If you like to play cards then Hearts is a game you have played before. I love the game. Here is a screen shot of a really good game. I was only playing against the computer which is pretty dumb but you have to admit that is one kick ass score.
This is the latest buzz now to get a picture South Carolina Governor’s mistress. So far a photo has not surfaced but I imagine she is going to be a hot latina. Keep your eyes posted for future posts regarding Mark Sansford and his hot Argentina Latina!
Do you ever say to yourself…I KNEW that was going to happen? Are you good at predicting the next superbowl champs, the next president, the next coup? Visit http://www.intrade.com and put your money where you mouth is.
Its a very interesting site. People basically buy stock in world events. So do you think Kim Jong douche bag will flip his wig on the 4th of july and nuke us? Put some money on it. Then when it happens you’ll have plenty of dough to buy your way into your neighbors secret bunker.
The following companies are listed from most endangered to least endangered, based on the credit-default-swap spreads on five-year corporate bonds on April 3.
R.H. Donnelley
Visteon
General Motors
Six Flags
Financial Guaranty Insurance
Hawker Beechcraft
Ineos Group
NXP Semiconductors
McClatchy
Unisys
CC Media
Beazer Homes USA
YRC Worldwide
Hellas Telecommunications II
Lear
Ono Finance
American Axle & Manufacturing
Harrah’s Entertainment
Truvo Subsidiary
I am far more wealthy than Donald Trump because I still have my integrity. This guy sold his. Look at the litany of lies and half truths he admitted to under oath. This guy is sleezy. We need more honesty in this country.
The world famous real-estate developer and television personality has consistently said it’s in the billions. A 2005 book citing anonymous sources said it was between $150 million and $250 million. Mr. Trump sued the writer for defamation. He alleged damage to his reputation that caused him to lose out on future deals in locales from Philadelphia to Kiev.
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A hearing in that case will take place Monday in a state court in Camden, N.J. As part of the proceedings, the Donald, as he’s known to fans and detractors alike, has provided under oath the secrets to how he values his wealth and treasure. In one case, he says, he does “mental projections.”
“My net worth fluctuates, and it goes up and down with markets and with attitudes and with feelings, even my own feeling,” he told lawyers in the December 2007 deposition.
The deposition, marked “Confidential,” comes to light at a time when some of Mr. Trump’s projects, including several condominium developments that bear his name, are struggling. Among the problems are anemic sales, lawsuits, sharp declines in value and troubles with creditors.
In a telephone interview Sunday, Mr. Trump disputed that these are tough times for him. “We have a lot of cash right now. We’re starting to buy things,” he said while taking a break from playing golf at a Trump course in Bedminster, N.J. He said he stood by the statements he made in the deposition.
In the deposition, given to lawyers representing the book’s author, Timothy O’Brien, and its publisher, a unit of French-based Lagardere SCA, Mr. Trump described his public persona. “I’m not different from a politician running for office,” he said.
In the deposition, Mr. Trump said that his 2007 estimate of his net worth — over $4 billion — is “a very conservative number, in my opinion.” He also said $6 billion is a good number, counting his brand value. (In the interview Sunday, he said he was worth $5 billion, not counting brand value.)
Mr. Trump was asked whether he has ever exaggerated in statements about his properties. “I think everybody does,” he said in the deposition. “Who wouldn’t?”
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A follow-up question: Does that mean he inflates the value of his properties in general, nonfinancial public statements? “Not beyond reason,” he said in the testimony.
The deposition reveals he told his bankers and New Jersey casino authorities in 2004 and 2005 that he was worth approximately $3.6 billion. In 2005, Deutsche Bank evaluated his net worth as part of underwriting a $640 million construction loan it made to Mr. Trump’s Chicago condo and hotel project. The bank said his worth was $788 million, according to information presented by the author’s lawyers present during Mr. Trump’s deposition.
In his testimony, Mr. Trump discounted that and other low-ball evaluations as “ridiculous.” And he noted, “They [Deutsche Bank] still come up with numbers that are many times” what the book’s author, Mr. O’Brien, reported. In his interview Sunday, he said Deutsche Bank looked at some of his assets, not all of them, and didn’t do independent appraisals. A Deutsche Bank spokesman couldn’t be reached.
Mr. Trump said Sunday that Mr. O’Brien, author of “TrumpNation: The Art of Being the Donald,” will “wish he never heard of that God damn book” and predicted that “the publishing company will pay me hundreds of millions of dollars” as a result of the suit.
Mr. O’Brien, who is an editor at the New York Times, declined to comment through his attorney, citing the ongoing litigation.
In the deposition, Mr. Trump discussed how he determined the value of a residential development on old rail yards on Manhattan’s west side. According to the deposition, when a newsletter reporter writing about the project’s 2005 sale for $1.8 billion said Mr. Trump had a “small interest,” Mr. Trump wrote him a note. “You’re a real loser. Thanks for the nice story. Is 50% small?”
 AP Photo/Eugene Tanner |
| A Trump project on Hawaii’s Waikiki Beach |
But Mr. Trump had a 30% limited-partnership interest in the project, according to legal documents. A group of Hong Kong investors were the owners. Asked about this during the deposition, Mr. Trump explained that, in his eyes, he owned half because he gets paid fees for managing the buildings and because he didn’t have to put up cash in the deal. “In my own mind I’ve always felt that,” he said. “That 30% is equated to 50%,” he said. In his interview Sunday, Mr. Trump said he had owned the equivalent of “more than 50%.”
Mr. Trump often licenses his name to other developers in return for a fee or a cut of the sales. During the deposition, Mr. O’Brien’s lawyer, Andrew Ceresney, noted that Mr. Trump had claimed publicly that he had a major ownership in one such project.
For example, in a November 2007 Wall Street Journal interview cited by Mr. Ceresney, Mr. Trump said he had sold out units at an eponymous condo-hotel project in Hawaii. “The building is largely owned by me,” he said in the interview. But in the deposition, Mr. Ceresney produced the licensing agreement for the project. Mr. Trump wasn’t a major equity holder in the project, it showed, a fact Mr. Trump didn’t dispute.
“Because this is such a strong licensing agreement that I consider it to be a form of ownership,” Mr. Trump said. “I’d rather have this than own the building,” he said. Moments later he said: “I would say that it could be interpreted to be a form of ownership in the building.”
In the deposition, Mr. Trump is asked about the Bedminster, N.J. golf course, which financial statements showed had a net loss of $4.6 million in 2005. Has he ever done a financial analysis of his investment there?
“Yes, I’ve done mental projections,” he said, figuring he’d eventually make $120 million. He never put them down on paper. “You don’t really have to,” he said. Mr. Ceresney, asks: “Have you discounted in your mind for the risk that you won’t sell [memberships] at the prices you are anticipating?”
“I think I will, but it’s possible I won’t. But I think I will,” Mr. Trump said.
At one point during the deposition, Mr. Trump explained the importance of putting his projects in the best light possible. “Would you like me to say, oh, gee, the building is not doing well, blah, blah, blah, come by, the building — nobody talks that way. Who would ever talk that way?”
The Obama Making Home Affordable program expanded its $50 billion mortgage aid program on Thursday, announcing new measures that would help homeowners avoid a foreclosure if they don’t qualify for other assistance.
The expanded initiatives are intended to streamline the selling of homes that are upside down or transfer ownership back to the lender. Officials estimate up to 4 million borrowers will get their loans modified, but housing experts expect the number may be less than half of that. While the number of success stories is growing many housing counselors are complaining that the program has been slow getting off the ground.
“Our experience at the ground level has been - frustrating,” said a director of at Neighborhood Housing Services of Chicago. There have been a few success stories but the basic problem is that the program is very complicated and involved to set up. The government program, requires numerous changes to how the mortgage industry does business.
Since the program involves taxpayer dollars, the lending industry needs to make sure it sets up the program correctly, said Faith Schwartz, executive director of Hope Now, a mortgage industry group formed in response to the foreclosure crisis. “This is a very well-thought out plan,” she said. “People have to be a little bit patient.”"
So far, 14 companies that serve about three quarters of the mortgage market have signed up and will be paid for each loan they modify. The initiatives announced Thursday are aimed at ineligible homeowners. For borrowers who are unemployed or owe significantly more than their homes are worth, there are generally two options to avoid foreclosure.
1) The homeowner can sign the property title over to the lender in what is known as a deed in lieu of foreclosure.
2) A short sale can be pursued. This is where the homeowner can sell the property for less than the value of the loan a so-called “short sale.”
Mortgage companies would get up to $1,000 and borrowers would get up to $1,500 in relocation costs. However, many real estate agents complain that it’s difficult to get lenders to agree to a short sale.
For companies providing loan modification services many are using loan modification software such as Captaloans to help keep homeowners informed as to the status of their mortgage modification.
“I’m gonna sue you unless you remove that post!”
In a nice slap in the face to freedom of speech a company called ePerks sued a blogger who wrote a less than flattering review of the company. You can read the full story a here www.go-beyond-mls.com/ePerks/
The LA NFL stadium took another step forward and the city of Diamond Bar approved it. Looks like Walnut is a hold out. Here is latest news.
Diamond Bar city council votes 5-0 to approve stadium. Walnut, however, has decided to file a lawsuit claiming the developer did not do an adequate job assessing the environmental impact of traffic and noise. Diamond Bar, after expressing similar concerns took the negotiation route and has an agreement with Majestic Realty that will pay the city at least $700K a year if the number of events increase. The tentative agreement also calls for $20 million to the city for traffic improvements.
That agreement should serve as encouragement and perhaps something of a model for Chino Hills, which has expressed its own serious concerns about traffic from the project - particularly if the San Diego Chargers, with a large fan base from San Diego and Riverside counties, should move to the stadium in Industry.
Meanwhile, Walnut is waiting for its day in court by filling under the California Environmental Quality Act. The city put its fate in the hands of a judge who may or may not grant them the changes or amenities they seek. The chances are slim that any judge will stop the development, especially one in which the land for the development is not pristine or sensitive and is owned by a developer with an excellent reputation for building quality projects.
Dear Friends of the NFL Stadium Project,
Further, it is important that the City Council receives emails of support from the citizens of Diamond Bar. Below is a draft email that you can use and the contact information for the Diamond Bar City Council:“Thank you for the extensive negotiations that resulted in a settlement agreement for all the citizens of Diamond Bar. We want to show our support for the City Councils approval of this settlement agreement at the next City Council.”
This is the kind of story I like to read!
After reading a newspaper article’s report that a particular armored vehicle had dramatically cut fatality rates in Iraq, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and other senior defense officials traveled 80 miles northeast to Aberdeen Proving Ground in spring 2007 to see for themselves how the V-shaped hull of the costly Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicle deflected the worst blast effects of buried explosives.
Within weeks, and after some pointed demands for the MRAPs from Capitol Hill, Gates decided to make accelerated production of the vehicles his top priority, using a special task force that circumvented the department’s normal purchasing methods — and the initial opposition of the Army and the Marine Corps. The results were not perfect — an inspector general’s report said later that in its rush, the department overspent by tens of millions of dollars — but they were effective: Thousands of additional MRAPs flooded into Iraq and fatality rates dropped precipitously.
Aides say that the experience was like a baptism for Gates into the weirdness of the Pentagon’s weapons-procurement system, which experts have long assailed for buying the wrong arms and paying far too much. Hired by President George W. Bush mostly to fix the Iraq war, Gates initially left key buying decisions to his deputy, Gordon England. But they say Gates’s decision to buy more MRAPs and a similarly frustrating battle to build more unmanned aerial vehicles for use in Iraq persuaded him that he would have to wade deeply into the procurement mess.
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Gates concluded that “the building was not being responsive to the requests for these vehicles,” his spokesman, Geoff Morrell, said.
In calling yesterday for “a dramatic change in the way we acquire military equipment,” Gates showed his slow but palpable alienation from the so-called iron triangle of defense contractors, lawmakers and military service executives that has long promoted building the best weapons systems, no matter what the price. In the future, he said, weapons should be engineered to counter “the actual and prospective capabilities of known future adversaries,” not what a potential adversary might create with “unlimited time and resources.”
Gates has signaled his frustrations with the broken and “rigid” purchasing system for months, and in a January article in Foreign Affairs magazine, he noted that the pursuit of perfect solutions combined with a lack of flexibility and innovation had made it “necessary to bypass existing institutions and procedures to get the capabilities needed to protect U.S. troops and fight ongoing wars.”
But Gates sees this year as a rare opportunity to pursue politically controversial ideas, one of his top aides said, largely because of two factors. First, President Obama’s repeated claim that procurement reforms can increase efficiency and save expenses across the government will provide “top cover” for Gates in his head-butting with a group of service chiefs that proposed last year to alleviate their woes by adding tens of billions of dollars to the budget instead of making hard choices or undertaking major reforms.
Second, Gates feels the nation’s woeful economic status will give him added leverage in beating back attempts on Capitol Hill to continue financing weapons that troops don’t need or want. “It is important to remember that every defense dollar spent to overinsure against a remote or diminishing risk, or in effect to run up the score” is a dollar that might otherwise be spent on troops or winning the wars we are in, Gates said yesterday.
To some military experts, the two-year wait for Gates to take such a step since his December 2006 appointment has been long. Kori Schake, a National Security Council staff member during the Bush administration and adviser to Sen. John McCain’s presidential campaign, said that “with the important exception of his emphasis on MRAP acquisition, he submitted two budgets and several supplemental spending requests that were straight-line extensions of previous spending.”
Now, Schake said, Gates has called for ruthlessly separating appetites from real requirements, but Congress may “serve him up his own previous justifications for the very programs he proposes to cut.”
