(From Burnt Orange Report)

And another one bites the dust -- probably. The Ellis County Observer (in a post made by the last Republican to challenge Barton in the primary) today wrote that Barton may be retiring in 2010:

What started as one of those "off the record" conversations was confirmed by numerous Arlington-area Republican sources of mine who have kept talking about the 2010 retirement announcement (supposedly) by Congressman Joe Barton, R-Ennis.

TX-6 is in North Texas, and contains all of Ellis County, Navarro County, Freestone County, Leon County, Houston County, and a part of Limestone County, Trinity County, and Tarrant County. It runs on a "backslash-diagonal" angle from Arlington & Fort Worth in the Northwest to Trinity in the Southeast. (See district map here).

The House will likely approve a comprehensive housing finance bill intended to stabilize U.S. housing and financial markets this week. One key component of the plan is inclusion of Community Development Block Grant funding to help communities purchase and renovate foreclosed and abandoned homes. These grants, proposed by the Center for American Progress and Enterprise Community Partners in its January 2008 Great American Dream Neighborhood Stabilization, or GARDNS Plan, are designed to turn around communities that have been devastated by the foreclosure crisis.

My mother-in-law is 80 years old. She is an invalid and has lived with my wife and I for the past 3 years. Her late husband was an employee of General Motors, and GM provides a surviving spouse's pension and health care coverage to Mom. At least they will until the new year. Here's the letter Mom received today from GM. It's a real kick in the teeth on top of many of her favorite doctors no longer accepting Medicare. Some won't even accept any insurance at all and have reverted to cash basis only.

 If you ever want to see why this nation is totally screwed with the GOP at the helm, then look no further than this little gem from the AP.

crossposted from unbossed

For years, I have warned that pensions are at high risk A few months ago, unbossed noted that the Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation (PBGC) was engaged in a dangerous strategy for financing pension shutdowns. Now it is ready to take additional actions you need to be aware of. They will affect defined benefit pensions and most likely have an impact on other retirement benefits.

  It was probably pretty obvious but there is a damning report out yesterday that paints a stark picture: the collapse of the housing bubble has created a savings and retirement crisis for millions of Americans who face a bleak future.

Conservative apologists are perplexed.  They can't seem to understand why Americans are so worried about their economic struggles.  After all, unemployment is down from historical highs, we haven't had a quarter of negative economic growth yet, the Dow is still high relative to prior downturns, so what's the problem?

Maybe if they actually listened to just one average American instead of figuring out ways to place the numbers in the right combination to make all look well, they'd get their answer.  Hint: it has nothing to do with what they hear on the nightly news.

Ann Shea, 47, an attorney who lives in Butte, said the nation faces hardships that trump patriotism.

"The issue is, we're paying almost five bucks a gallon in gas, we're in a war we shouldn't be in, and the current administration, which is the one McCain will carry on, is just lying to the American people to get what they want," she said. "Obama's not about that."

Admittedly I am not an expert, but I'm supposed to be able to do this on my own.  Right?  Motley Fool says so.  The first rule of investing is do not invest money you cannot afford to lose.  But the majority of people cannot afford to lose their retirement.  Over the last few years, people have had even less money they can afford to lose.  Nevertheless financial planners uniformly recommend stock-based retirement in instruments where the principal is at serious risk.  They only advise adjusting the allocation between stocks  and bonds as you get closer to retirement.

My parents were and are hippies.  My father was kicked out of his house after coming home from a rock concert when he was 16.  His parents didn't like the fact that he had long hair and smoked pot.  My mother left her parents house at 16 after years of conflict and abuse within her family.  One of the defining moments of her life came when she graduated high school and her dad refused to attend because my mom was wearing a peace dove on her robe.

The baby boomer generation did not save enough money to retire.

One of the miraculous things about the Obama candidacy is that we can support him for months--whether by giving, volunteering, standing on our respective internet soapboxes and shouting our views to the heavens, or merely voting--and then find out something new about him or his platform that makes us fall in love all over again.

Believe it or not, Obama has a serious plan to help restore Americans' confidence that old age will not leave them destitute. If the war incites my generation's outrage like nothing else, then surely the thought of what awaits us at the end of our working lives triggers our despair more than Armageddon itself (for us, after eight years of George W. Bush, Armageddon is the mere stuff of Will Smith movies).

Retirement is the issue so ugly for us that even the contemplation of it dispirits us before we even consider actual solutions. Thinking about it provokes a dread that overwhelms reason. Hope is pretty alien to this territory.

Change That Works for You: Columbus, OH

At a town hall meeting in Columbus, Barack Obama continued his Change that Works for You tour on June 13, 2008, discussing social security.

Vintage Obama.
It was touching towards the end when he got personal and spoke of his 85 year old grandmother.
Obama referred to secure retirement as a promise that was kept for Michelle's parents and for his grandmother. Of the latter, he said, "I keep on trying to convince her to come live with us, and for some reason she would rather live in Hawaii."
He joked, "I don't know what she's thinking." As the audience laughs, he he points to a guy and says, "You know what she's thinking. Well, you've got that Hawaiian shirt on."

Read this article and tell me what is both remarkable and at the same time unremarkable about it.

More dip early into funds for retirement

http://www.cnn.com/...

Read it and weep, folks.

This makes me feel especially bad today because a family member of mine has been laid off her job, and will be moving out of the area.  I will not relay too many details because she wants to keep it private for now, but suffice to say this 59 year old woman, mother of four, is going to live with her 80 year old mother because it's all she can afford to do.

I wish I could help her, but I am barely making it myself.

Mothers Day has me thinking about more than flowers. What do we really want for the mothers of the world? I've put together this video with some thoughts about what we need to do to make sure that mothers (and all the rest of us) don't end up barely surviving in old age on just Social Security. I'd love to hear your thoughts, so leave me a comment, or write to me at teresa@heinzoffice.org. We're all in this together, and I look forward to learning about your concerns and what you think we should be doing to make every day Mothers Day. [There's a transcript below the video.]

There's so much discussion about the economy and what can be done or proposed to enhance it that I felt that a diary dedicated to the economy might be something that others (besides me) were interested in!).

I'm currently a single woman age 50 and live alone.  I've been through the raising of children and having to provide for them as a single parent.  Between the 'gas tax holiday' and the 'tax incentive checks' and some of the recent media attention on our economy there are some basic, overlooked facts.

Now we all know and anticipate that prices are going to go up, it's just the way it is - I'm grounded in reality whether I want to be or not.  As a grandmother I wonder how my children manage today - especially when compared to when I was bringing them up!

I just got done reading an eye-opening new book: Leisureville, by Andrew Blechman. This book rips the shiny veneer off of the age-segregated retirement cities of Florida and Arizona and shows them for what they are: corporate-run ghettos where fear-stricken old white people can escape from the horrible realities of modern society.

More after the jump...

  I happened to see a cartoon recently in which one person says to another, "My 401(k) feels like a 201(k)". That is, indeed, one of the other, less-talked about facts that many people are facing in the more-visible credit-crisis gripping our economy. You would think that that reality would force a serious rethinking of the foolishness of the 401(k) system and the "opportunity society" mantra. But, you would be wrong--at least if you observed the debate in political and elite circles.