If you’re a business, civic group, arts organization or good cause, and you’re actively using Twitter to share your community news, events, initiatives, or even reviews, we’ll automatically retweet your messages to our community follower base.

Why?

We firmly believe in the power of social media at the local level. Most of your daily errands, your business and your livelihood is really done within walking and driving distance. We want to empower you to be able to reach your local audience via our 300 Twitter feeds.

Again, we are community service media. We believe in Buy Local. We want to help our local causes. We will never charge you a cent for helping you get your word out, ever.

How?

You can tweet through our Breaking News Twitter feed (whatever city you are from) simply by adding our Breaking News Twitter handle (like @breakingsfnews) at the end of your tweet. And follow our Twitter feed @theBNN so we’re alerted to you.

The tweet will show up instantly like this on our Breaking News Twitter feed:

We’ll authorize you

When you send out a tweet to us the first time, it will not get retweeted automatically. We will do it manually.

We will check your Twitter feed. If it meets our standards of good local community content (no spam or self promotional Twitter history), we will authorize you to allow you to tweet through our Breaking News Twitter feed any time simply by mentioning the local Breaking News Twitter feed (like @breakingsfnews).

We will tweet back to you that you have been authorized. We use Grouptweet to facilitate this all for you and highly recommend them for developing your own collaborative Twitter system (easier to use than CoTweet and Hootsuite!)

Oh, and contact me at @pkitano or thebreakingnewsnetwork@gmail if you’re still unsure about these instructions.

Our Twitter feeds are managed by locals. We’re looking forward to helping you get your word out!

If you're worried about the future of home ownership in America, you have good reason. The nation's economy is struggling. But it's not just the rising unemployment rate (up to 9.2% in June 2011) that's deferring home ownership for many. Some outlandish proposals on Capitol Hill are also weighing heavily on the hearts and minds of home owners, sellers, and potential buyers.

But despite financial woes, a decline in home prices (down 4.6% in May 2011 year over year, according to NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF REALTORS®' stats), and a ludicrous legislative attack, a new poll suggests that the dream of owning a home is still alive and well in the United States. According to research (http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-20075544-503544.html?tag=cbsnewsLeadStoriesArea) conducted by CBS News and The New York Times, a whopping nine out of 10 Americans say home ownership is still an important goal. More than half of those surveyed described it as "very important." Did you hear that, Congress?

 With so much enthusiasm for home ownership, it's tough to understand how some lawmakers are blatantly disregarding their constituents and proposing legislation that would further cripple the market. According to the CBS/NYT poll, almost half of Americans believe the government should be doing more to improve the housing market. But the hard reality is that some in Washington are putting the American dream out of reach.

Federal regulators, for instance, in an attempt to tighten lending standards, have put forth a proposal that would punish home buyers who put down less than a 20% downpayment by hiking their interest rates almost two percentage points. The proposal would create a high downpayment hurdle for first-time and low-income home buyers and make refinancing much more expensive for credit-worthy home owners.

If you agree that 20% down is just too high for hard-working, creditworthy Americans, send a message to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, which is accepting comments until Aug. 1.

Another important revelation from the poll is that nine in 10 of those surveyed say it's important to maintain the mortgage interest deduction; six in 10 call the MID "very important." Yet the President and some members of Congress have suggested repealing the longtime tax credit (http://www.houselogic.com/blog/taxes/home-owners-have-good-reason-hide-uncle-sam-wants-more/), which would mean an annual hit of more than $3,000 to the average itemizing home owner. So why is the government ignoring the voices of those they were elected to represent?

 America has spoken: The government needs to take note, advance home ownership, and abandon proposals that would hinder the housing market. If our representatives won't listen, the 2012 elections are a great opportunity to find some who will.

 What do you think of the various federal efforts to tighten downpayment rules and reduce home owner tax breaks?

Posted via email from Sammy Giordano’s Posterous