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McNew/GettyLindsay Lohan reportedly entered rehab in an apparent attempt to convince the judge to either dismiss or reduce her 90-day jail sentence.

Troubled actress Lindsay Lohan has reportedly entered rehab in an apparent attempt to curry favor with the California judge who wants to lock her up for 90 days.

The fallen starlet was pictured entering the Pickford Lofts facility Wednesday, according to X17online.com.

The clinic was set up by O.J. Simpson's former attorney, Robert Shapiro, who has been hired by Lohan to handle her on-going legal woes, TMZ.com reported.

Shapiro established the facility after his son Brent died of a drug overdose in 2005.

On her first day at the center, Lohan received visits on Wednesday from her mom, Dina, sister Ali, ex-girlfriend Samantha Ronson, assistant Eleanor and alleged new love Eilat Anschel, according to X17.

Her assistant brought in pillows and bags from Blick art supply, a case of Sprite and toilet paper, while Ronson arrived about 10 p.m. and stayed for 45 minutes, reported the celebrity Web site.

Shapiro will reportedly attempt to convince Los Angeles Judge Marsha Revel to put Lohan in a detox clinic and either dismiss or reduce her 90-day jail sentence.

Lohan, 24, was sentenced to time behind bars followed by 90 days at an inpatient rehab center last week for violating the terms of her probation in her DUI case.

She must surrender herself in Revel's courtroom on July 20.

Mallin/BloombergOne in 78 homes have been issued a foreclosure warning in the first half of 2010.

Buying the house was the easy part. Keeping the home is another story. 

More than one million homes are facing foreclosure, new numbers indicate. So far, nearly 528,000 homes have already been repossessed, according to RealtyTrac Inc. 

"That would be unprecedented," Rick Sharga, a senior vice president at RealtyTrac, said. 

The wave of foreclosures stems from banks and lenders trying to clear the logjam of borrowers who have fallen way behind on loans. 

While the report isn't all bad news — the number of foreclosures is down 5 percent in 2010 compared to the last six months of 2009 — it reflects a housing market still mired in crisis. 

Between January and June of this year, one in 78 homes — 1.7 million in all — got a foreclosure warning. 

While banks have pulled back their pressure on delinquent borrowers, it is only to avoid flooding the housing market with more foreclosed homes. 

"The banks are really sort of controlling or managing the dial on how fast these things get processed," Sharga said. 

Despite the Obama administration's $75 billion effort to stem the foreclosure outbreak, at least a third of 1.2 million homeowners who sought help have dropped out of the government's aid program. 

The immediate outlook doesn't look to good, either. 

Even if the economy doesn't get worse, Sharga says it will take until 2013 for banks to clear its backlog of foreclosed homes. 

Good economic news, however, has been hard to find lately. 

The unemployment rate is at 9.5% and more than a million people will lose their jobless benefits in July. 

And the June housing numbers showed that prices of new and previously-owned homes dropped to its lowest-level in 10 years. Those prices stand to drop even lower as more foreclosed homes hit the market. 

"The downward pressure from foreclosures will persist," Celia Chen, senior director of Moody's Economy.com said.

"Prices will be very weak well into 2012." 

RealtyTrac, a foreclosure listing service, says in a typical year 100,000 homes are repossessed by the banks. 

Overall, Nevada has been the hardest hit in 2010, with one in 17 homes facing foreclosure. Arizona, Florida, California and Utah round out the top five states in foreclosure trouble. 

With News Wire Service 

Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/money/2010/07/15/2010-07-15_foreclosures_in_us_could_hit_1_million_as_housing_market_continues_to_struggle_r.html#ixzz0tlnDaKFa

http://www.wistv.com/global/story.asp?s=12800751

MPD: Mother Took Child To Drug Deal

Shaun Chaiyabhat

8:23 PM CDT, July 14, 2010

                                              House Democrat’s frustration with what they feel is an under-appreciative White House blew into the open Wednesday.

Democrats have been boiling for four days over comments by White House press secretary Robert Gibbs, who suggested his party could lose control of the House this fall.

Irritation with the spokesman’s foray into political prognostication have exposed tensions between the two ends of Pennsylvania Avenue that is centered on the feeling among some House lawmakers that the White House has not given the lower chamber due credit for an unprecedented string of accomplishments.

The House has approved a controversial healthcare overhaul and tackled difficult votes on climate change and financial regulatory reform, only to see legislation languish for months in the Senate.

More broadly, some Democrats complain, the White House has not made an aggressive enough push to keep the House in Democratic hands this fall.

“It was the straw that broke the camel’s back,” one Democratic campaign strategist working on 2010 elections said of Gibbs’s comments.

Lawmakers in the lower chamber have taken note that the president has held many more fundraising and campaign events for Senate candidates than House candidates. During the recent July 4 recess alone, one campaign aide pointed out, the president stumped for two Senate candidates — Majority Leader Harry Reid in Nevada and Robin Carnahan in Missouri — but did nothing for House candidates.

“There has been less of a focus on House Democrats and what we’re trying to do here and on our electoral prospects than on the Senate,” one Democratic aide said.

“The end result is a sense by some members that they’re being ignored,” the aide said.

House Democrats planned to vent their frustrations with the White House’s political strategy during a Wednesday meeting with President Obama.

While Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and other Democratic leaders want to move on from the flap, the speaker, as leader of House Democrats, has a responsibility to take their concerns to the White House, the aide said.

“She had to stand up and fight for them,” the aide said.

Rank-and-file members were outraged over the comments from Gibbs, who told “Meet the Press” the GOP was within “striking distance” of winning the House given the number of seats in play.

“I think he’s wrong. He clearly hasn’t evaluated or examined our House races,” Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.) said. “We’re not going to lose the House. You can use mathematics to look at anything, and politically our members are in very good shape, and I think we’re going to have a better-than-average election cycle.”

Rep. Bill Pascrell (D-N.J.) said the White House and House Democrats were plainly not on the same page.

He said Gibbs was “off the wall” in his statement on NBC. “That was something that should have been said to the caucus and not glibly stated on national television on Sunday,” Pascrell said.

“If the administration is trying to tell us ‘stay away from us with an arm’s length,’ they did a good job. We don’t need a wake-up call. The White House needs a wake-up call on the politics of these issues.”

Democratic leaders have publicly downplayed the Gibbs comments as merely stating an obvious fact, but Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) on Wednesday also suggested the White House press secretary should have known better.

“People need to be aware of how their comments will be interpreted in a political environment,” he said.

Asked if Gibbs had misspoken, Van Hollen replied: “I’m just saying people need to be aware of how their comments will be interpreted in a political environment. Many people interpret that to mean that the Democrats will lose the House when he himself has been very clear that that is not the case and he does not believe that.”

Democrats were particularly frustrated at the timing of the Gibbs statement, coming as the party felt it had forced Republicans onto the defensive by highlighting gaffes by House GOP leader John Boehner (Ohio), who compared the financial meltdown to an “ant,” and Rep. Joe Barton (Texas), who apologized to BP CEO Tony Hayward at a congressional hearing.

They also want more help from Obama on the campaign trail. While it is clear that the president could not be helpful to some vulnerable Democrats who hail from conservative districts where Obama is unpopular, there are several districts where Obama is wanted, the Democratic campaign strategist said.

The message to the president: Come visit where you can, and send money where you can’t.

The strategist mentioned Rep. Steve Driehaus’s district in Ohio, where the congressman was helped in 2008 by first-time Obama voters, as well as races in the president’s home states of Illinois and Hawaii. “It’s a question of actions,” the strategist said. “There’s an onus on [the White House] to do more.”

House Democrats aired their grievances with the White House to an Obama staffer Tuesday night during a closed caucus meeting.

Pelosi confronted that White House aide, Dan Turton, after her members lashed out at Gibbs for undermining the party’s electoral chances and handing a talking point to Republicans during his appearance on “Meet the Press.”

 At the White House on Wednesday, Gibbs described his relationship with Pelosi as “cordial.”

“Of course the opinion of the Speaker of the House matters to me,” he said. “It matters to Democrats throughout this country.”

Heaping praise on Pelosi, Gibbs added: “The work that the House and the Speaker have done over the past 18 months in making tough choices and making tough votes and in passing the agenda of this president have — have been monumental.”

Jordan Fabian contributed reporting.

This story was originally posted at 1:38 p.m. and updated at 8:37 p.m.

http://news.yahoo.com/s//newsnet5/20100714/ts_newsnet5/newsnet5_ts3110

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0710/39708.html

Critics slam Reid immigration remark
Scott Wong
July 14, 2010 08:23 AM

Immigration reform critics are seizing on Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's comments this week that seemed to downplay the number of illegal immigrants working construction jobs in Nevada, even though a recent study found that his home state had the largest percentage of undocumented workers in the country.

When a reporter from KLAS-TV in Las Vegas told Reid a 2009 Pew Hispanic Center report found 17 percent of the nation’s construction workers were undocumented, the Nevada Democrat replied: “That may be some place, but it’s not here in Nevada.” 

Political opponents have tried to twist Reid’s words, saying he believes there are no illegal workers in Nevada. But Reid spokesman Jim Manley on Wednesday clarified his boss’ comments, saying the majority leader was simply disputing the reporter’s statistic and did not say the state has zero illegal workers.

In the interview, Reid was also asked why he blocked an amendment introduced last year by Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) that would have required all construction firms working on economic stimulus projects to use E-Verify, the federal online system that allows employers to check whether someone is eligible to work in the country.

“That’s the reason we need to do comprehensive immigration reform,” Reid said. “We cannot do it piecemeal.”

Manley said Reid supports E-Verify and has worked to ensure the program does not expire. But Reid believes the current system is flawed because it sometimes penalizes American workers and can be susceptible to identity fraud.

"Improving our employment verification system is only a partial solution, however, to the exploitation of illegal labor and the undercutting of American wages,” Manley said in a statement to POLITICO. “Our broken immigration system can be fixed only through comprehensive immigration reform.”

Facing a tough challenge this fall from tea party darling Sharron Angle, Reid has been touting the success of the Democrat-backed stimulus plan, saying it has created jobs and helped repair the nation’s battered economy.

But Reid’s remarks on immigration have provided ammunition for opponents, who have tried to paint him as out of touch with average Americans.

“When you consider that Harry Reid has been splitting his time lately between his Ritz-Carlton condo in Washington and high-dollar fundraisers with trial lawyers in Canada, it’s easy to understand why he honestly may not believe that there are illegal workers in Nevada.,” said Brian Walsh, a spokesman for the National Republican Senatorial Committee. “But for those who live and work in the real world, and particularly for his constituents in Nevada, America’s broken borders and the lack of enforcement at construction sites is a very serious problem that is hurting American jobs.”

Stand With Arizona, a group backing the state’s tough new immigration law, uploaded the KLAS-TV interview on YouTube and posted a link on its website, standwitharizona.com. The site links to its Facebook page, which has more than 321,000 fans.

“Just when you thought the open borders crowd could not possibly be more out of touch with American workers, comes this gem,” the group posted on its website. “Sen. Maj. Leader Reid (D-NV), even when confronted with multiple sources of data, denies both that illegal aliens work on construction jobs in his state at ALL (they do), or that E-Verify is effective in weeding out illegals from jobs in the first place (it is). … As usual with his ilk, he repeats the phony mantra of ‘comprehensive reform’ again and again like a malfunctioning robot on Star Trek.”

According to the Pew report, “A Portrait of Unauthorized Immigrants in the United States,” Nevada had 170,000 illegal immigrants in its labor force in 2008, or 12.2 percent, more than twice the national rate of 5.4 percent. California was next with 1,850,000 illegal immigrants, representing 9.9 percent of its labor pool. Arizona had about 300,000, or 9.8 percent.

http://www.politico.com/singletitlevideo.html?bcpid=19407224001&bctid=114750622001

Bubba's back

Clinton joins W.H. business meeting

 MATT NEGRIN | 07/14/10 3:04 PM

Former President Clinton (right) will meet with President Obama Wednesday. AP 

Former President Clinton returned to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. on Wednesday to meet with President Obama, Vice President Biden and business leaders, the White House announced. They were scheduled to "discuss new ways to create jobs in the private sector and strengthen the partnership between the public and private sectors to make new investments in the clean energy industry," according to White House guidance.

The meeting, at 2:35 p.m., was closed press.

In Wednesday's White House briefing, press secretary Robert Gibbs denied that Clinton was called because Obama needed extra support. Rather, Gibbs said, the Clinton Global Initiative is particularly engaged with one of the topics of discussion: making buildings more energy efficient.

Gibbs added that the opportunity for Obama to meet with Clinton was too great to be turned down, and he said of the former president's relationship with the current White House generally, "I think it would be crazy not to have a real popular former president out campaigning as he has."

Tom Abate

Chronicle Staff Writer

San Francisco Chronicle

July 14, 2010 04:00 AM

For the first time on record, senior citizens outnumber teens in the labor force as the Great Recession accentuates trends that make it harder for young people to find jobs and more likely for older workers to delay retirement. 

This historic crossover is revealed in data compiled by Bloomberg News showing that 6.6 million people over age 65 worked or looked for work in the first six months of the year, versus 5.9 million 16- to 19-year-olds. 

That analysis is based on federal records that started in 1948 when there were 4.4 million teens in the labor force compared with 2.9 million people over age 65. 

Experts say that over the past decade older workers have tended to hang on to their paychecks longer, owing to sagging stock portfolios and falling home prices. 

This shift toward an aging workforce has been disastrous for 16- to 19-year-olds, who face unemployment rates of 25 percent nationwide and 34 percent in California, similar to the Great Depression. 

"It's killing kids," said Andrew Sum, director of the center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University. "We're tossing our future into the trash bin."

Economists agree that youngsters, especially those who lack college degrees, need entry-level jobs to help them acquire the discipline, confidence and motivation they need to succeed later in life. 

Slammed hard

The recession hurts. 

"Young people, as is always the case, get slammed hard because they are last hired, first fired," said Heidi Shierholz with the liberal Economic Policy Institute.

Some economists argue that high rates of teen unemployment make it time to rethink minimum-wage laws that put youngsters at a disadvantage compared with older workers who may compete for the same jobs.

For instance, the Bloomberg data cited a Labor Department report on employment trends in food preparation and serving - a strong teen job sector. From 2000 through 2009, the report found that employment among 16- to 19-year-olds fell by 242,000 jobs while the number of workers 55 and older increased by 128,000. 

"We need to create a lower minimum wage for teens to lower the cost of hiring and training entry-level employees," said Michael Saltsman, a research fellow at the conservative Employment Policies Institute. "What we would get for this is more jobs for our teens to learn career skills." 

Such a policy is anathema to Shierholz, who thinks a better way to improve job prospects for younger workers is to make Medicare and full Social Security benefits available at age 64 for the next two years to coax more older workers into retirement. 

Sum, the academic expert, argued for wage subsidies for employers who hire teens and better school-based programs to help young people find jobs. 

Young people at work

Some Bay Area youths have already benefited from such efforts. 

Sierra Faulkner, a 17-year-old student at Albany High School, parlayed a job-shadowing day at Chez Panisse in Berkeley into an unpaid internship at the internationally renowned restaurant. "I get paid in knowledge," said Faulkner, who said her once-a-week restaurant gig has taught her how to work at a fast pace. 

Cherisha Leung, a 20-year-old resident of Noe Valley in San Francisco, said she went looking for her first job at age 15 and ever since has worked through programs like Enterprise for High School Students and the United Way to find everything from odd jobs to career-track training.

This summer she is working as a paid intern at a real estate firm where she's getting exposure to her planned career in design and communications. 

"Little things here and there have built me into a pretty well-rounded individual," she said.

Forty-year McDonald's employee Ray Aronson was in the teen demographic when he started in food service. He's now in the fast-growing over-55 worker crowd.

Photo: Michael Andrews MICHAEL McANDREW / Hartford Courant TPN 

 

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/07/14/MN7K1EDSTA.DTL&tsp=1#ixzz0tfp7nd8I