While MSNBC reports that Home sales rise 9.4 percent in September, much of that was due to a special program for first time home buyers, like the “Cash For Clunkers” program, that ended in September.

The Miami Herald has a different take on the situation: `Shadow market’ clouds housing recovery

The number of properties heading to the market may be much larger than anyone thought and appears likely to swamp South Florida with more deeply discounted homes, clouding the prospects for a housing recovery.

Figures from the Florida Association of Realtors released Friday show that South Florida’s median home prices have stabilized over the past several months and sales are up year-over-year as the number of properties on the market shrinks.

But an analysis of the so-called shadow market done for The Miami Herald suggests the number of homes and condos in the pipeline to come on the market in South Florida is nearly five times larger than all residential properties currently listed for sale by Realtors. LPS Applied Analytics, a firm that supplies loan data to the federal government, did the analysis on the shadow market, which refers to properties that will eventually be listed for sale — because they are about to enter foreclosure, are in foreclosure or already owned by banks.

Banks are holding a lots of houses off the market waiting for better prices, so they can cover more of their losses. The houses are empty, but they haven’t been listed yet. A South Florida realtor did his own check and found that locally more than two-thirds of the bank-owned houses hadn’t been listed for sale.

This doesn’t even include all of the commercial real estate foreclosures that have or will occur. This isn’t even close to being over.

CNN has the latest from Florida’s best-known Congresscritter: Rep. Grayson calls Cheney a vampire

NEW YORK (CNN)– Controversial freshman Rep. Alan Grayson, who has become famous for attacking the Republicans’ health care plan, went on the attack again Friday night, calling former Vice President Dick Cheney a vampire for his recent criticism of the Obama administration’s handling of the war in Afghanistan.

Well, that would explain the pallor and the new crypt dungeon basement under Blair House that Dick had built.

You have to wonder where Grayson gets those 1930s ties that he wears, and he really should apologize to Neanderthals for comparing them to Republicans.

The search is still on to find someone to run against Grayson, despite all of the huffing and puffing the FGOP does.

The Northwest Florida Daily News is my local puppy trainer. It is/was part of the now bankrupt Freedom Communications media empire started in Orange County, California to be sure that as many people as possible got a dose of libertarian opinion. The Cato Institute has supplied a lot of editorials to the paper over the years.

Today I read two of their opinion writers and was somewhat taken aback by the hard dose of reality they wrote about.

First there was Del Stone who wrote about Fox News in: Be wary of the ‘fair and balanced’ shtick. Mr. Stone tells of seeing a newscast from Fox News while he was waiting to get his car serviced. He was not a happy camper with what he saw.

Mr. Stone did not believe the news was presented in a “fair and balanced” manner, and went on to point out that there had to be a separation between the news and opinion, noting that columns in the Daily News are clearly labeled as such with the author’s name prominently displayed, and that the news should be an unbiased presentation of the facts.

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Well, CNN says that Obama declares H1N1 emergency

Washington (CNN) — President Obama has declared a national emergency to deal with the “rapid increase in illness” from the H1N1 influenza virus.

“The 2009 H1N1 pandemic continues to evolve. The rates of illness continue to rise rapidly within many communities across the nation, and the potential exists for the pandemic to overburden health care resources in some localities,” Obama said in a statement.

If you are wondering what communities are affected, the Weather Underground has a Flu Map based on Center for Disease Control data that shows that Hawaii has local outbreaks, and South Carolina, New Jersey, and Massachusetts Connecticut have regional out breaks.

Oh, yeah, the rest of the entire country have widespread outbreaks.

The State of New York canceled their threat of punishing health professionals who don’t get H1N1 vaccinations. They figured that the fact that there is a shortage of vaccine sort of made the threat… well, stupid.

Big pharma has once again failed to anticipate their ability to perform their primary function, providing drugs and vaccines. I guess they were busy editing their television commercials. Not much the US government can do, since vaccines are another thing that are no longer made in the US.