Fighting for his life, the still conscious Reagan looked sideways at a nurse and asked her, “Am I going to make it?” She told him he was doing fine, but she had to look away when she burst into tears. She had been asked that by hundreds of patients, and they usually asked it when they knew they were dying.

When the limo pulled up to the hospital, Reagan insisted on walking through the front door. Instinctually, he knew that the nation didn’t need to see their newly elected President carried in on a gurney. Immediately upon entering the hospital, he collapsed. As one of the doctors said, “We just picked him up by his legs and arms, 195 pounds of dead weight.” When his shaken wife made it to the hospital, she was shocked at how gray he looked. He winked at her and told her, “Honey, I forgot to duck.” The doctors had cut away his blue suit, and as he lay there naked with tubes, drains and IV’s in him, he was surrounded not just by doctors and nurses, but also by Secret Service agents holding Uzi machine guns. They still didn’t know if this was part of a larger attack, and even during surgery, there were armed agents with guns drawn in the room.

Just as the anesthesiologist was about to put him under, Reagan took his oxygen mask off and got up on one elbow and said, “Well, I sure hope you’re all Republicans.” The lead surgeon, a die-hard liberal Democrat told him, “Mr. President, today we’re all Republicans.”

The one thing that comes across in the book is how truly close he was to death, much more so than we ever knew. After the shooting, the limo raced back to the White House where they knew they had maximum security, but when one of the Agents noticed blood coming out of the President’s mouth, he called for a quick u-turn and they raced to the nearest hospital. The doctors who saw Reagan said even an extra five minutes delay and he wouldn’t have made it.

When he woke up from the anesthetic, he had a breathing tube in his throat and couldn’t talk. He motioned for a pen and paper and, referring to his career as an actor, wrote down “Let’s re-shoot that last scene, and let’s take it from just before I left the hotel.” When Reagan’s political nemesis Tip O’Neil visited him in the hospital a few days later, he grabbed the President's hand and kissed him on the forehead. With tears streaming down his face, he said “God bless you, Mr. President. We’re all praying for you.” O’Neil then fell to his knees and prayed. When Reagan left the hospital 11 days later, he refused standard protocol of being taken to his car in a wheelchair. He wanted the nation to see him walking on his own power, looking vigorous, waving at the crowd, and smiling.

What comes across is Reagan’s humor and his poise, showing exactly what Hemingway meant when he defined courage as “grace under pressure.” The assassinations of Jack Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King had been traumatic for the nation, and the fact that Reagan survived made him seem larger than life. That he did it with grace and humor seemed to create a special bond between him and the American people, and even people who opposed his politics seemed to like him as a person and an American hero.



The debate about government's role in the mortgage biz continues, although there was a significant story out yesterday. President Obama has concluded that the government will have to play a major role in the mortgage market going forward. Fannie and Freddie would probably be preserved under the White House plan although with different names and under different constraints, operating more as utilities. And the government would back mortgage securities issued by the firms but not the company's themselves. The White House isn't certain whether to unveil its ideas formally ahead of the 2012 elections. (Is that how things are now - our government is frozen for over a year prior to any election???) .

Here's the quiz for the day. What state had more than 82,000 licensed mortgage brokers just four years ago, but now only has 10,600 licensed loan originators? It is also the same state of which the highest elevation is 345 above sea level: YearAroundSunshine.

Opt-Out Instructions: Credit reporting agencies will put your name on a 'target list' within 24 hours after your credit report is ordered in connection with a mortgage. They will sell this list. As the result you will receive phone calls and junk mail with offers of loans, insurance, etc. from a variety of unscreened vendors. If you wish to avoid receiving this unwanted solicitation, either call 1-800-567-8688 or go to www.optoutprescreen.com and follow the instructions. It takes 5 business days to process your request to opt out. How pathetic this cold call tactics are..I pity the the many that fall for this game.

Every month we hear about existing home sales, with the usual quote from someone at the NAR. (This time around, Lawrence Yun, NAR chief economist, said, "Affordability conditions this year have been the most favorable on record dating back to 1970, but many buyers are being held back because banks are offering financing to only the most highly qualified borrowers, ignoring a large share of otherwise creditworthy buyers. Those potential buyers represent the difference between an uneven recovery and a much more robust housing market that could stimulate additional economic activity and create jobs." Many in the credit & mortgage industry would say that "qualified" and "creditworthy" are subjective, and that NAR members rarely underwrite loans and are better at helping to buy & sell properties.)

Face it: there is no quick fix for the problems in Europe, or in this country. The situation in Europe is worsening, and the fear that sovereign debt would spread has done just that: French, German, and Spanish banks are now viewed as vulnerable since they hold a good amount of poor European debt from Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal, and Ireland. Germany and Holland can't save the rest of Europe. German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Nicolas Sarkozy said they will encourage euro-zone nations to more closely integrate their economies, proposing stricter oversight and deficit rules to tackle the sovereign-debt crisis. The leaders rejected the idea of expanding the region's rescue fund or introducing Eurobonds.

Do the problems over there influence our mortgage rates? Well, to be concise and simplistic, European concerns have not pushed our rates higher, and in fact, in a roundabout way, have helped to push US Treasury debt rates lower, and mortgages along with them. But analysts are quick to point out that the trouble there is likely to spread to other economies, especially if austerity measures are implemented. And great rates are only part of the lending picture - the borrower and the property still have to qualify.

RE/MAX released a survey of 53 cities, showing that July home sales dropped 12.7% from the previous month. RE/MAX blamed tightened lending standards, concern about the overall economy and bad appraisals that reportedly killed many transactions. In addition, RE/MAX also said many lenders are already using the lower loan limits for government guaranteed or insured mortgages set to take effect in October.

You would think that 55-plus year lows for mortgage rates would come around, well, every 55-plus years or so. As it turns out, that's not exactly so; in these unusually difficult economic times, perhaps 55 years just isn't as long as it used to be.

Fresh record lows for mortgage rates are great, for those who can access them. For many others, they are little more than a mirage, or at best a constant reminder of the bleak economic situation. Certainly, for many people, they seem to becoming available at the expense of an emptied retirement portfolio.

The European debt crisis shows no sign of abating, and fears of the formation of new U.S. recession continue to grow. Several economic reports which were released this week serve to underscore that potential, even as investors flee to investments which yield almost nothing. The ten-year Treasury dipped below 2 percent this week, the first time this has occurred in some 61 years. To the extent that collapsing interest rates signal a recession, we certainly have our clues in place in that regard.

But all is not lost, even though financial markets are again being battered. Even amid poor economic numbers come those which point to increasing stability, if nothing else. Even if at low levels, stability is a preferable alternative to outright decline, and a market must find a bottom before it can improve.

Consumer Comfort levels remain lousy, if less so, during the week ending August 14. The minus 48.3 level for the Bloomberg index was marginally better than the prior week, but still remains closer to recent bottoms than highs.

So where do we go from here? In terms of mortgage rates, it just doesn't get any better than this. In terms of the economy, there remains plenty of room for improvement. Of course, improvement will bring higher mortgage rates, whenever it may come. It should be noted that the markets can become accustomed to anything, given enough time, but fear and panic bring irrational responses that can engender even more fear and panic, and before you know it a lot of damage can be done (and plenty already has occurred).

Unfortunately, there's not a lot of economic data due next week to break the market's fixation on the troubles which still confront us. What is available -- covering mostly July -- may serve to reinforce the focus. That will no doubt be seen in the revised GDP report for the second quarter and the final Consumer Sentiment reading for August, among a handful of others. However, given the small overall decline in rates this week relative to the more pronounced decline in Treasuries, we'll hope for a pretty flat week for rates next week, barring any new panic.