop, maybe. But because the remaining outer shell of this hell castle is a Historical Texas outer shell — and Texas never cheaps out when it comes to honoring its proud history of slavery, violence, oil, and self-importance — the difficult, tedious renovation will cost TWENTY MILLION dollars. CONSIDERING THE COST, the Texas state legislature is now telling Perry that if he wants his dumb house, then $11 million of that sum will have to come out of the Obama Stimulus Package — the thing Perry pretended to hate so much that he vowed to secede over it in ~FY2011. MORE »

Just imagine our very private and humble Supreme Court justice sitting in his secluded shack in the woods, looking out the window, only to find some nut lurking behind two trees with a macro zoom lens. Next, the NYT will boil his bunny and put him down a well, for fattening purposes. [New York Times]

Back in early February, before President Obama failed at everything (life), it seemed he could heal the lame and the halt simply by looking at them and saying in a dignified manner, “the stakes are too high.” For example, at a rally in Ft. Myers, he magically transformed the lives of two (2) paupers just by calling on them when they raised their hands. MORE »

Well, here is some depressing news! The hot new housing sector in the US isn’t houses at all: it’s shacks. That’s because the kind of people who used to be your next-door neighbor if you lived in a sort of marginal neighborhood in a largeish city are now squatters living under bridges in Fresno. Hell, maybe you’re one of them. MORE »

Watch out America, because Eliot Spitzer is buying LAND, LAND we tell you! LAND! In Washington D.C., right near where he banged the gal that time in the hotel thing. 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 »