Yes, investors are now, once again, wary of the real estate market.

Investors should be wary of all markets, all the time. That's what prudent investing is all about.

Why weren't investors wary from 2003-2006?

B. U. B. B. L. E.

Blaming a burst investment bubble on negative psychology is ridiculous. Unless of course by psychology you mean some basic awareness of recent history and the world around you. Then sure, it's all about investor psychology.

So Realtor is trademarked, but realtor isn't.

The NAR trademarked their version in 1948, I presume to create additional barriers to entry to the otherwise wide open broker market.

So real estate agents unaffiliated with the NAR can call themselves realtors, but not Realtors? I have to wonder if they are even allowed to start a sentence with the word realtor.

How the NAR co-opted Salon's letter-to-the-editor-spell-checker is a separate mystery.

The location, etc.. mantra is important... as a predictor of current and future home valuation.

The anonymous realtor (wow, why does the spell-check want me to capitalize realtor?) is right in that you shouldn't buy a place outside your budget that doesn't fit your needs just because it's in a prime location. Of course what she's glossing over is that the run-up in prices has left many non-prime-location houses just as expensive as the well-situated ones. These outsiders are the houses that seem most likely to suffer from a heavy depreciation. In many regions they've already taken significant hits. In others they're still hanging on.

So if the choice is new spacious McMansion in an exurb development whose price hasn't dropped since early 2006, or something smaller and older closer to a city center... well I know what I'd do.

Given that the country now has the highest inventory of houses on the market ever, buyers should have plenty of choices.

http://calculatedrisk.blogspot.com/2007/06/more-on-may-existing-home-sales.html

Everyone who's been following anything tangentially related to the housing market over the past several years is aware that the NAR are the domestic real estate version of carnival barkers, a Hanoi Hannah targeted at consumers. Continuing to print their statements and reference their "economists" only gives them power and encourages them to continue their chicanery. They don't care if you revile and ridicule them as long as their message is repeated; it's the Fox News effect.

They are the public policy version of spam, Nigerian Viagra penny-stock spam.

@J.Mandel, I didn't think I was making rules, but here we go...

When you said that my rules imply "...there is NEVER any politician who can support ANY military action anywhere, under any circumstances" we all took a ride down your slippery slope.

I was writing about this war, and this specific, slipperier than KY, politician. This war is an invasion predicated on lies and maintained by the ruling party's 4-year version of "the check is in the mail". This politician is a consummate chameleon who changes his pattern to suit whichever demographic he needs to pick up 10% in. Currently that demographic is the 28% that still thinks the president is doing, everyone say it with me, "a heck of a job".

In my mind the odds that Romney believes that Iraq is anything but a massive operational clusterfuck, doomed to eventual disintegration and counterproductive in the meantime, are close to nil. That's why, for me, it would be creepy for him to have children serving over there and still be spouting his pap.

I guess in some way I do believe in the idea that no politician can ever "legitimately" support a military action. Military actions are what we call wars of choice, unilateral foreign adventures that the public probably wouldn't support if they were told that their county was about to invade another, all because a corporation wants better trading rights or because a chief executive wants the domestic cover of being a "war president".

Asking Romney about whether or not his children are serving in the military is a legitimate question. It's worth knowing exactly how much he has at stake when he supports the "surge", or when he says that invading Iraq was the right thing to do.

The fact that his kids aren't in the military is fine. It just makes him hard to seriously, like Bush, when he talks about the sacrifices of the war, and "completing the mission".

Honestly I'd be even more creeped out by him if some of his kids were currently serving. It's one thing to be a lying hypocritical republican politician eager to send other people's kids off to die for self-serving reasons. That's par for the course in this country. Sacrificing your kids on the altar of your political aspirations would be almost..... biblical.

That's not a good thing.

I really wish Schussel would illuminate how she came to her "conclusion" about the study.

I imagine it went something like:

If each daughter a Congressmen has makes him more likely to support reproductive rights...

and

If I can write whatever the hell I want because my conservative fans and fellow conservative bloggers are never going to call me on my logic...

then

Liberal Congressmen produce slutty daughters.

@tiberious

Which nation are we at war with?

So what kind of spider was it?

While it might be reasonable for the director to not reveal Heigel's character's internal abortion debate, the idea that her baby-daddy-to-be wouldn't at least raise the issue as a possibility, even just as a gettin-ta-know-ya topic before they were inextricably linked, is ridiculous and screams self-, or studio-, censorship.

-the only candidate who might have at one point baked cookies in a tree.

Image matters. It's the second most important thing, right behind funding. It isn't fair or right, but it is true.