Monday AM ~ TheFrontPageCover

TheFrontPageCover
~ Featuring ~
Huff and Puff and Blow 
the Housing Market Down? 
by Brian Mark Weber
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Congressman affirms: Unaware of abuse at OSU
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{ wnd.com } ~ Responding to accusations from former student athletes that he ignored allegations of rampant sexual abuse by a team doctor at Ohio State University... Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ind., affirmed Friday evening his insistence that the accusations are “false.” “I never saw, never heard of, I never was told about any type of abuse,” Jordan said in a live interview with the Fox News Channel’s Bret Baier. “If I had been, I would have dealt with it. Our coaching staff – we would have dealt with it – these were our student athletes,” said Jordan, who served as an assistant wrestling coach at the university from 1987 to 1995. “A good coach puts the interest of student athletes first. We would have dealt with it if we had known about anything that happened.”...   http://www.wnd.com/2018/07/congressman-affirms-unaware-of-abuse-at-osu/.
Sane dummycrats-Democrats And Liberals 
Should #Walkaway From The Regressive Left
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{ lidblog.com } ~ There is a new grassroots campaign called #Walkaway that is working to remind liberal Americans of the values that they USED to stand for... Across America, sane dummycrats-Democrats and liberals are waking up to a political reality that they didn’t see coming. The dummycrats- Democrat Party and the “progressive” movement have gone off the rails, embracing an ideology that is even to the left of mainstream socialism. Progressives are now openly advocating violence against their political opponents. Progressives are now calling for the destruction of every traditional American value that has guided our nation over the last 250+ years. Progressives demonize anything and anyone that has ever been viewed as “normative” in American culture. Progressives have come to hate white people, straight people, religion, and men...   https://lidblog.com/walkaway-from-the-regressive-left/
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Memos show Strzok accelerating Russia probe before election
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{ wnd.com ~ Newly revealed FBI memos show that FBI agent Peter Strzok and his counterintelligence team stepped up their effort to find “derogatory” information regarding alleged Trump-Russia collusion... so they could expand their investigation prior to the 2016 presidential election. The investigators were looking for a “pretext” to accelerate the probe and get a surveillance warrant on figures tied to the future president, reported John Solomon in The Hill, citing documents turned over by the Justice Department to the inspector general and multiple Senate and House committees. Solomon said the documents provided what sources involved in their production, review or investigation describe as “damning” or “troubling” evidence. Strzok is scheduled to testify at an open congressional hearing next week...
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A Year Later, the Fascists of Charlottesville Are Back for More —
This Time Outside the White House 
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{ theintercept.com } ~ THE “UNITE THE RIGHT” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, last year ripped away the last shred of plausible deniability about the white supremacist fascism of the so-called alt-right... A neo-Nazi plowed his Dodge Charger into a crowd of anti-fascist counterprotesters, killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer and injuring others. A young black man was beaten bloody by racists with metal poles in a parking lot near a police station. White supremacists marched Klan-like, with burning torches and Nazi salutes, around a Confederate statue of Gen. Robert E. Lee while chanting, “Jews will not replace us!” It was a gruesome pastiche of 19th-century American and 20th-century European race hate, newly emboldened under Donald Trump. The president later declared that there were some “very fine people on both sides” — a remark that winked at the side with swastikas and “Sieg Heils.” The tragic events of that day make it all the more vile that the white nationalist organizer of “Unite the Right,” Jason Kessler, is planning an event to mark the deadly demonstration. The approval for the “anniversary” rally outside the White House was granted by the National Park Service. The application offered plans for an estimated 400 demonstrators in Washington’s Lafayette Park who would be “protesting civil rights abuse in Charlottesville, Va / white civil rights.” Kessler initially applied to hold “Unite the Right 2” in Charlottesville, and is now suing the city because it denied him a permit due to safety concerns. The lawsuit seeks to allow the demonstration to go ahead in Charlottesville, as well as in Washington, D.C., on August 12 — exactly a year after Heyer’s brutal death. The false victimhood of Kessler’s aims were on full display as news of approval for him to both assemble and speak in Washington came in: He told a local CBS affiliate, “We’re not able to peacefully assemble. We’re not able to speak.”...   https://theintercept.com/2018/07/02/charlottesville-neo-nazi-washington-kessler/?utm_source=The+Intercept+Newsletter&utm_campaign=68820eda06-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2018_07_07&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_e00a5122d3-68820eda06-131896129
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The Jones Act: A Burden America Can No Longer Bear
by Colin Grabow, Inu Manak, and Daniel J. Ikenson

{ cato.org } ~ For nearly 100 years, a federal law known as the Jones Act has restricted water transportation of cargo between U.S. ports to ships that are U.S.-owned, U.S.-crewed, U.S.-registered, and U.S.-built... Justified on national security grounds as a means to bolster the U.S. maritime industry, the unsurprising result of this law has been to impose significant costs on the U.S. economy while providing few of the promised benefits. This paper provides an overview of the Jones Act by examining its history and the various burdens it imposes on consumers and businesses alike. While the law’s most direct consequence is to raise transportation costs, which are passed down through supply chains and ultimately reflected in higher retail prices, it generates enormous collateral damage through excessive wear and tear on the country’s infrastructure, time wasted in traffic congestion, and the accumulated health and environmental toll caused by unnecessary carbon emissions and hazardous material spills from trucks and trains. Meanwhile, closer scrutiny finds the law’s national security justification to be unmoored from modern military and technological realities. This paper examines how such an archaic, burdensome law has been able to withstand scrutiny and persist for almost a century. It turns out that, as in so many other cases of rent seeking, there is an asymmetry of motivations among those who benefit from the Jones Act’s protections and the vastly greater number who bear its costs...
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Huff and Puff and Blow the Housing Market Down? 

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by Brian Mark Weber:  The 2007 housing market crash seems like a distant memory.

             Home prices are rising today, and there’s a general feeling that there’s never been a better time to own a home or purchase a new one. Throw a strong U.S. economy into the mix, and it’s no wonder we’re having trouble seeing the dark clouds on the horizon.
               The Investor’s Business Daily editorial board writes, “Right now, housing suffers from an affordability crisis. Despite median household income rising strongly since President Trump took office, the average price for a new home today is just under $330,000, vs. about $248,000 in 2006, before the last housing crisis. Higher Fed rates followed by a downturn in housing prices would devastate the U.S. economy.”
               Higher interest rates are a near certainty as the Fed responds to rising incomes and low unemployment. This would not only keep some new buyers from qualifying for mortgages but ensure those who did buy would see higher payments. Moreover, the demand for homes would dwindle if such a scenario played out.
               A greater threat is that the very government meddling that caused the bubble to burst in 2007 is setting us up for another potential crash in the market.
               But didn’t we learn anything from the recession? Didn’t the government put safeguards into place to prevent it from happening again?
               Not a chance. We are talking about politicians after all, and many of them will do anything to maintain the status quo if it benefits them politically.
               Remember Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac? They’re the two federally backed mortgage behemoths that contributed to the housing crash in 2007. In response to mainly leftist politicians pushing for greater homeownership for low-income citizens, and under orders from the Department of Housing and Urban Development, these government-sponsored enterprises offered loans to millions of applicants who simply couldn’t afford them. And both organizations failed to disclose the number of subprime loans they held.
               As with just about any government solution, this one mainly benefitted politicians claiming to be looking out for the little guy. Except in this case, too many little guys couldn’t afford to keep their homes, and the bursting of the resulting housing bubble led to the Great Recession of 2008. Thanks, dummycrats-Democrats.
               The election of Donald Trump offered a glimmer of hope. Last fall, the Trump administration highlighted problems with Fannie and Freddie in a meeting designed to prevent another housing crash. The objectives of the meeting included ending government control and doing away with the federal loan guarantees that cost American taxpayers billions when those loans fail. But in the end, there weren’t enough points of agreement to move to the next step, and we’re back to square one.
               Bloomberg’s Joe Light writes, “Trump’s administration effectively acknowledged that it’s no closer to figuring out what to do with Fannie and Freddie. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said there’ll likely be no end to federal control during this Congress. In the meantime, the duo has only become more crucial to America’s booming-again housing market, standing behind about $5 trillion of loans.
               Light adds, “Trump’s team hasn’t decided how to restructure the companies — or even who should do it, the White House or Congress. It’s still in the earliest stages of figuring out what a new housing-finance system should look like, according to interviews with officials inside and outside the administration.
               For now, there’s plenty of good news on the housing front — including a sharp uptick in home purchases due to low interest rates and a growing economy, especially among first-time buyers who are fueling a surge in home building. Housing starts for single-family homes are the strongest in a decade, and home builder  confidence remains strong after reaching an 18-year high last December.
               But with the Federal Reserve expected to increase interest rates as many as three times this year, and with the government encouraging lenders to engage in the same risky practices that led to the last crash, we could be facing a wake-up call that collapses the housing market and takes Trump’s surging economy with it.

~The Patriot Post
https://patriotpost.us/articles/56974?mailing_id=3613&utm_medium=email&utm_source=pp.email.3613&utm_campaign=snapshot&utm_content=body

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