Sooner Or Later, This Bubble Is Going To Burst
A weekend topic starting with WSB-TV in Georgia. “Felicia Seamon’s home for the holidays is stuck in limbo after the property she rents was foreclosed on. However, she only learned about the foreclosure after paying rent for months and resigning her lease in early October. The family also picked the home from Landa Properties because it owns dozens of properties throughout the Atlanta metro area. According to property records, Landa had 14 Newton County homes foreclosed on June 4, months before they signed Felicia and her husband for another lease. ‘I can say this is pretty definitely civil fraud. If Landa is leasing out a property it no longer owns, that is definitely, civil fraud,’ Real estate Attorney Rick Alembik said. He says these types of moves from landlords are not unusual, especially for some out-of-state groups using properties as pure investments.”
From WGME. “The typical home in Maine was unaffordable to 79 percent of households across the state last year, according to a Maine Development Foundation report released this week. The MDF says this 2023 data is the ‘continuation of a troubling trend,’ but realtors say those figures don’t reflect the nuances in today’s market, which has since cooled significantly. ‘You really started to see inventory coming online earlier this spring,’ said Melanie Trott, broker-owner of the Rockland-based Midcoast Realty Group. ‘It’s bringing prices down, which is helping offset the higher interest rates. Is it affordable? It’s affordable to more, but I wouldn’t say affordable to most. It’s definitely improving.'”
“Tom Landry, a broker with Benchmark Real Estate of Portland, went as far as to say this winter will finally be a buyer’s market in Maine as more inventory comes online. He’s seen that homes across the state are sitting on the market for longer and sellers are slashing unreasonable prices. ‘Right now, it is shifting to much more of a balanced market. The data always lags what we see with boots on the ground,’ Landry said. ‘Buyers are patient. They don’t participate in that first week of bidding wars.’ A starter home that Landry listed in pricey Boothbay Harbor this month is still on the market, and even saw a $7,000 price reduction. He also listed a single-family home in Portland this month and cut its price by $60,000. At that price, it would have been snapped up quickly last year, he said. But Landry has only held one showing on it.”
From CBS Miami. “As South Florida home prices and costs of living soar, many families are choosing to rent instead of buying. Samuel Andrade, a Doral resident with a growing family, explained the tough financial reality younger professionals face, even with high-paying jobs. ‘I could stretch myself thin and buy a home, but at what cost? I’d own a house but afford nothing else. Renting and saving seems like the smarter choice,’ Andrade said. Realtor Ashley Cusack agrees this trend is growing. ‘We’re seeing Miami-Dade inventory up 42.5%, and I think we’ll need lower interest rates or price adjustments to reignite home sales,’ Cusack said. Condo owners are also bracing for changes. Starting in January, new regulations will require 10% reserves and mandatory structural inspections for buildings, likely leading to higher assessments and HOA fees. Miami-Dade condo inventory has already surged 84%.”
The Los Angeles Times. “Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, who is trying to combat one of the nation’s largest homelessness crises, said she is eager to work with the incoming administration, and believes she and Trump can find common ground in housing the city’s estimated 46,000 homeless people. The sense of disorder created by open drug use and street camping has prompted an increasing number of cities to crack down on homeless people with more laws that allow removing and arresting them. Even liberal politicians such as California Gov. Gavin Newsom have begun ordering more aggressive tactics to clear encampments. ‘We know from years and years of evidence that requiring somebody to get well, get sober, before they can access housing just means more people are going to fall down on that journey before they get back into housing,’ said Alex Visotzky, senior California policy advisor for the National Alliance to End Homelessness.”
The Real Deal on Washington. “Goodman Real Estate has sued Seattle for allegedly blocking its ability to successfully operate an affordable apartment building by forcing it to take in criminals and roommates. An affiliate of the locally based investor filed the 41-page complaint, alleging the city ‘destroyed’ its chances of sustainably running the historic Addison on Fourth building at 308 Fourth Avenue South, in the Chinatown-International District, the Puget Sound Business Journal reported. The city passed several ordinances between 2018 and 2022 the company alleges hurt its business model, including a Fair Chance Housing Ordinance that requires landlords to accept residents with criminal backgrounds, or who may ‘pose a threat to others.’ Other recent measures include a ‘winter eviction ban,’ a ‘COVID-19 eviction ban’ and a ‘roommate ordinance” requiring landlords to accept additional roommates and immediate family members as tenants within existing rental agreements, according to the complaint.”
From Mises.org. “Commercial real estate continues to suffer despite. The pain is especially apparent in the so-called ‘CRE-CLO’ bond market. CRE-CLO bonds are packaged commercial real estate mortgages comprising short-term floating rate loans. These bridge loans were recently, and most notably, used to facilitate the biggest apartment investment bubble in history, but were also used in financing other commercial real estate sectors including office, retail, hotel, industrial, and self-storage. Despite attempts by lenders to extend and pretend—kicking the can down the road in the short term to avoid defaults until the Federal Reserve lowers rates enough to bail them out—their delusions of reprieve may be fading fast.”
“While astounding, this level of distress will come as no surprise to veterans of the apartment market. In the 2020-22 period, bridge loans of this variety were ubiquitous above a certain minimum loan size. And, because of the extreme and reckless nature of money printing undertaken by the Federal Reserve during this time—when interest rates were effectively zero—lenders underwrote property acquisitions with a 1.0x debt service coverage ratio (‘DSCR’), meaning the initial net operating income of the property was projected to just cover interest payments, with nothing left over.”
From Bloomberg. “A Federal Reserve pandemic program aimed at supporting mid-size businesses is now having the opposite effect on some of them, burying them in high interest rates and balloon payments and leading to layoffs at companies struggling to stay afloat. The central bank designed the Main Street Lending Program to help businesses that were generally too big to apply for forgivable loans through the Paycheck Protection Program and too small to tap US capital markets. The program, which marked the Fed’s first effort to systematically support American businesses in such a way since the Great Depression, ultimately made 1,830 adjustable-rate loans ranging in size from $100,000 to $300 million. The challenges of implementing the brand-new program and the burden it has become for many of its borrowers raises questions about whether it’ll remain in the Fed’s crisis toolbox. ‘I’d be very surprised if they did this type of program again,’ said Eric Rosengren, former president of the Boston Fed, which runs Main Street.”
“Tejune Kang’s marketing company, Atypical Digital, faithfully made interest payments on its $3.5 million loan, even as they surged from $11,000 a month to $25,000. But he couldn’t keep up when the first balloon payment came due last year. Though Kang was able to get a six-month extension, the $65,000 combined monthly interest and principal bill was still too much. ‘It feels like — did I take money from the devil? What did I sign up for?’ Kang said. ‘It’s a tough situation.'”
Organized Crime and Reporting Project. “There was an important real estate deal simmering. But it wasn’t going as planned. Alleged mob boss Angelo Figliomeni and a Toronto-area developer were wrestling with how to handle investors who appeared to be backing out of a $30-million development deal, according to police notes on a wiretapped July 2019 phone conversation between the two. They appeared to have a strategy for handling the situation. According to investigators’ synopsis of the call, the developer told Figliomeni, ‘You know we have a way we can f@ck them. I’ll wait even until we get the $2 million…Then I’ll say f@ck you.’ Figliomeni made no objection, saying: ‘This is for me and you to know right?'”
“Figliomeni’s conversation with the developer was among thousands of calls wiretapped by police as they probed what investigators alleged was a powerful and dangerous Canadian faction of Italy’s ’Ndrangheta mafia, involved in illegal gambling and loan sharking in and around Toronto. Just two weeks after this wiretapped call, Figliomeni and eight associates were arrested, with police alleging the group had laundered more than $70 million Canadian (US$51 million) through casinos ‘in only a few short years.'”
“According to experts, weak enforcement of such legislation in the real estate sector is just one of several factors that has made Toronto’s property market a magnet for dirty money in recent years. The opportunity to hide behind anonymous ownership structures is another. ‘If you’ve got $1 million cash, you don’t have a lot of options. [Real estate is] a place where you can live, [and] you can easily hide ownership through beneficial owners,’ said Stephen Schneider, a criminology professor at St. Mary’s University in Nova Scotia and author of Iced: The Story of Organized Crime in Canada. ‘You can co-mingle the proceeds of crime as a rental revenue,’ he added. ‘It’s multipurpose for both making money and hiding money.'”
From The Week. “Britain’s ‘expensive, cramped and ageing housing stock offers the worst value for money of any advanced economy,’ according to a new analysis from an influential think tank. The findings are likely to ‘inflame an already heated debate’ about housing and planning in the run-up to the next general election. Both the Conservatives and Labour are seeking to ‘win over younger voters struggling with sky-high rents,’ said the Financial Times. There are a ‘multitude of culprits’ for the failure of housing supply to keep up with demand, said Jeremy Warner in The Telegraph. But ‘the biggest cause of the lot’ is immigration, said Warner. Since the turn of the century, three million homes have been built in England, but the population has grown by around eight million, ‘nearly all of it immigration.'”
ABC News in Australia. “When Neil Cornish was a young boy in the 1950s, he and three friends built a model village in the backyard. For fun, the boys started trading homes between them for pretend coins. Over two years, the village grew larger and larger, and the young owners became more aspirational. Then one day, the four boys decided to introduce more ‘coins’ into the system. Suddenly everything became too expensive, the game wasn’t fun anymore, and the town was abandoned. ‘It seemed just to deflate the whole thing,’ Neil says. Now in his late 70s, Neil wonders if the game was prophetic.”
“It was the mid-1970s, and Jenny and Neil were newlyweds looking for a place to grow their family. The first home they looked at was a beautiful little house in Mulgrave, in Melbourne’s south-east. The pair bought the home 1974 for $24,975, after spending 19 months saving their $5,000 deposit. That same property (after some renovations) is now valued at $1 million, according to CoreLogic — an ‘incredible’ price, Jenny says, for a small home. ‘We should have kept it,’ Neil jokes.”
“By mid-2024, CoreLogic’s model found the average Australian household was spending half of their income on home loan repayments when they bought a median-priced home, and it took them just over 10.5 years to save a 20 per cent deposit. Thinking back on how he and his friends ruined their childhood game by flooding the toy village with coins, Neil wonders if the same mistake has been made in the real world. ‘You could argue that’s what’s happening at the moment, that sooner or later, this bubble is going to burst,’ he says.”
“Independent economist Saul Eslake says while simplistic, Neil’s toy village reflects exactly what’s happened. ‘We’ve got 60 years of evidence that shows anything that allows Australians to pay more for housing than they would be able to otherwise results in more expensive housing, not in more people owning that housing.'”
Korea JoongAng Daily. “Ahead of Trump’s second term, the Korean economy is experiencing a tsunami of high interest rates, high exchange rates and high prices. Though Trumponomics triggered the two tsunamis. it is not their root cause. The fundamental cause behind them is that the Korean economy is a ‘house built with debts.’ During the Moon Jae-in administration, apartment prices in Seoul and the metropolitan area soared two to three times. As housing prices showed signs of falling in the second half of 2022, the Yoon Suk Yeol administration started offering various policy loans to help lift housing prices.”
“As a result, home prices in Seoul and the metropolitan area have surged again this year with household debt rising sharply. As 79 percent of household assets are tied to real estate, household debt accounts for 149 percent of disposable income. Over 80 percent of new household debt this year is mortgage loans. Due to excessive household debt, spending power has weakened. As most of household assets are concentrated in real estate, there’s little room to invest in stocks. As a result, companies with difficulty in financing cannot invest in future projects, darkening the growth potential of our economy.”
“The government must acknowledge the crisis and make drastic policy changes. We must start by removing the real estate bubble and reducing household debt. Only then, consumption will pick up — and stock price value-up will be possible. That will increase investment and create more quality jobs.”
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‘According to property records, Landa had 14 Newton County homes foreclosed on June 4, months before they signed Felicia and her husband for another lease. ‘I can say this is pretty definitely civil fraud. If Landa is leasing out a property it no longer owns, that is definitely, civil fraud,’ Real estate Attorney Rick Alembik said. He says these types of moves from landlords are not unusual, especially for some out-of-state groups using properties as pure investments’
14 shacks and they can’t pay their bills. And they also own ‘dozens’ in Atlanta. Wa happened to my sweet equity?
‘While astounding, this level of distress will come as no surprise to veterans of the apartment market. In the 2020-22 period, bridge loans of this variety were ubiquitous above a certain minimum loan size. And, because of the extreme and reckless nature of money printing undertaken by the Federal Reserve during this time—when interest rates were effectively zero—lenders underwrote property acquisitions with a 1.0x debt service coverage ratio (‘DSCR’), meaning the initial net operating income of the property was projected to just cover interest payments, with nothing left over’
That’s some sound lending right there. I was pointing out yesterday I ran numbers in 2014 on multifamily for sale in Arizona. It wasn’t exhaustive: in about 5 minutes I could see these things would bleed cash. And the apartment bubble still had years to run, getting dumber every day.
BTW the puddle watching ‘experts’ thought they had discovered sliced bread when they happened upon DSCR loans a year or two ago. Clowns. This has been going on since before there was puddle watching.
‘When Neil Cornish was a young boy in the 1950s, he and three friends built a model village in the backyard. For fun, the boys started trading homes between them for pretend coins. Over two years, the village grew larger and larger, and the young owners became more aspirational. Then one day, the four boys decided to introduce more ‘coins’ into the system. Suddenly everything became too expensive, the game wasn’t fun anymore, and the town was abandoned’
I’ve mentioned before that when I was a kid we came up with a similar game, but it was based on stuff we could make. We used magnolia leafs for currency. They were falling at the time. It went OK for a couple of days and some wise guy started plucking leaves off the tree in our front yard. The game fell apart immediately. Nobody was going to make things when you could just get free money.
Alice Brock, who helped inspire Arlo Guthrie’s classic ‘Alice’s Restaurant,’ dies at 83
Her death, just a week before Thanksgiving, was announced Friday by Guthrie on the Facebook page of his own Rising Son Records. Guthrie wrote that she died in Provincetown, Massachusetts, her residence for some 40 years, and referred to her being in failing health. Other details were not immediately available.
Guthrie, son of the celebrated folk musician Woody Guthrie, first met Brock around 1962 when he was attending the Stockbridge School in Massachusetts and she was the librarian. They became friends and stayed in touch after he left school, when he would stay with her and her husband at the converted Stockbridge church that became the Brocks’ main residence.
On Thanksgiving Day, 1965, a simple chore led to Guthrie’s arrest, his eventual avoidance of military service during the Vietnam War and a song that has endured as a protest classic and holiday favorite. Guthrie and his friend, Richard Robbins, were helping the Brocks throw out trash, but ended up tossing it down a hill because they couldn’t find an open dumpster. Police charged them with illegal dumping, briefly jailed them and fined them $50, a seemingly minor offense with major repercussions.
By 1966, Alice Brock was running The Back Room restaurant in Stockbridge, Guthrie was a rising star and his breakout song was an 18-minute talking blues that recounted his arrest and how it made him ineligible for the draft. The chorus was a tribute to Alice — whose restaurant, Guthrie pointed out, was not actually called Alice’s Restaurant — that countless fans have since memorized: You can get anything you want at Alice’s Restaurant / You can get anything you want at Alice’s Restaurant / Walk right in it’s around the back / Just a half a mile from the railroad track / You can get anything you want at Alice’s Restaurant.
Guthrie assumed his song was too long to catch on commercially, but it soon became a radio perennial and part of the popular culture. “Alice’s Restaurant” was the title of his million-selling debut album, and the basis of a movie and cookbook of the same name. Alice Brock would write a memoir, “My Life as a Restaurant,” and collaborate with Guthrie on a children’s book, “Mooses Come Walking.” At the time of her death, they had been discussing an exhibit dedicated to her at her former Stockton home, now the Guthrie Center, which serves free dinners every Thanksgiving.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/alice-brock-who-helped-inspire-arlo-guthries-classic-alices-restaurant-dies-at-83/ar-AA1uAHJc
Thanks for posting. Great tribute to the lady & story that inspired a legendary song that brings chuckles to millions every Thanksgiving.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WaKIX6oaSLs
Do rising inventories in the face of higher-for-longer mortgage rates make the used home sales outlook for 2025 seem exceptionally bleak?
HousingWire
Inventory 722,032 +456
30-yr Fixed 7.00% +0.01
Housing Market
Fannie Mae’s forecast for home sales? ‘Meh’
The GSE downwardly revised its 2025 existing-home sales forecast to 4% growth
November 21, 2024, 11:54 am
By Jeff Andrews
It looked like existing-home sales were primed to rise in 2025, but the prospect of higher-than-expected mortgage rates are driving down expectations.
Fannie Mae on Thursday issued revisions to its 2025 housing market forecast, dropping its estimated gain for existing-home sales next year from 11% to a more muted 4%. The government-sponsored enterprise cited the recent rise in mortgage rates for its revision.
“We expect inventories of homes added to the market, and therefore sales of existing homes, to remain subdued through next year, as the higher mortgage rate environment is likely to strengthen the ongoing lock-in effect,” Mark Palim, Fannie Mae’s senior vice president and chief economist, said in a statement.
…
https://www.housingwire.com/articles/fannie-mae-existing-home-sales-forecast-2025-2026/
US Housing Crisis:
An Impossible Mess
$1 Million Starter Homes
How to Refinance
Why It’s So Hard to Fix
Economics Daily
Higher for Longer US Mortgage Rates Are Now in the Cards
By Jarrell Dillard
November 21, 2024 at 4:05 AM PST
Newly built homes at the Cold Spring Barbera Homes subdivision in Loudonville, New York, US, on Tuesday, Oct. 15, 2024.
Photographer: Angus Mordant/Bloomberg
I’m Jarrell Dillard, an economics reporter in Washington, DC. Today we’re looking at the outlook for the US housing market. Send us feedback and tips to ecodaily@bloomberg.net or get in touch on X via @economics. And if you aren’t yet signed up to receive this newsletter, you can do so here.
Higher Mortgage Rates
US mortgage rates will likely stay higher for longer now that Trump has been elected.
Which means Americans who were waiting for rates to drop to buy a home may delay their plans and the housing market might stay stuck.
Three days after the US election, Redfin Corp. raised its projection for the average mortgage rate to 6.8% in 2025. That’s roughly where the current average 30-year fixed mortgage rate stands. Others expect rates to remain near 7% next year, including Moody Analytics and Capital Economics.
…
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2024-11-21/higher-for-longer-us-mortgage-rates-are-now-in-the-cards
“Despite attempts by lenders to extend and pretend—kicking the can down the road in the short term to avoid defaults until the Federal Reserve lowers rates enough to bail them out—their delusions of reprieve may be fading fast.”
Denial ain’t a river in Egypt…
The Indicator from Planet Money
Bond vigilantes. Who they are, what they want, and how you’ll know they’re coming
November 21, 2024 3:00 AM ET
8-Minute Listen
SYLVIE DOUGLIS, BYLINE: NPR.
(SOUNDBITE OF DROP ELECTRIC SONG, “WAKING UP TO THE FIRE”)
WAILIN WONG, HOST:
This is THE INDICATOR FROM PLANET MONEY. I’m Wailin Wong.
PADDY HIRSCH, HOST:
And I’m Paddy Hirsch. If you’ve been paying any attention to the financial news this last week – and who hasn’t? – then you might have gotten wind of a new posse that’s just ridden into town. Some say they’re heroes. Some say they’re villains. Their name? – the bond vigilantes.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
WONG: Snappy. They’re a blast from the past who are striking fear into the hearts of fat-cat, spendthrift politicians on both sides of the political divide. They’re also, like most of us, big opponents of the hottest topic in the presidential election – inflation.
HIRSCH: So on today’s show, the bond vigilantes – where they came from, what they want and, maybe most important, how you can tell when they’re about to ride into action and do what they think needs to be done.
WONG: I get tied to the railroad tracks after the break.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
WONG: For as long as there’s been government, there have been groups of people unhappy about the way that administrations do business – lobbyists, interest groups, crowds in the street.
HIRSCH: Yeah, some of these groups have more leverage than others, but none has as much leverage as the bond vigilantes.
ED YARDENI: The bond vigilantes will take law and order into their own hands if they don’t believe that the government’s fiscal and monetary policies are doing the job.
HIRSCH: This is Ed Yardeni. He’s the president of Yardeni Research, an investment research firm, and he’s been investing and watching Wall Street since 1978.
You are the creator – or the originator – of this phrase, bond vigilante.
YARDENI: Well, that’s guilty as charged.
…
https://www.npr.org/transcripts/1214380327
[Bond futures …]
https://finviz.com/futures_charts.ashx?t=BONDS&p=d
“[Bond futures …]”
The bond vigilantes are out in force!
Precious metals dropped sharply in the initial euphoria after Trump wiped the floor with Comrade Kamala. Now gold & silver have regained much of their lost value as the recognition sets in that the fundamental case for precious metals remains intact – the Fed shows no sign of any real “tightening,” while the global geopolitical situation is going from bad to worse.
https://www.kitco.com/price/precious-metals
Markets
Pimco Says Treasury Yields Are Attractive, Expects Steeper Curve
– Asset manager favors five-year notes over 30-year bonds
– Asset-allocation head Browne prefers foreign bonds to US
By Liz Capo McCormick
November 21, 2024 at 11:16 AM PST
US government bonds are a good investment following the recent surge in yields and the prospect of more Federal Reserve interest-rate cuts, according to Pacific Investment Management Co.
The benchmark 10-year Treasury note’s yield at about 4.4% Thursday has risen more than three-quarters of a percentage point from its mid-September low, and yields across maturities are back above 4%.
…
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-11-21/pimco-says-treasury-yields-are-attractive-expects-steeper-curve
“HIRSCH: Now, I understand that that might sound a little wonky. So allow me to extend this Wild-West analogy to explain what this posse of debt-hating investors actually did. The bond vigilantes were – and are – armed with two weapons – a pair of six guns, if you will. Holstered on their right hip, bond purchases, and on the left, bond sales.
WONG: And we are talking about government bonds here, U.S. Treasurys, and particularly longer-term Treasurys, like 10-year notes and 30-year bonds, which, as all loyal INDICATOR listeners know, are sold by the Treasury at auctions throughout the year.
HIRSCH: Yeah, and the Treasury, when it sells these bonds, counts on a lot of buyers showing up. The more buyers, the more demand, and therefore the less interest the Treasury ends up having to pay.
WONG: But what if those buyers – especially those big buyers, like pensions, endowments and investment shops like Vanguard and Fidelity – what if they decide not to show up?
HIRSCH: Aha. And this is the first of the bond vigilantes’ pistols – refusing to buy.
YARDENI: Not enough people show up for the Treasury auction, and it’s a sloppy auction.
WONG: Tumbleweeds at the bond auction, Paddy.
HIRSCH: Tumbleweeds at the bond auction. Yeah, if there’s not enough demand for government bonds, the Treasury has to increase interest rates – or yields – to get people to buy them, which, as Ed says, can get very expensive.
WONG: The second weapon is bond sales. These investors hold a lot of bonds – billions upon billions worth. What happens when they get nervous about the way the government is handling inflation?
YARDENI: People who actually own these things just willy-nilly call their broker today and say, just get me out of these bonds. I don’t want to take any risk. I want to see how things play out.
HIRSCH: The vigilantes sell their bonds. Prices fall. Yields, of course, rise. And now the government is forced to issue any new bonds at a higher interest rate.
WONG: Both of the bond vigilantes’ six-guns have the net effect of costing the government more money – a lot more money. No wonder the bond vigilantes have so much power. But we’ve been racking up debts for years now, so why have the bond vigilantes decided that now is the time to make a comeback?”
That’s a very long article about the powerful influence of the bond vigilantes with no mention anywhere of the Treasury market’s real 800 lb. gorilla, which is the Federal reserve using Quantitative Easing to financially engineer the long end of the yield curve to an artificially low level. It seems like the sustainability of the Fed buying down interest rates while risk asset investors borrow like drunken sailors and bid up asset prices into the stratosphere might have its limits, especially if inflation rears its ugly head.
What’s the opposite of CR8R? It’s where U.S. used home inventories are headed…
Housing Inventory: Active Listing Count in the United States (ACTLISCOUUS)
Oct 2024: 953,814 | Level | Monthly | Updated: Oct 31, 2024 4:51 PM CDT
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/ACTLISCOUUS
Fannie Mae lowers 2025 housing market expectations
Revised outlook points to slow sales recovery
…
https://www.mpamag.com/us/mortgage-industry/market-updates/fannie-mae-lowers-2025-housing-market-expectations/515142
Re-post from the last thread, it’s an actual insurrection:
“With the incoming Trump administration promising mass deportations of undocumented immigrants, Denver Mayor Mike Johnston is facing scrutiny for recent comments he made, appearing to suggest he’d use Denver police to block federal immigration officials from doing their job.
“More than us having DPD stationed at the county line to keep them out, you would have 50,000 Denverites there,” Johnston told Denverite in an interview. “It’s like the Tiananmen Square moment with the rose and the gun, right?” You’d have every one of those Highland moms who came out for the migrants. And you do not want to mess with them.”
https://www.denver7.com/news/politics/denver-mayor-suggests-using-denver-police-to-block-mass-deportations-under-trump
Related article published yesterday:
https://nypost.com/2024/11/22/us-news/denver-mayor-threatens-to-deploy-cops-50k-residents-in-tiananmen-square-moment-to-stop-trumps-mass-deportations/
Muh insurrection.
https://floppingaces.net/2024/11/22/never-mind-insurrection-the-left-is-promising-a-civil-war-over-their-new-slaves/
Joe Rogan explains why liberal media ‘hemorrhaging’ audiences: ‘You’re not accurate, you’re delusional’
https://www.yahoo.com/news/joe-rogan-explains-why-liberal-020013859.html
Podcaster Joe Rogan dunked on left-wing media for losing viewers as many Americans have grown distrustful and wary of their bias.
Rogan spoke on his podcast about a recent op-ed from billionaire Amazon founder and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos, headlined, “The hard truth: Americans don’t trust the news media.”
He summarized the piece as “essentially saying that you have to take divergent viewpoints, you have to take a bunch of different perspectives, we can’t just be this left-wing echo chamber, and it’s the reason why the business is faltering.”
Rogan argued that the truth of Bezos’ observations appears to be playing out across the media landscape.
“I was just reading something about CNN’s ratings and MSNBC’s ratings post-election – they’ve crashed,” Rogan said on Wednesday’s episode. “All these left-wing kooks on YouTube are hemorrhaging subscribers. Where people go, ‘You guys are out of touch, you’re not accurate, you’re delusional.’ And people are speaking with their subscriptions and they’re speaking with their purchasing of the Washington Post and their purchasing of the New York Times.”
He then recalled how the New York Times published a baffling fact-check this week of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s claim that a popular breakfast cereal contains several artificial ingredients in the United States that are not used in other countries.
“The New York Times just debunked – in the most insane way – debunked RFK Jr’s assertion that the ingredients in Froot Loops are different in Canada than they are in the United States. They fact-checked it, while saying he was accurate, so their fact-check – it’s so dumb when you see the fact – I tweeted it.”
He went on to say, “The fact check is so dumb because the fact check says it’s not correct, they have the same ingredients… except for these harmful chemicals.”
He then read the fact-check, adding his own commentary at the end that these are “f—ing dangerous chemicals that are banned in Canada that we’re trying to get rid of in America. So, they’re literally saying he was wrong, but he was right.”
“That made my brain hurt just reading it,” one of Rogan’s guests said.
“That’s the New York f—ing Times,” Rogan exclaimed in disbelief. “This is what the New York Times is doing, so, of course, you’re gonna hemorrhage subscribers, of course. You’re crazy, you’re saying something that’s nuts and also… What is your motivation?”
“If we’re saying that these things have been eliminated in other countries because they’ve been proven to be dangerous – what is your motivation for saying he was wrong?” he wondered.
After one of his guests said the motivation was money, Rogan asked, “What else could it be?” before listing other possibilities like “ideology.”
“Left-wing rejection of RFK Jr. because now ‘he’s connected to Trump, which is connected to Nazis,'” he suggested as another reason. “It’s like, you go down this f—ing weird rabbit hole with these people, and you’re like, ‘What are you trying to do? Are you trying to remove all leftover credibility?'”
“Are you trying to eliminate – because you lost so much credibility – are you trying to kill it all? Are you secretly working for the Chinese? Like, what are you doing?” he asked.
“The New York Times just debunked – in the most insane way – debunked RFK Jr’s assertion that the ingredients in Froot Loops are different in Canada than they are in the United States. They fact-checked it, while saying he was accurate, so their fact-check – it’s so dumb when you see the fact – I tweeted it.”
He went on to say, “The fact check is so dumb because the fact check says it’s not correct, they have the same ingredients… except for these harmful chemicals.”
[I did some quick internet snooping and ran across the below passage from Wikipedia. While the passage does not mention Canada it does talk about the U.K.]
“In 2012, Kellogg’s introduced Froot Loops to the UK market for a limited time with only the secondary colors (orange, green, and purple), as natural color substitutes for red, yellow, and blue could not be found. The recipe also differed from the US version. Kellogg’s stated that “due to European legislation we have been unable to produce Froot Loops to the same specifications as the US product. The formulations are different, including sugar and salt levels and the UK version has been produced with natural food additives and flavorings which will account for the differences in appearance and taste between the two products.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Froot_Loops
LMFAO@ considering yourself part of Muh Resistance while shilling for Big Food and Big Pharma.
“All these left-wing kooks on YouTube are hemorrhaging subscribers. Where people go, ‘You guys are out of touch, you’re not accurate, you’re delusional.’
YouTube disabled the “dislike” button because Biden-Harris regime officials and leftist shills always got massively downvoted. The garbage legacy media had to remove or heavily censor reader comments because their globalist propaganda & DNC talking points were being mercilessly flamed by readers who called out the globalist propagandists on their lies and omissions.
Yale professor concedes in NYT opinion essay: ‘Yearslong effort to vanquish’ Trump was a ‘dismal failure’
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opinion/yale-professor-concedes-in-nyt-opinion-essay-yearslong-effort-to-vanquish-trump-was-a-dismal-failure/ar-AA1uB5HW?ocid=BingNewsSerp
Yale University law professor Samuel Moyn admitted on Friday that the legal efforts to stop President-elect Donald Trump over the past several years have failed and only made him stronger.
Moyn made the declaration in a New York Times guest essay, adding that liberals need to shed the strategy of trying to use the law to stop Trump during his second term.
“The yearslong effort to vanquish Donald Trump in court was a dismal failure,” the professor wrote.
The Times published Moyn’s essay on the same day that Judge Juan Merchan granted Trump’s request to file a motion to dismiss the charges in New York v. Trump and removed Trump’s sentencing date of Nov. 26 from the calendar.
The news of Merchan’s ruling comes just days after Department of Justice Special Counsel Jack Smith filing a motion to vacate all deadlines in his 2020 election interference case against Trump, a move that signals the case could be dropped entirely.
Moyn wrote that the courts failing to end Trump’s political career shows that “our search for political salvation primarily through the law has backfired.”
The professor explained that liberals have put too much focus on the legal system to pursue their agenda. He noted that while there have been some progressive victories in the process, they have not been able to use the law to stop their political opposition.
“While liberals saw breakthroughs afterward for women and L.G.B.T.Q. people, delivering progress more quickly than elections could, they failed to stop the conservative drift of American law,” he stated.
Specifically, Moyn criticized progressives for acting as if their use of the law was a matter of principle and justice, while “ignoring that their movement had mainly treated it as a weapon for legalistic political change.”
He noted that conservatives have been able to use it as a weapon as well, and now Trump has more power than ever.
“Along the way, you claim that the rules are on your side and impose them on your political enemies, and sometimes yourself, because the results are good ones,” the professor stated, adding, “The trouble is that they regularly aren’t. In this election, legalistic tactics contributed to Mr. Trump’s victory, helping to produce the popular majority he had never boasted before.”
“For all of Mr. Trump’s misdeeds, prosecuting them was not worth the cost of restoring him to power.”
He pointed out several examples throughout Trump’s political career of liberals using (what’s been called by some) “lawfare” against him that backfired, including former Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into claims Trump colluded with Russia in the 2016 election.
“But when Mr. Mueller’s inconclusive report was released in April 2019, it was an embarrassment to liberals. The politics of law had misdirected their focus for years, and in the process convinced millions of Americans that Mr. Trump’s foes were as prone to conspiratorial thinking as his allies,” he said.
Moyn went on to note how all the cases brought against Trump following his first term, including the New York case, Smith’s case, and one brought against him in Georgia, stalled out for various reasons, despite liberals alleging they would prove successful on principle.
“But agonizingly, Mr. Trump revealed how unprepared the law was for his acts. The law is open to interpretation and, even when clear, allows for discretion and selectivity in its enforcement.”
Moyn then described how liberals, driven by self-righteousness, made Trump even more relevant and immune from their attacks.
“Yet many liberals, convinced that their causes were righteous, didn’t register the risks of this legalistic strategy, which included being seen by voters as treating the law as politics by other means. The criminal investigations fueled their target’s dominance of the Republican primary race and breathed new life into his campaign fund-raising,” he wrote.
Moyn added, “The election became something like national jury nullification — after the fact for the New York case, and pre-emptively for the others.”
Because of this dynamic, Moyn declared, “[T]here can be no federal criminal investigations or prosecutions of Mr. Trump while he is in office.” Rather, he advocated for diminishing Trump by political means only, “But there are the midterm elections in two years, and in the meantime a Democratic Party in dire need of reimagining and a public to win over.”
He also listed a single-family home in Portland this month and cut its price by $60,000. At that price, it would have been snapped up quickly last year, he said. But Landry has only held one showing on it.”
The party’s over, greedheads, and buyers getting crushed by the Fed’s “cost of living crisis” and the tax burden of sustaining the welfare-warfare state won’t be able or willing to pay your delusional wish price.
I could stretch myself thin and buy a home, but at what cost? I’d own a house but afford nothing else. Renting and saving seems like the smarter choice,’ Andrade said.
You will own nothing, and like it.
Miami-Dade condo inventory has already surged 84%.”
Is that a lot?
If you marry an illegal, true love means you join the deportee in whatever sh*thole country he fled from. Buh-bye!
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/trumps-mass-deportations-split-4-million-mixed-status-families-one-get-rcna181318
Former hospital, land sale doesn’t reflect true value for the City
Sale of the former General Hospital, the renal building and waterfront land will eventually reap benefits for the City of Sault Ste. Marie.
City council approved a staff recommendation Monday that will see the former hospital site and the vacant waterfront property sold to Green Infrastructure Partners Inc. and Ruscio Masonry and Construction Ltd.
The former renal building will be sold to Ruscio.
The city paid $4.75 million for the three properties, in an attempt to take them back from a derelict out-of-town property owner and flip them to a developer who really wants to create more housing units in Sault Ste. Marie.
The former hospital site and waterfront property were sold for a mere $1; the renal building for $2 million.
At first blush, that’s simply a loss for the city.
https://www.nugget.ca/opinion/columnists/former-hospital-land-sale-doesnt-reflect-true-value-for-the-city
A $6.2 Million Banana and the Unexpected Return of the Art Market
A $121.2 million René Magritte. A $68.3 million Ed Ruscha. And don’t forget that $6.2 million banana that sold for six times its asking price. To anyone looking in, the art market appeared to come roaring back this week—but it’s anyone’s guess if the party will last.
“Comedian,” by Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan—better known as the Banana—proved to be the viral star of the week and a marketing bonanza for Sotheby’s. The artwork consists of a banana duct-taped to the wall, with instructions for replacing it when it rots. The house’s evening sale pulled in an influx of 30-somethings dressed in hoodies and sneakers, who stood out among the perennial sea of pinstripe suits in the saleroom. A few newcomers wore banana-themed T-shirts to the sale and used their cellphone cameras to film their bidding. Playful moves like these have been largely missing from recent, sleepy seasons.
After auctioneer Oliver Barker opened the bidding for the Banana at $800,000, seven bidders pounced, chasing it far higher. Tron blockchain founder Justin Sun won the fruit for $6.2 million, which he said he would be paying in crypto.
Sun, in an interview, said he collects pieces by Pablo Picasso, Andy Warhol and Alberto Giacometti, but until last month he had never encountered conceptual art—where the idea behind the work matters more than what it looks like. That’s when he saw a Sotheby’s video online about its plans to resell the Banana. Sun had missed the stir the Cattelan caused during its art-fair debut five years ago; he didn’t even go to see it in person during the run-up to the auction, but still felt compelled to win it, finding connections between the piece and blockchain technology.
“As long as you own the banana, you’re part of an artwork that’s evolving,” Sun said. He eventually plans to eat the artwork.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/a-62-million-banana-and-the-unexpected-return-of-the-art-market/ar-AA1uBkWs
The Fed sees no bubbles.
The Francis Soyer Art Institute will shortly be offering HBB regulars an exact copy of this $6.2 million work of art for the bargain basement price of $620. Act now; supplies are limited!
https://x.com/NorthmanTrader/status/1859349070327808419
What brand of duct tape will you be using?
Only the best. Yeah, that’s it, that’s the ticket. Trust me.
Wondering why your smart TV has so many ads? Manufacturers are struggling to make money on hardware
As recently highlighted by market research firm Omdia (via FlatpanelsHD), the good news is that TVs are getting cheaper – so much so that some firms are actually losing money on the sets they sell.
The bad news is that they need to get that money back from somewhere or something. And increasingly, that somewhere is your living room and the something is you.
As Omdia notes, the business model for many TV firms is shifting away from making profit from physical sales and towards making money from ads (and while they didn’t mention it specifically, from user data) instead.
The research firm’s consumer electronics research director Paul Gray says that “People are happy to sell TVs below cost. You just have to look at the finances of Vizio or Roku to see they’re selling TVs at somewhere between -3 and -7% margin, just in that scramble for users.”
That could mean US buyers in particular will increasingly have to make a choice: get the TV for a low price and put up with more ads, or pay more for a comparatively ad-free experience.
https://www.msn.com/en-gb/money/technology/wondering-why-your-smart-tv-has-so-many-ads-manufacturers-are-struggling-to-make-money-on-hardware/ar-AA1uztbL
So what happens if you don’t connect the set directly to the internet?
or keep my 20 year old one which doesn’t report on me, talk to the internet and still works fine. It’s not like there is anything to watch.
Europe’s car battery ambitions go up in smoke. China wins again as Northvolt files for bankruptcy
Europe’s last great hope to roll majestically into the global car battery business, Northvolt, has crashed. Another European wannabe tech giant has been humbled. China wins.
On Thursday, the nominally Swedish company – it was backed by a broad range of investors and lenders, from Germany’s Volkswagen to Canada’s pension funds – filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in the United States. What was Europe’s best-funded startup, one that was to be an industry champion, could not live up to its own hype.
Northvolt had raised some US$15-billion from investors and governments, yet found itself desperately short of cash in recent months, making the bankruptcy filing inevitable. It will try to keep its echo-chamber main factory in northern Sweden open while it hunts for fresh survival loans – a few bucks have arrived already. The odds do not look encouraging. “Northvolt’s liquidity picture has become dire,” the company said in its bankruptcy court petition.
The idea proved more grandiose than realistic. Over the years, Northvolt was hobbled by severe production problems, a shortage of funding and skittish customers, a few of whom lost patience with the low output. Last summer, BMW cancelled its US$2.15-billion order for Northvolt battery cells.
An overambitious and costly expansion strategy, including plans for a Canadian plant, was responsible for much of the rot. Northvolt chief executive officer Peter Carlsson, who resigned on Friday, told the media, “I should have pulled the brakes earlier on the expansion path to make sure the core engine was moving according to plan.”
The subsequent upheaval in the European car business did not help. European EV sales are going in reverse as high prices, range anxiety, lack of charging points, waning EV purchase subsidies and a thin range of models that appeal to young drivers – they want iPhones on wheels – repel buyers.
Europe has a sorry history of competing with the Americans and the Chinese on the tech front. In his September report on European competitiveness, or lack thereof, former European Central Bank president Mario Draghi said that no European Union company with a market value of more than €100-billion (about $145-billion) has been set up from scratch in the past half century. The six American companies worth more than €1-trillion (about $1.45-trillion) were all started over the same period. “Europe is stuck in a static industrial structure,” he said.
The Northvolt dream is dead. European carmakers will be happy to buy cheap Chinese batteries, as they are now, for their EVs. The key question is whether European EVs are doomed too as the Chinese come on strong. Northvolt’s fate is a warning that is about as subtle as a high-speed car crash.
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/commentary/article-europes-car-battery-ambitions-go-up-in-smoke-china-wins-again-as/
China’s lithium battery makers aren’t doing so hot, either.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BwJtAx7rA8g&t=202s
A new lithium ion battery plant opened in our area less than a year ago. All the big shots were there cutting the ribbon.
Colombian man funded Miami condo, lavish lifestyle with $66M Ponzi scheme, feds say
A 36-year-old Colombian citizen has been charged in South Florida federal court with leading a $66 million Ponzi scheme disguised as a payday loan company to pay for his lavish lifestyle, including a Miami condo and wedding in France.
Efrain Betancourt Jr., was arrested on Nov. 14, upon entering the United States, the U.S. Department of Justice said in a news release Thursday.
The indictment, which was unsealed in federal court in Miami on Monday, charges with him with conspiracy to commit mail and wire fraud, and wire fraud on Sept. 12.
If convicted of all charges in the indictment, Betancourt, Jr. faces a maximum total penalty of 140 years’ imprisonment.
According to allegations in the indictment, Betancourt Jr. offered promissory notes to Sky Group investors with yearly returns ranging from 24% to 120%. More than 600 investors invested in Sky Group, many of whom were Venezuelan, DOJ said.
Betancourt, Jr. and others told promissory note investors their funds would be used to disburse payday loans to Sky Group clients, according to prosecutors. Interest from payday loans clients would then be used to repay promissory note investors. However, millions of dollars from promissory note investors were used to pay previous promissory note investors in Ponzi scheme.
Also, Betancourt Jr. is alleged to have used more than $7.5 million of investor funds for personal use, including a luxury chateau wedding in France, expensive jewelry, a Miami condominium and family vacations.
https://www.cbsnews.com/miami/news/colombian-man-accused-of-leading-ponzi-scheme/
‘Death sentence for millions’: COP29’s proposed $250b annual climate finance pledge draws criticism from advocates, experts
The COP29 climate summit presidency released a draft finance deal on Friday (22 November) that would have developed nations take the lead in providing $250 billion per year by 2035 to help poorer nations – a proposal that drew criticism from all sides.
World governments represented at the summit in the Azerbaijan capital Baku are tasked with agreeing a sweeping funding plan to tackle climate change, but the talks have been marked by division between wealthy governments resisting a costly outcome and developing nations pushing for more.
Jess Beagley, policy lead at the Global Climate and Health Alliance, a consortium of more than 200 health professional and health civil society organisations from around the world said, “If COP29 agrees on the text shown to us today, it will sign a death sentence for millions. Such a deal would be a bad deal not just for developing countries already under pressure from the climate crisis, but for the entire world.”
https://www.tbsnews.net/environment/climate-change/death-sentence-millions-cop29s-proposed-250b-annual-climate-finance
$250 billion per year by 2035 to help poorer nations
Taking your money to make the world a better place.
Globalists gonna globe.
Just like a watermelon: green on the outside, red on the inside.
THIS!!
The people have spoken in the US Election, to reject the treasonous insanity and fraud of the Biden/Harris Administration.
The Majority rejected the following:
Invasion of US Borders by unvetted illegals who were supported by taxpayer funds to invade.
Escalation of World War 3, by US support of global Wars that are a threat to the entire World.
Biden medical tyranny by mandating fake vaccines, destruction of small business , and transfer of tax funds to Monopoly Corporation , Big Pharmacy , Medical Cartel for implementing greatest crimes to humanity by fake counter measures to a Covid Panademic.
Censorship of first amendment and dispute to Covid 19 response , that defrauded millions for forced lockdowns, useless masks, and mandated fake killer vaccines.
Transgender assult on minors and the insanity of brainwashing minors into sex change.Destruction of women’s sports, and women forced to endure men in women’s bathrooms and locker rooms.
Shut down of oil production , Biden giving US oil reserves to China, and attack on agriculture.
Destruction of a merit base system for hiring based on gender, race , etc. with prejudice to targeted people , basically against the Civil Rights laws and Constitutional protections.
Faulty withdraw from 20 year war leaving 80 billion in military supplies to enemy , also causing death of
US Citizens and allies.
Advancement of fraudulent Climate Change Doomsday narratives based on theory of co2 emmission being culprit in a fake Climate Change emergency, pursuant corrupted and bought out fake Science.
Increase in crime throughout the US because of the insane policies of the Democrates.
Biden Administration labeling over half the Country enemy of the State, or a threat to democracy , in a outrageous assult on Biden’s political opposition to his treasonous and insane policies.
Inflation that threatens basic survival of millions of people in US, while billions are given to border invaders, or billions to Globalists proxy wars.
Mega Corporations acting in collusion with Biden Administration to force crimes against humanity.
You know the rest.
And Biden in his last months trying to start World War 3 with Russia, is one of the worst acts I have ever seen done by a President to try to sabotage a incoming Administration .
Biden/Harris were a horrible evil that got in by a rigged election .They represented the One World Order power grab to take over world and genocide billions by their various methods.
Nuremberg 2.0 can’t come soon enough.
https://x.com/liz_churchill10/status/1860164360385233282
Fauci needs to hang ☠️
Randi Weingarten’s COVID lockdowns of our NEA indoctrination mills inflicted incalculable harm on our kids. She needs to be held accountable, along with all of the other NEA officials who have ruined our public education systems with their globalist agenda-pushing.
https://nypost.com/2024/07/27/opinion/unhinged-teachers-unions-fear-losing-power-influence-over-kids-and-families/
+1
Opinion: What happens if families and employers decide Toronto’s just not worth it anymore?
If hating on Toronto can get a bit dull, it’s not because the city makes us work very hard for it. Colleague Matt Gurney’s latest about the trials endured by a woman seeking to (gasp, horror) sell coffee from a trailer is only the most recent example of a city where the default setting seems to always be no. It’s remarkable how rare the counter-examples actually are — areas where residents simply have clear permission to do what they want. About the only one that comes to mind is, alas, kind of perverse. The straitjacket of Toronto’s zoning policies (which makes it incredibly difficult to build new, dense, family-friendly housing) just happens to have a kind of cheat code built into it: for anyone with the money available, it’s trivially easy to buy existing multiplexes and gut them into single-family homes.
In short, while the rules around food trucks aren’t terribly important in themselves, the thing to understand is that Toronto gets everything wrong the same way it gets food trucks wrong. There are always going to be more rules governing our behaviour in a dense urban environment than in a rural idyll, simply because it’s easier for one person’s bad behaviour to harm their neighbours. Toronto, however, consistently acts like the only way to ensure public safety is to say no to everything first and then only timidly carve out exceptions to the refusal. This city debated “can we trust adults to drink alcohol in parks” for more than a decade before cautiously allowing it in a handful of places.
https://www.tvo.org/article/opinion-what-happens-if-families-and-employers-decide-torontos-just-not-worth-it-anymore
Chinese Stocks Slump on Tech Earnings, Geopolitical Tensions
A selloff in Chinese stocks deepened on Friday afternoon, as disappointing tech earnings hurt sentiment already weakened by concerns over Donald Trump’s imminent return.
Traders also pointed to statement by Texas Governor Greg Abbott dated Nov. 21, which prohibited state agencies from putting new money into investments originating from China and urged a divestment of previous holdings. That worsened fears that some of the largest US funds may avoid investing in China as part of political considerations.
“The broader market is still facing uncertainties around macro, because better October numbers were partly boosted by early Singles’ Day promotions on the retail side and timing around policy easing on the property side, so there are some questions around sustainability,” said Xin-Yao Ng, an investment manager at abrdn Plc. “Regarding tariffs, I think Trump will start to negotiate with various governments, but the appointees to the government are many China hawks, so not great.”
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/chinese-stocks-slump-on-tech-earnings-geopolitical-tensions/ar-AA1uy9dg
How long will the CCP be able to keep a lid on social unrest among stampers of little feet and bright, ambitious young people who have no future under Communist tyranny?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jW4mTHMwXjA
[Captain Obvious says this is a long post.]
Democrats Need Their Own Donald Trump
https://realclearwire.com/articles/2024/11/22/democrats_need_their_own_donald_trump_151987.html
There may be five stages of grief, but there’s usually just one when it comes to political defeat – pretend to soul-search, then carry on as if nothing happened.
In the wake of Donald Trump’s clearcut victory on November 5, Democrats and their media allies acknowledged mistakes were made, but their mea culpa sounded more like humble brags as they suggested their real problem was a failure to communicate. If only we’d done a better job of describing our wonderful accomplishments and the dangers of fascism. Next time, our commercials will be much more effective.
The stand-pat strategy makes some sense in a two-party system where many elections are akin to a coin flip. Ironically, each side banks the other’s unwillingness to change to provide the opening they need to keep on keeping on.
The Democratic Party may well rise from the canvas in the 2026 midterms and the 2028 presidential race – but this would likely be more a result of potential Republican overreach than the wisdom of their policies. For the good of the country, however, Democrats should use their recent defeat as an opportunity to rethink and reorient their approach to governance.
It won’t be easy, because a fundamental reason Democrats lost goes to the core of their identity: competence. Polls show a large majority of Americans have lost faith in their ability to govern effectively. The GOP’s campaign slogan homed in on this failure: “Trump Will Fix It.”
Since the rise of the progressive movement more than a century ago, Democrats have argued that an expansive government run by experts can solve the nation’s problems. Especially through the ambitious legislative programs put forward by presidents Franklin Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson, and Joe Biden, Democrats have assured voters: We know what works.
Decades of experience have proven otherwise. Democrat-run states and major cities have distinguished themselves not only for their poorly run schools, high crime, and massive debts, but also their corruption. The New York Times reported in August that California has now become the leader in political malfeasance, “exceeding the number of cases in states better known for public corruption, including [the deep blue states of] New York, New Jersey and Illinois.”
For its part, the Biden administration has taken a series of missteps – personified for all to see by the president’s weak, wobbly gait – that directly led to Kamala Harris’ defeat. Who thought it was a good idea to:
Open the southern U.S. border to millions of unvetted migrants?
Pass bills costing trillions that fueled inflation?
Hastily withdraw from Afghanistan, leaving behind billions in equipment to arm the Taliban?
Unlock billions of dollars that Iran used to fund the Hamas terrorists who attacked Israel on Oct. 7, leading to the wider regional war?
Weaponize the justice system to target Trump personally, increasing his popularity by turning him into a victim?
Pretend Joe Biden was sharp as a tack when it was clear to all that he was in decline?
While these and many other failures weakened confidence in the Democrats’ ability to steer the ship of state, their embrace of the woke agenda showed that the party was not just wrong about certain issues, but in the grips of an unhinged ideology. Claims that America is irredeemably racist, that illegal aliens should be allowed to vote, that gender is not a biological fact and that children should have the right to decide to mutilate their bodies without parental consent, struck most citizens as incomprehensible.
Yes, Harris and other Democrats tried to distance themselves from some of these positions, but they never repudiated them. If you have to run to the center so you can govern from the far left, your politics have become an exercise in deceptive cynicism.
Post-election revelations that the Harris campaign burned through $1.5 billion in 15 weeks – including showering celebrities with huge paydays to draw crowds to her rallies – reenforces the perception that Democrats see money as a slush fund for their allies.
Perhaps the greatest indictment of Democrats’ competence is the rise of Donald Trump. After eight years of Barack Obama – an exemplar of well-polished progressivism – the American people elected a man with no government experience, whose campaign focused on the failures of the ruling elites of both parties. Entrenched Republicans were, in fact, as disdainful of Trump as Democrats were.
Then, despite titanic efforts to undercut and delegitimize him at every turn, this quintessential outsider led a largely successful administration. Polls suggested he was likely to be reelected before the COVID-19 pandemic struck. Trump was returned to office earlier this month because many Americans remembered the policies of the man Democrats dismissed as a failed real estate developer and superficial reality TV star as far more effective than those advanced by his highly credentialed opponents.
The visceral hatred for Trump stems in large part from his competence. As he calls out the failures and corruption of the rulers on the left and the right, he has succeeded at their game without their alleged expertise. He points out obvious facts – China and Iran are not our friends, we can no longer pay the world’s bills – that they have long obscured. They call him a liar, and he does do that, but it’s his truth-telling they can’t forgive. His chief character flaw is that he isn’t part of the club.
All of which is to say, Democrats need their own Trump – a wrecking ball who will challenge the party’s dogmas; a disruptive outsider who can force them out of their ideological cul-de-sac. The radical transformation Democrats need seems beyond the capacity of the party’s entrenched leadership: To expect people who cannot admit error to change their minds and ways seems like wishful thinking. They probably don’t need a Trump-like figure to win elections, but they need one to find a way to govern effectively. This would not require abandoning progressive ideals, but developing new ways to actually achieve them.
This will not be easy. As a spur, Democrats should consider the fate of their allies in the legacy media. The partisan, left-wing turn many news organizations have taken in the last decade has undermined the trust Americans once had in their reporting – while contributing to shrinking audiences and mass layoffs. That failure is a major reason millions of Americans are turning to alternative outlets, including X, Substack, and podcasters such as Joe Rogan, for news.
Political parties are not subject to the swift and ruthless forces of the market. But Democrats would be wise to see the decline of their media allies as a canary in the coal mine. It should inspire them to begin a true process of soul-searching and change for their own good and for that of the nation.
The only thing more enjoyable than watching Comrade Kamala’s election-day shellacking is seeing her reduced to begging her butt-hurt supporters for money after burning through $1 billion in donations.
https://x.com/EndWokeness/status/1859800272408834458
The Dems can start by making the cities they control livable again. The chance of that happening is about 0%
Letters: Voting for evil
RH Line caller still chose evil
This is regarding the RH caller who stated that she was embarrassed that she voted for Trump but felt she had no choice since Democratic policies such as abortion and transgender care/participation in sports were abhorrent.
A woman’s right to choose health care that is appropriate for her is already legal in Colorado. In addition, Trump’s wavering, and ever-changing stance on a woman’s right to choose has been nothing short of dizzying, making the caller’s excuse to vote for this lesser evil curious. As for transgender women participating in sports, only 34 transgender women in the United States have participated in college athletics – and only two have participated in the Olympics.
There are big issues that will have huge impacts on all of us as we move into a second Trump term. War, economy, energy, climate change, immigration reform are just a few of the challenges that will need to be tackled. However, when the caller cast her vote, she was more concerned with the choice another woman makes about her health care or whether a transgender woman might participate in athletics. Are these issues so monumental and impactful to the caller that she had no other option than to vote for an adulterous, adjudicated sexual abuser, who dabbles in felony crimes and misdemeanors? And in the end, she still chose evil.
Doreen Michals, Loveland
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/letters-voting-for-evil-respect-for-loveland-leaders/ar-AA1uA4v7
“Democratic policies such as abortion and transgender care/participation in sports were abhorrent.”
The Democrats died on that hill…
And don’t forget prioritizing invaders over citizens. The mayor of Denver is threatening a war with ICE, using DPD as his foot soldiers.
As if I didn’t already have a good reason to stay out of that sh!thole.
I’m gonna guess she was perfectly fine with PedoJoe.
IIRC, Loveland overall voted for DJT.
I drove through Loveland right before the election. Lots of Biden-Harris yard signs and the usual indicators of libtard malgoverance, i.e. lots of “unhoused” and newcomers roaming everywhere. Berthoud, by contrast, is solidly pro-Trump and was visibly tidier and more prosperous, with Trump signs and bumper stickers in abundance.
I think the signage depends on the neighborhood. You would have seen more Harris signage downtown, which is where the illegals and low income mostly live. Camping is illegal in the city, though bums do wander in from their outside of city limits camps and panhandle, mostly at the intersection of 34 and 287. As for illegals, they are actually less prominent than say 10 years ago.
Berthoud is an upper middle class town, so yeah, it looks nice. It used to be microscopic, until developers built a lot of McMansions there. It’s a nice place, but it does have issues. For instance, Berthoud voters approved MJ dispensaries a long time ago. Loveland voters approved them this year, unfortunately.
Loveland has unfortunately been a magnet for Fort Collins libtards, who move there because its cheaper than the Fort. That said, DJT signs handily outnumbered Harris signs in my neighborhood. And Loveland helped Boebert handily win her congressional seat.
Ft. Collins has a serious libtard infestation, but it also has a lot of conservative neighborhoods. Some Soros Scum found this out the hard way when they tried to bring their Mostly Peaceful Protests to what they mistakenly presumed would be a permissive city.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9e7odIGwfUU&t=15s
Arab American precincts in Wayne County rejected Kamala Harris
In the November 2020 election, Joe Biden received 82% of the vote in the eastern part of Dearborn. In that same area, Vice President Kamala Harris received only 23%.
The nearly 60-percentage point drop in four years was in an area where an estimated three-fourths of the residents are of Arab descent, mostly Muslim. Harris won the western part of the city, where residents generally have higher incomes and are more likely to be white, with 46% of the vote and Donald Trump receiving 42%. In 2020, Biden won west Dearborn with 61%, 16,057 votes.
Arab American and Muslim voters interviewed by the Free Press mainly blamed the Biden administration’s handling of foreign policy in the Middle East, but also sometimes cited economic and social issues.
“They’re sending a message that they’re tired of the Democrat agenda,” Hassan Aoun, of Dearborn, who voted for Trump, said outside Salina Intermediate School on election day last week.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/arab-american-precincts-in-wayne-county-rejected-kamala-harris/ar-AA1tWkXY
It should be interesting to see where Electric Vehicle subsidies go with Trump back in the WH, given his alliance with Elon Musk. Lots of oil industry executives wouldn’t mind seeing artificial demand for EVs, paid for by taxpayers who don’t own any, go away.
The EPA’s arbitrary mileage mandates have forced carmakers to give us turbocharged small-displacement engines and CVT transmissions that are most complex and costly, and inherently less reliable and durable than normally aspirated bigger-bore engines. I hope Trump will act to protect car buyers by rolling back some of the Biden regime’s overreach in the auto manufacturing sector.
California shifts slightly right in 2024 elections
“I’ve seen a lot more people rallying on the street supporting Trump this year,” said Rami Malik, a sophomore. “I also noticed many signs supporting him in my neighborhood.”
The growing dissatisfaction with the Biden administration has caused many voters, mainly in the lower classes, to vote against the incumbent party. This shift is best seen in inland counties such as Fresno and San Bernadino, which voted for Biden in 2020 but have flipped to Trump in 2024.
In the last four elections, San Bernardino County, in the southeast of California, has voted for a Democratic president by at least five points. This year, however, Trump has won the county by a small margin.
These counties in California are not alone. In fact, 80% of incumbents in countries with a Democracy Index of 5 or higher that held elections this year were voted out of office.
California itself has seen similar frustrations to the government, with voters feeling disconnected from the state’s political leaders due to rising costs and economic pressures. This was shown in the counties that flipped Republican in California. Additionally, residents are expressing dissatisfaction with high housing costs, the state’s handling of taxes, and its policies relating to economic relief.
https://scotscoop.com/california-shifts-slightly-right-in-2024-elections/
There’s an info graphic at the link where you can see the counties.
Gavin Newsom Tours California’s Trump Country to Tout Economic Focus
California Governor Gavin Newsom is embarking on a tour of conservative counties in a bid to connect with voters who shifted to President-elect Donald Trump in this month’s election.
Newsom kicked off his pitch in Fresno County on Thursday, touting $120 million in job-creation grants intended to boost employment across California in the coming years. The move is part of the Democrat’s effort to reinforce his party’s economic messaging while addressing growing voter concerns about affordability and the outlook for the working class.
“California may be the largest economy in the United States of America,” Newsom said from an automotive repair school. “But that’s cold comfort for certain regions in this state that don’t feel that they’re fully participating in that economic output. They don’t feel like they’re fully engaged in the prosperity that is the state of California.”
Fresno County voted for the Republican presidential candidate for the first time in two decades in this year’s election, underscoring the inroads Trump made with traditionally Democratic voters. It’s one of eight counties that he flipped in deep-blue California, contributing to a broader national swing that helped Republicans secure control of the White House and both chambers of Congress.
In the coming weeks, Newsom is set to visit Colusa County, a rural area north of Sacramento, and Kern County, a GOP stronghold and home to former Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy.
“I care about people. I don’t care who you voted for,” Newsom said. “I care about Trump supporters. I care about RFK Jr. supporters. I care about Tucker Carlson supporters.”
The governor’s focus on conservative-leaning counties highlights rising voter frustration with Democrats who control all levels of California’s state government. Concerns over housing affordability, crime and gas prices have pushed some voters to the right, while hundreds of thousands of people have left the state.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/gavin-newsom-tours-california-s-trump-country-to-tout-economic-focus/ar-AA1uwPdF
“I care about people. I don’t care who you voted for,” Newsom said
Two lies in a single sentence. That takes talent.
“I don’t care who you voted for”
That’s a whopper!
He just can’t string his words together properly.
I care about me. I don’t care about people who voted wrong.
would have a better ring.
Over 900 mobile home owners in Sweetwater, Florida handed move-out notices amid plans to transform park
https://www.yahoo.com/finance/news/over-900-mobile-home-owners-114200967.html
[Here is an interesting oxymoron-type snip taken from the article …]
“Many mobile homes, the report says, ‘are cemented into the ground, making their relocation either structurally impossible or prohibitively costly.'”
[Hence an immobile mobile home.]
[Here is the article …]
Residents of Li’l Abner Mobile Home Park in Sweetwater, Florida, were recently notified that they’ll need to find somewhere else to live and quickly. The community of more than 900 mobile homes, together housing roughly 2,000 to 3,000 people per the mayor’s estimate, will close in May 2025 to make way for new affordable and workforce housing.
Mobile home owners usually own the home but rent the land it stands on. The land owner in this case, CREI Holdings, says it will provide a financial incentive of $14,000 to residents who leave by January 31, 2025. Those who leave by March 31 or April 30, will receive $7,000 and $3,000, respectively, though many tenants say it’s not enough time or money, according to a NBC6 report.
Sergio Zamora lives in the park with his wife and in-laws, who’ve had a home in Li’l Abner Mobile Home Park for more than 30 years.
“They paid off the house to be told you don’t have a place to live anymore,” Zamora told NBC6. “Imagine saying you own a property and someone tells you don’t.”
Why aren’t the relocation incentives enough?
The incentive packages being offered to the park tenants are more than what Florida law requires. According to the Miami Herald, the owner is mandated to offset relocation costs by offering $3,000 and $6,000 for single- and double-wide homes, respectively.
Residents say more than $14,000 would be needed for a down payment on a new home. Mobile parks are also increasingly rare in Florida.
Even if they are able to find a new park to relocate to, it won’t be cheap. According to CostHelper.com, full-service mobile home moves of about 60 miles that include disconnect, reconnect and transport will cost about $3,000-$5,000 for a single-wide unit, $4,000-$10,000 for a double-wide and $10,000-$14,000 or more for a triple-wide, depending on size and location.
Hamilton Dos Santos told the Miami Herald he paid $160,000 for his mobile home four months ago using almost all of his savings and now “it’s a completely lost investment.” He said it could cost upward of $10,000 to move his trailer. Many mobile homes, the report says, “are cemented into the ground, making their relocation either structurally impossible or prohibitively costly.”
Melvin del Chiaro told 7News Miami he owns his home in the park but is unable to move it.
“It’s inconceivable. I remodeled my home, and it’s worth $180,000, and they want to give me just $2,750 to leave? Because I can’t move my mobile home,” he said.
“We need more just to be able to leave,” Zamora said. “The incentive is not enough, not for most of these people.”
Sweetwater’s mayor responds to residents’ concerns
NBC6 reports that city officials came to residents and promised support.
Sweetwater’s mayor, Jose “Pepe” Diaz, said the notices came as a surprise, he spoke with the mayor of Miami-Dade County, the county commissioner for this district, and he plans to meet with the owner of the park. 7News shared this statement from the mayor:
“As mayor of Sweetwater, I want to express my deep concern over a recent notice received by residents of Lil Abner Mobile Homes, informing them of the need to vacate within six months … My administration and the city commissioners are diligently exploring every available resource while we continue to stand by our community to help these troubling times and transition.”
For decades, mobile home parks offered retirees and those on fixed or low incomes a decent, affordable place to live. Then the private equity locusts and speculator scum targeted them for takeovers and started gouging trailer park residents. Fauxahontus could not be reached for comment.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wkH1dpr-p_4&t=26s
“They paid off the house to be told you don’t have a place to live anymore,”
I guess there’s more than one reason they are called mobile homes?
Remember when the Left & globalist scum media shrieked that Trump would drag us into WWIII?
https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2024/11/23/former-ukrainian-commander-in-chief-declares-world-war-iii-has-begun/
Watching one liberal eviscerate another. Maher vs. deGrasse Tyson.
https://x.com/CitizenFreePres/status/1860170156032557132
Like watching the Iran-Iraq war.
James Carville Blasts Trump Cabinet Picks As “Pack Of Creepy Perverts” As New Documentary About Him Gets Post-Election Recut
Director Matt Tyrnauer is doing a rapid update of his new documentary Carville: Winning Is Everything, Stupid to reflect Donald Trump’s win in the presidential election. Deadline has learned the filmmaker quickly assembled a crew to shoot a new interview with the famed Democratic political consultant to include as a coda to the film.
“When you lose, everything is a mistake,” Carville says by way of an election postmortem. In the film, he is seen sounding the alarm that Pres. Biden was heading for a resounding defeat to Trump. It was in large part because of his influence in the Party (as well as a shove from former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi) that the incumbent president got out of the race. But crucially, Carville advocated for some form of mini-primary to determine who should be the Democratic Party nominee to replace Biden. That didn’t happen. After Biden bowed out, VP Kamala Harris almost immediately became the presumptive nominee.
As became apparent at the polls, this was a “change” election, meaning a majority of voters wanted a sharp shift from the status quo.
“The only person we could pick that really couldn’t give ’em anything different was Harris,” Carville comments. He points to a telling appearance Harris made on The View when she was given an opportunity to articulate a different vision from Biden’s. “When you go on The View to say what would you do different than Biden, and you say, ‘I can’t think of anything…’ Loyalty is great, but loyalty does not trump winning.”
Carville, who played a definitive role getting Bill Clinton elected president in 1992, in large part by insisting the campaign stick to the message, “It’s the economy, stupid,” praised Tyrnauer’s choice of a name for the documentary. “I love the title because the most exalted thing you can do in politics is win the election. That’s it. Everything else is secondary. It is secondary to that one single objective.”
https://www.msn.com/en-us/tv/news/james-carville-blasts-trump-cabinet-picks-as-pack-of-creepy-perverts-as-new-documentary-about-him-gets-post-election-recut/ar-AA1uAM0S
“But crucially, Carville advocated for some form of mini-primary to determine who should be the Democratic Party nominee to replace Biden. That didn’t happen.”
Classic Democrat election strategy: Ignore the will of voters in favor of party insider candidate preferences at peril of losing.
Rob Reiner Says ‘MAGA Scum’ Have Already Wrecked Bluesky
The director reveals he’s taking a break from social media after the X alternative quickly became “vile, racist and evil”
Donald Trump’s supporters wrecked X in popular opinion — and now they’re ruining Bluesky, according to a account that appears to be Rob Reiner.
The acclaimed director on Wednesday night said “MAGA scum” have come to Bluesky, the growing rival to Elon Musk’s X, and made it “vile, racist and evil.”
About 90 minutes later, Reiner said he was checking into a facility for “peace and relaxation” and wouldn’t be on his phone or social media for a few days. “Just calmness to heal my pain,” he noted.
TheWrap reached out to Reiner’s management to confirm whether or not the posts were his, but did not hear back immediately.
Reiner’s social media detox is notable, considering things were all good just a week ago for him on Bluesky.
“I have decided to move here for a less hateful experience,” Reiner posted on the platform last week.
Things have clearly changed since then, even as Bluesky has been dubbed “Blue Heaven” by many disenchanted left-leaning X users. The platform has enjoyed a surge in new users since Election Day, as many have ditched X due to Musk’s backing of president-elect Trump (those self-imposed X exiles include media pundits like MSNBC’s Joy Reid and actors Mark Hamill and Gabrielle Union, among others.)
“Now that America has elected a Convicted Felon with Authoritarian proclivities, I fear that Democracy’s return won’t be any time soon,” the actor posted. “The long term solutions are daunting. Democrats need to re-adopt the 50 state strategy. And most importantly, a competitive information distribution system must be built to combat the massive disinformation currently being fed to the American people.”
Reiner has 2.3 million followers on X and 12,100 followers on Bluesky.
While X has seen many prominent celebrities and journalists leave the app in the last two weeks, its user base has remained stable, thanks to a 27% surge in new downloads in the U.S.
https://www.thewrap.com/rob-reiner-bluesky-maga-scum/
Good witch Glinda has the final word for the TDS-afflicted struggling to come to terms with the election results.
https://ogdaa.blogspot.com/2024/11/your-friday-politics-in-memes.html
Rob Reiner Says ‘MAGA Scum’ Have Already Wrecked Bluesky
Does anyone sell T-Shirts that say “MAGA Scum And Proud Of It.”?
TRHL joins the gleeful libertarian-conservative social media voices trolling the libs on Bluesky. You can almost feel the shudders of revulsion from the partisans of the Party of Tolerance, Inclusivity, and Joy.
https://x.com/TRHLofficial/status/1859830133416394899
The Most Fatal Mistake of Biden’s Term
We’re still sifting through all the reasons that the 2024 presidential cycle turned out the way it did, but there’s clearly one factor that proved more potent than just about any other: costs. Groceries, housing, transport, recreation—everything that’s far more expensive now than it was before the pandemic recovery continued to weigh on the minds of voters of all demographics as they went to the polls. The roaring stock market, cooling inflation gauges, and positive employment metrics didn’t matter. The vibes of the so-called vibecession were very real.
It’s not hard to see why voters, time and time again, indicated that the economy was their top issue. U.S. consumers have experienced serious whiplash over the past four years, with a severe COVID recession in 2020 and inflation jumping to 5 percent the following year during a supply-chain crunch. By 2022, as the pandemic continued to ravage normal life in the U.S., Russia began its invasion of Ukraine, further pushing all-around inflation to about 8 percent—the highest level seen in the U.S. since 1981.
This has spurred a reckoning with the Biden administration’s aggressive post-COVID economic policy, which by all accounts engineered a remarkable comeback from pandemic-era hits to the economy. There were no further recessions, despite the panic from the financial press, and the labor market even came close to full employment. Yet the surge in prices was a worldwide phenomenon, with climate and war shocks adding to market woes everywhere. So much still felt unaffordable and out of reach for many Americans, even down to formerly cheap everyday goods. High interest rates, pumped up to slow down inflation, did not help with the massive debt burden that weighs on too many American families, from credit cards to mortgages to health care. Whatever the appropriate classification for this economic situation, inflation has become the catchall buzzword for a malaise as definitive and deadly now as it was early in Joe Biden’s term. To quote Isabella Weber, who helped mainstream the idea of corporate price hikes as an inflationary force: “Unemployment weakens governments. Inflation kills them.”
A quick glance back through American political history may seem to bear that out.
Did Biden do the wrong thing on an electoral level, then, to pour billions of dollars into the U.S. economy through a corpus of massive legislation—the American Rescue Plan, an infrastructure bill, the Inflation Reduction Act, the CHIPS Act—and make sure people got back on their feet, instead of remaining jobless? Did a worldwide “cost-of-living crisis” trump the benefits of a working economy? Did none of it matter anyway, in light of the sheer disinformation that informed countless voters’ choices at the polls?
It’s complicated, according to Claudia Sahm, a former Federal Reserve economist, who told Slate that on paper the Biden administration made all the right moves to combat inflation. It’s dropped drastically over the past two years—it’s been about 2 percent through 2024—yet voters are still unhappy with the economy. However, there’s a silver lining: wage growth. Since September 2023, wage growth has outpaced inflation, while unemployment has also remained low. That’s a recipe for success.
“The good way to deal with inflation is to have people’s wages catch up,” Sahm explained. “We have seen inflation really start to slow down in the second half of 2023, and we had a strong labor market through much of the recovery.” Despite the Biden administration overseeing this positive trend, huge swaths of voters seemed to be looking for pre-pandemic prices that were last overseen by Donald Trump. According to Sahm, that’s unlikely to ever happen.
“A lot of people have this feeling, ‘Well, until prices go down, I’m not going to be happy.’ And you really want to be careful what you wish for,” Sahm said. “The only time prices go down in a broad way is during the Great Depression. We don’t want that.”
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/the-most-fatal-mistake-of-biden-s-term/ar-AA1uAxsa
By 2022, as the pandemic continued to ravage normal life in the U.S., Russia began its invasion of Ukraine, further pushing all-around inflation to about 8 percent—the highest level seen in the U.S. since 1981.
The globalist scum media is incapable of telling the truth. Any economic fallout from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine – which was entirely preventable, BTW – pales in significance compared to the inflationary effects of the Fed flooding the financial system with created-out-of-thin-air money, stealing value from every honestly-earned dollar in existence.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lK_rYS8L3kI
and positive employment metrics
I suggest they take a look at the tales of job seeking woe on glassdoor dot com
Since Colorado Springs went blue, Nextdoor has been flooded with Ring camera reports of property crimes and riffraff roaming neighborhoods in the wee hours of the morning trying to open car doors or get into garages. Also tweakers cutting copper backflow pipes from people’s backyards. Tons of tales of woes from people asking for charity or free services from neighbors.
Tons of tales of woes from people asking for charity or free services from neighbors.
I would say that about half the posts on NextDoor are people asking for charity.
As for the crime, it’s everywhere on the Front Range now, though far worse in some places than others.
NextDoor
I looked at that site once a while back. It had a few “where is my cat?” posts but was polluted with messages from our crazy NY governor.
As for the crime, it’s everywhere on the Front Range now, though far worse in some places than others.
A few months back a libtard FedGov employee in my neighborhood – single woman in her 40s – had the catalytic converter cut off her Acura SUV, which was parked in her driveway – her garage is filled with crap. She noted that her security camera caught a good image of the thief, who appeared to be Central American or southern Mexican – “squatty and very swarthy” in her words. I happened to catch up with her after the dealership told her the repair would be $4K and it would take 3 weeks to get the parts – she was in a rage. I don’t think I improved her mood by shrugging and saying, “You literally voted for this.” Definitely elevated my mood though.
explain to me like i”m 5, why we don’t want prices to go down in a broad way.
Isn’t this what capitalism (real capitalism, not the financialization we have now) is supposed to do? make things cheaper over time? Isn’t that how things get better?
Things have gotten cheaper. That just gave cover for massive theft by the Fed.
Paul Krugman muh best economy ever
“Groceries, housing, transport, recreation—everything that’s far more expensive now than it was before the pandemic recovery continued to weigh on the minds of voters of all demographics as they went to the polls.”
Whose bright idea was it to inundate the economy with printing press money during a pandemic-driven shutdown of economic production with clogged imprt supply chains? Hopefully Modern Monetary Theory was thoroughly repudiated as a side effect.
Opinion>Finance
The views expressed by contributors are their own and not the view of The Hill
Did modern monetary theory elect Donald Trump?
by Phillip Magness and Alexander William Salter, opinion contributors – 11/19/24 9:30 AM ET
Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell is seen during a Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee hearing on the semiannual Monetary Policy Report to Congress at the Capitol on Tuesday, July 9, 2024.
Good ideas don’t always outcompete bad ones. But willful foolishness usually has a cost.
So it is with modern monetary theory. Ironically, this basket of economic fallacies, embraced by policymakers during the Biden-Harris administration, may have returned Donald Trump to the White House.
Exit polls conclusively demonstrated voters are fed up with the high cost of living. The economy topped their list of concerns; three-quarters of the electorate attributed some degree of hardship to inflation. The de facto embrace of modern monetary theory-style fiscal and monetary extravagance over the past four years explains how we got here.
For the unfamiliar, modern monetary theory is a fringe school of economic thought arguing that the federal government, as the sole issuer of legal tender, can issue virtually limitless amounts of new money to fund itself. Bucking thousands of years of evidence that such reckless policies lead to currency devaluation, advocates shirk all blame when inflation occurs, insisting instead that prices increased due to “corporate greed” and “price gouging.”
Perhaps some of that sounds familiar.
Over the last four years, the federal government essentially stumbled into a modern monetary theory-style monetary crisis. The Biden-Harris administration began its term assuming it could “run the economy hot” while also avoiding inflation. They added another multi-trillion-dollar stimulus to Trump-era COVID relief spending, believing they could escape the repercussions of its price tag. Then inflation spiraled out of control.
On the fiscal side, extravagant spending greatly increased government indebtedness. On the monetary side, running the printing press to keep interest rates low flooded financial markets with liquidity. The predictable result was too much money chasing too few goods — the classic recipe for dollar depreciation, better known as inflation.
When the first signs of an inflationary spiral appeared in summer 2021, the White House responded with an official stance of denialism. Price level increases were only “transitory,” they assured us, adopting a talking point from modern monetary theory theorist Stephanie Kelton.
As the problem lingered beyond Kelton’s predictions, the White House doubled down on fringe theories, such as blaming “corporate greed” instead of its own spending habits. As recently as July 2024, Council of Economic Advisors chair Jared Bernstein adopted the modern monetary theory-aligned inflation narrative of economist Isabella Weber, who contends that producers made an “implicit agreement” to exploit a price shock during the pandemic and extract profits from the public.
Vice President Kamala Harris attempted to turn this conspiratorial reasoning into policy by proposing price controls at the grocery store — a scheme rejected by most economists, but championed by Weber, Kelton and other modern monetary theory advocates on the heterodox periphery of the profession.
Modern monetary theory fooled Washington’s elite because its message was seductive: If there’s any slack in the economy and the government prints and spends in its own currency, policymakers don’t need to worry about price hikes.
The years 2020-2024 provided an unambiguous test of this theory. The answer: It’s bunk. Consumer price inflation peaked at 9 percent during the summer of 2022. Central bankers were late to the game to tighten, even adopting the modern monetary theory talking point about “transitory” inflation for a brief but critical moment in early 2021. Elected Democrats scrambled to minimize the role their profligacy had played in forcibly raising the cost of living, culminating in Harris’s grocery store price control proposal as the centerpiece of her economic platform.
The flawed narratives of “transitory” inflation and “greedflation” can be viewed as desperate spin attempts in the face of obvious economic reality. Fed officials should have predicted the consequences of keeping money growth above economic growth for so long.
President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris should have recognized that continued fiscal follies would pressure the Fed to embrace money mischief, and that price controls simply made the administration look economically illiterate and out of touch. This rhetoric began as a convenient political argument for stimulus spending, then morphed into an act of self-deception on the part of the Harris campaign.
As election day exit polling revealed, the electorate repudiated the modern monetary theory narrative. Americans are fed up with over-credentialed experts inventing new reasons to ignore basic economics. The laptop class has only itself to blame for elevating these fringe theories, thereby facilitating Trump’s electoral comeback.
Phillip W. Magness is the David J. Theroux Chair in Political Economy at the Independent Institute, Oakland, Calif. Alexander William Salter, an Independent Institute research fellow, is the Georgie G. Snyder Associate Professor of Economics in the Rawls College of Business at Texas Tech University and a researcher with TTU’s Free Market Institute.
…
https://thehill.com/opinion/finance/4996296-modern-monetary-theory-inflation/
I’d like to remind the proponents of MMT and other whack Democrat-favored theories of what my freshman microeconomics professor taught the class on the first day:
“There’s no such thing as a free lunch.”
Hopefully Modern Monetary Theory was thoroughly repudiated as a side effect.
That is hopefully, the bright side to the inflation issues.
But, some people don’t/won’t learn so, we will see.
Bidenomics, Also Known As MMT
Jul 22, 2024 2 min read
Commentary By
Arthur Laffer, Ph.D.
Founder and Chairman, Laffer Associates
Stephen Moore
Senior Visiting Fellow, Economics
…
https://www.heritage.org/progressivism/commentary/bidenomics-also-known-mmt
‘Sometimes ideas that seem obviously silly catch on and cause serious destruction. In the late 2000s Australian economist Bill Mitchell coined the term “Modern Monetary Theory,” or MMT, to describe what one might call Keynesianism on steroids. John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946) argued that government should stimulate the economy by spending and borrowing during a short-term shock like an economic crisis or a war, then pull back to a reasonable level of spending and debt once the crisis has passed.
Under MMT, the crisis never ends. Proponents posit that because the dollar is the world reserve currency and the Treasury can sell bonds at low interest rates, Uncle Sam can spend and borrow limitlessly with no economic risk. As Stephanie Kelton, an economist at Stony Brook University, put it: “Deficits can help us fight a myriad of problems that plague our economy—inequality, poverty and unemployment, climate change, housing, health care, and more.”’
“A lot of people have this feeling, ‘Well, until prices go down, I’m not going to be happy.’ And you really want to be careful what you wish for,”
A seasoned Fed insider would never advocate falling prices as a way out of an episode of inflation, as the private banks which form the Fed’s constituency are highly dependent on ongoing inflation to keep from getting saddled with and collapsing under a weight of underwater debt. Wage inflation is the standard hair-of-the-dog remedy for a bout of high inflation in other goods and servicesbesides labor, according to mainstream economic doctrine.
“The only time prices go down in a broad way is during the Great Depression. We don’t want that.”
How soon we forget the deflating asset prices of the 2007-2012 financial crisis that brought on a protracted period of extraordinary monetary stimulus known as Quantitative Easing…
Automakers’ Costly Gamble on EVs: A Lesson in Ignoring Consumer Demand
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2024/11/23/automakers-costly-gamble-on-evs-a-lesson-in-ignoring-consumer-demand/
In the ever-evolving automotive industry, listening to consumers has always been the cornerstone of sustainable success. Yet, in recent years, many automakers have turned a deaf ear to consumer preferences, betting big on electric vehicles (EVs) despite clear signals that the market wasn’t ready to fully embrace them. The result? A multibillion-dollar debacle, with these companies now clinging to hopes that government intervention will save them from their missteps.
The Money Quote That Says It All
A recent article in the New York Times highlights this perfectly:
“But they have already invested billions in a transition to electric vehicles, and fear that if Mr. Trump made an abrupt change as he has promised, they could be undercut by automakers who sell cheaper, gas-powered cars.”
https://archive.is/qyry3#selection-937.85-937.305
This admission is staggering. Automakers have sunk vast sums into EV production, prioritizing a politically charged vision of the future over actual consumer demand. Now, they’re worried that a rollback of EV mandates could leave them vulnerable to competition from companies that stuck to producing affordable, gas-powered vehicles. The fear is justified because these companies chose to ignore basic market principles: satisfy your customers, or someone else will.
A Tale of Two Strategies
While some automakers threw caution to the wind and gambled on an electric future, others, like Toyota, took a more measured approach. Toyota has long been a leader in hybrid technology, balancing innovation with consumer accessibility. Instead of forcing a rapid transition to EVs, Toyota focused on building cars that people want and can afford. The result? A loyal customer base and financial stability, without reliance on government bailouts or regulations to prop up their strategy.
Contrast this with companies that rushed into EV production without adequately considering demand. They’ve saddled themselves with immense sunk costs—investments in EV production lines, supply chains, and infrastructure—that they now cannot recover. These companies are essentially betting on government policies to shape the market in their favor, a risky and unsustainable strategy.
Tesla: The Standout Exception
Amid this turmoil, Tesla stands apart as a shining example of how to succeed in the EV market without relying on government mandates or subsidies. Of course Tesla took advantage of subsidies in the past, because leaving money on the table is study, but unlike legacy automakers, Tesla has focused on making vehicles that people want to buy. Its designs, technology, and competitive performance captured consumers around the globe.
Elon Musk has been vocal about Tesla’s ability to thrive without government support, recently stating that subsidies or mandates are unnecessary for the company’s success. Tesla has achieved profitability and dominance by creating a desirable product, not by forcing consumers into a corner through regulation. This starkly contrasts with traditional automakers who seem more concerned with appeasing policymakers than satisfying their customers.
The Consumer Disconnect
Many consumers remain hesitant to adopt EVs due to high costs, range anxiety, and insufficient charging infrastructure. Instead of addressing these concerns, many automakers doubled down on EV production, banking on regulatory mandates to create an artificial demand for their products.
This approach ignores a simple truth: consumers vote with their wallets. Tesla understands this dynamic. Companies like Toyota, which continue to offer efficient and affordable options, also demonstrate the importance of aligning with consumer needs. On the other hand, those that gambled on EVs without a clear understanding of the market are now left hoping that government policies won’t expose their poor decisions.
The Role of Government
For the now EV-focused big automakers, government intervention has become a lifeline. Subsidies, tax incentives, and regulatory mandates are crucial to making EVs competitive. Without them, these companies risk being outpriced and outperformed by competitors offering cheaper, gas-powered alternatives. However, relying on government policies to dictate market dynamics is a dangerous game. Policies can change with each election cycle, leaving automakers vulnerable to sudden shifts, as the NYT article points out.
Lessons for the Future
Tesla’s success and Toyota’s steady approach highlight an important lesson: automakers must align their strategies with consumer demand, not political agendas. Innovation is essential, but it must be tempered by market realities. Companies like Tesla have shown that it’s possible to lead the charge in EV adoption by delivering products customers want. Similarly, Toyota demonstrates that slow and steady wins the race by focusing on what people want today while preparing for the future.
Meanwhile, legacy automakers stuck with massive sunk costs in EV production have exposed themselves to enormous risks. No amount of government intervention can shield them entirely from the consequences of ignoring their customers.
Ultimately, the market will decide the winners and losers. Automakers that prioritize consumer satisfaction over government market manipulation will thrive, while those that gambled on an uncertain future may find themselves scrambling to survive. Tesla’s trajectory proves that it’s possible to innovate without compromising, and the rest of the industry would be wise to take notes.
Hopefully CAFE MPG numbers will be rolled back and usher in the return of normally aspirated engines with durable slushbox transmissions.
+1
“Toyota has long been a leader in hybrid technology, balancing innovation with consumer accessibility. Instead of forcing a rapid transition to EVs, Toyota focused on building cars that people want and can afford.”
I helped one of my sons choose one of those Toyota hybrids to purchase a few years ago. He still loves it and drives it every day.
Creepy?
That’s rich, considering there’s no fundamental difference between a Diddy Party and a DNC fundraiser.
Mark Zuckerberg belongs in prison for censoring and silencing truth-tellers on social media who sounded the alarm over the clot shot, and serving as craven toady of Big Pharma and the captured medical establishment.
https://x.com/liz_churchill10/status/1860386764302528562
Big elephant in room about election campaign is that no questions or discussion about the Covid 19 Panademic and the fake counter measures of lockdowns, useless masks and Biden mandating fake killer vaccines.
The biggest crime against humanity, with these fake lethal vaccines still on the market, with them expanding this poison into more products.
A big cover up of the biggest attack on humans by genocidal Powers that be.
And while we were locked down, the US was invaded by up to 20 million illegals .
Total avoidance of discussion on this elephant in the room, as if it didn’t happen .
Instead we are getting a diversion to food supply toxins , and 120 years of toxic fluorine in water.
Suffice to say that the food supply has been toxic for years, but it doesn’t come close to the biggest assult on humans of genocidal vaccines and the cover up of this crime.
Also a UN dictated Climate Change lock down in Valencia Spain regarding their floods blamed on Climate Change. But, some experts say the real cause of the flooding was they eliminated a bunch of dams in the area, that would of prevented the excess flooding.
Covid vaccines are poison.
Climate change is communism.
Michelle Obama is a man
Silver, Bitchez!!
https://x.com/hashtag/silver?src=hashtag_click
This one of the few times you must bite the bullet and pay a lawyer so you can either stay until your lease ends or get them to pay for all your expenses to move and terminate the lease.
—————-
. “Felicia Seamon’s home for the holidays is stuck in limbo after the property she rents was foreclosed on
We need to reopen all the insane asylums Reagan closed in the 1980s. TDS needs to be recognized as a national mental health emergency, with the afflicted too unhinged to vote or procreate.
https://x.com/ClownWorld_/status/1860442068642070820
No matter how much you hate the globalist scum media, it isn’t nearly enough.
https://x.com/saras76/status/1860423406304264331
Are the billionaire owners of globalist scum media outlets like WaPo that are hemorrhaging money and subscribers finally ready to jettison “woke” editors and Real Journalists who have lost all credibility?
https://nypost.com/2024/11/21/media/washington-post-abruptly-ousts-politics-editor-dan-eggen-after-trump-win-report/
Their purpose was to spread propaganda. Since they have clearly failed the globalist dollars that used to go their way will in the future be spent elsewhere.
Dan Eggen is from Norway, so he’s easily expendable. However, Jennifer Rubin is a member of the usual suspects, so she’ll be allowed enough loiter time while another lucrative slot is created for her.
The globalists’ Democrat minions have their marching orders: escalate their jihad against free speech.
https://x.com/ReclaimTheNetHQ/status/1860399807652565243
Don’t expect the monsters to just give up and go away. Sure, right now they are determining who is no longer of use to them. The unfortunate will be thrown under the bus. But if there is anything worth recognizing about the monsters is that they are tenacious.
We need to keep our guard up.
What are the odds of the crypto and AI bubbles bursting at the same time?
https://x.com/FinanceLancelot/status/1860446112471019907
Die, speculator scum. Just die already.
https://www.news.com.au/finance/work/at-work/not-the-problem-property-investors-living-it-up-on-boat-party-hit-out-criticism/news-story/cd03f7dda8b855766a6902802f3d89c3
An inability to control one’s TDS should be a firing offense in our NEA indoctrination mills.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14118469/Connecticut-teacher-kill-Donald-Trump-voters-new-career.html
Unclear to me how euphoria over Trump’s election translates into retail investor muppets piling into the Fed’s asset bubbles & Ponzi markets, especially the crypto pump & dump.
https://x.com/charliebilello/status/1859959062860816758
‘A starter home that Landry listed in pricey Boothbay Harbor this month is still on the market, and even saw a $7,000 price reduction’
Sacré Bleu!
‘We know from years and years of evidence that requiring somebody to get well, get sober, before they can access housing just means more people are going to fall down on that journey before they get back into housing’
I don’t know who came up with that horse-hockey Alex, but it will never work. Sober isn’t what it used to be.
‘It feels like — did I take money from the devil? What did I sign up for?’…‘I’d be very surprised if they did this type of program again,’ said Eric Rosengren, former president of the Boston Fed, which runs Main Street’
Great job as always Eric.
‘If you’ve got $1 million cash, you don’t have a lot of options. [Real estate is] a place where you can live, [and] you can easily hide ownership through beneficial owners…You can co-mingle the proceeds of crime as a rental revenue…It’s multipurpose for both making money and hiding money’
I’ve been blogging about the money laundering REIC up there since at least 2009 Steve. Not much has changed for the better.
‘There are a ‘multitude of culprits’ for the failure of housing supply to keep up with demand, said Jeremy Warner in The Telegraph. But ‘the biggest cause of the lot’ is immigration, said Warner. Since the turn of the century, three million homes have been built in England, but the population has grown by around eight million, ‘nearly all of it immigration’
Central planning!
‘the Korean economy is a ‘house built with debts.’ During the Moon Jae-in administration, apartment prices in Seoul and the metropolitan area soared two to three times’
It is different this time.
11-20-2024 Weed, CA – Atmospheric River Closes I-5, Trucks and Cars Stranded, Vehicles Spinning Out
Live Storms Media
3 days ago
I-5 was shut down between Yreka and Redding, CA, Wednesday morning due to heavy falling and blowing snow, which caused treacherous to impossible driving conditions. Hundreds of semi-trucks were left stuck and stranded along I-5 and Weed, CA. CalTrans manned roadblocks for the closure of the freeway. Vehicles were spinning out due to slick conditions.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rq4lvFlzzO8
2:19.
David Vitner Day. “Snowfalls are now just a thing of the past.” – David Viner – March 2000
https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2024/11/19/david-viner-day/
“’Within a few years winter snowfall will become ‘a very rare and exciting event’”.
“Children just aren’t going to know what snow is,”
In other news: 11-20-2024 Weed, CA – Atmospheric River Closes I-5, Trucks and Cars Stranded, Vehicles Spinning Out
David Viner Day has arrived early this winter!
City motto: “Weed like to welcome you.”
Bush to Trump: You can’t insult your way to presidency
CNN
8 years ago
Speaking at the CNN GOP debate, candidates Donald Trump and Jeb Bush spar over what it takes to keep America safe.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKQgrOV27X0
2 minutes.
Does this period of politically unpopular inflation and impossibly unaffordable housing costs seem like the right time for the government to deliberately drive prices higher?
Yahoo Finance
Multifamily Dive
FHFA announces higher caps for Freddie, Fannie
The Fannie Mae headquarters in May 2019. Both Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are establishing new requirements for multifamily lenders, requiring them to provide 30 days advance notice of rent increases and lease expiration. ·
Multifamily Dive · Courtesy of Fannie Mae
Leslie Shaver
Thu, November 21, 2024 at 7:52 AM PST 3 min read
This story was originally published on Multifamily Dive. To receive daily news and insights, subscribe to our free daily Multifamily Dive newsletter.
Dive Brief:
– The Federal Housing Finance Agency has established lending caps of $73 billion each for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, allowing them to purchase a total of up to $146 billion in multifamily loans in 2025.
– FHFA’s new caps are a 4% increase above the $70 billion the agency allotted for each government-sponsored enterprise in 2024. In 2023, they were given $75 billion each.
– Even as the caps have been raised, questions surround the future of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. During Donald Trump’s first presidency, plans were made to privatize the agencies before COVID-19 hit in 2020, according to The Washington Post, which reported that the new Trump administration could try again to remove the GSEs from government control.
…
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/fhfa-announces-higher-caps-freddie-155200754.html
Why not? I’m sure the lame duck government would love to leave an even bigger wreck to DJT to deal with.