You know, we hit Viet Nam era home sales rates last month. That’s right, 1963 rates. The year we shot Kennedy and escalated the war. It was borrowing and spending all we could on another war of aggression that got us into this shite, so it’s apropos. Lenders, though, sure played their role, and still are. They still are dumb as toast. We keep watching them participating in the ongoing destruction of their own market – it’s like watching Rumsfeld and Cheney with their arms up Bush’s arse puppeting him through a war with no point and no end. Lenders won’t renegotiate lower rates with existing clients – they’d rather foreclose and take huge losses than lose ‘potential’ profits or feel like someone’s getting over on them. They jimmied paperwork, and are going to eat some of that, now. If there was ever an industry begging for hard core management, and getting bitch-slapped out of its pigheadedness, it’s the mortgage lending industry. They were told what to do to fix it, they were mandated to do it, and they keep just scamming and delaying. Fuck ‘em. If it weren’t for the debacle of the “bailout”, I’d say let them roast in the stew of their own stupidity. As it is, I think they should be taken over. Not that I think government is a good thing – but I recognize it’s there, and I’d rather see it go to war against the lending industry over houses in its own country than blow up houses in Afghanistan to make sure there aren’t any bad guys in them. We know where the bad guys are. They’re here. And the housing jungle is another “Viet Fucking Nam”.