Believe It or Not!

Win or lose, it's worth remembering these people who played us for infants this election season. Because there's one thing certain about political bunco artists: They'll be back again, and again, and again.

Footnotes:

1. After nearly a century in the city, Dudley Perkins Harley-Davidson is indeed leaving town.

"There will be no more homeless, no more crap and piss in the doorway in the morning," says proprietor Tom Perkins, of his new digs in a South San Francisco industrial park, where he'll move this October. "Basically it's become very hard to have a motorcycle dealership in the heart of San Francisco."

2. You heard it here first.

Hedge-fund managers, builders, commodities suppliers, investors, and speculating sharpies together predict that the average price for a San Francisco home — already an extraordinarily overpriced commodity at around $800,000 — will rise by about $40,000 during the coming year.

A new hedging contract for San Francisco housing prices, which began trading on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange three weeks ago, Monday showed one-year hedging contracts priced to reflect a bet that the cost of an average metro Bay Area home rising by about 5 percent between this March and next May. While that's nothing like recent returns of near 20 percent in some past years, it still suggests a market remaining phenomenally out of whack, when one compares monthly loan payments on homes bought this year with the much smaller amount the same residential property might fetch in rent.

Now, stop buying clothes for those kids (or paying for preschool), and save for that $160,000 down payment. Suits say our real estate market is still Bubbleicious.