From MarketWatch:
Pending home sales roar higher, but the housing market is still in low gear
Pending home sales jumped by a seasonally adjusted 1.1% in May but were 0.7% lower than a year ago, the National Association of Realtors said Thursday. The May increase beat the consensus forecast for a 0.6% rise.
NAR’s index, which tracks home-contract signings, has seesawed up and down every month this year, but through the noise, it’s clear that the housing market is shuffling. May marked the 17th straight month of annual declines.
Contract signings precede closings by about 45-60 days, so the index is a leading indicator for upcoming existing-home sales reports.
In May, pending sales in the Northeast were 3.5% higher, and in the Midwest, they were 3.6% higher. In the West, they dropped 1.8%. In the South, they edged up 0.1%, but were slightly higher than year-ago levels, the only region in which that was the case in May.
Good Morning New Jersey
Downside of this large field of democrats.
They are going to be sensationalist to stand out.
Which means they’ll attack the competition.
Without regard for the undecided middle watching.
Suspect the strongest candidate doesn’t get the nomination.
I still think it will be Kamala Harris. She has a huge blind spot though. I suspect her campaign is working overtime to squash it.
The nice thing about Kamala Harris is that she’ll be our first Indian president.
Fulop roughed up by real estate.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-06-28/jersey-city-s-renaissance-puts-mayor-s-ally-in-a-squeeze
Game LIFE 遊戲情報http://gamelife.tw/
Moderting last night’s debate looked a lot like being a number caller in the activity room of a mental ward on bingo night.
BTW, do Catholic churches still run Bingo games or do they just raffle off alter boys to raise money now?
Heh-heh. Altar boys, not alter boys, but I guess it could be both?
No matter who the candidate is , their life story will be completely whitewashed by The fake news just like Obama ‘s was.
Newsmedia is the least of republican worries this time. Every single tech company in silicon valley will be writing algorithms that suppress conservative speech. Some of the smartest people in the world are working for tech companies in CA and they all hate Donald Trump. He can’t bypass the media if no one can hear him or his supporters.
True, smart is a more liberal slant..;>)
Newsmedia is the least of republican worries this time. Every single tech company in silicon valley
will behas been writing algorithms that suppress conservative speech.https://www.projectveritas.com/2019/06/26/veritas-fights-back-attorneys-send-letter-to-google/
Cool demolition footage:
https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-europe-48797883/morandi-bridge-towers-demolished-in-genoa
I watched most of the debate last night. What a riot. Here’s my review.
Biden – Should not speak publicly. He sucks at it. Relying to much on what Obama did and not enough on his own accomplishments. Stay in cave until nomination strategy still his best option.
Sanders – What’s new? Same old old shtick. Did manage to get a lot of panel to agree with him. Best moment was closing statement where he pretty much said that all of the crap discussed tonight is important and needed but ain’t happening until you get the blood money out of politics.
Harris – Pretty good performance, but like a bad film, too scripted. Big turn off was whenever race was mentioned, she would but in like she was the only person qualified to discuss it since she is half black. She was smart to attack Biden. Might have been smarter to attack Bernie. None the less, she is a little too angry for my taste.
Buttigieg – Super smart, probably the best performance on the panel and not a mention of gender and sexuality crap. That’s how you do it! Too young and inexperienced though. He’ll be ready in a few more years. Joked to my wife that a gay will get elected before a woman.
Gillibrand – Knew little before, know a lot now. Very passionate, speaks her mind, fiercely independent and kind to the eye. Of all of the candidates, probably the best one to elect president. Sadly, no name recognition and press coverage means bye bye.
Yang – Last election’s pothead candidate has been replaced by this year’s universal income candidate. Pumpkin would endorse him. Nuff said.
Bennet – The edibles seemed to have kicked in pretty strongly.
Hickenlooper – Seemed pretty bright and well spoken. He was only one to attack Bernie. He said that moving towards a soc1alist will get Trump relected.
Swalwell – Did he say anything? Was he even there?
Williamson – Janis Joplin reincarnate.
NBC tried their best to make the questions easy on Biden and hard on Bernie. Didn’t make a difference.
Maddow is to the Dems as Rush was to the Reps.
Maddow is the Alex Jones of the left.
I would agree with you there.
In Massachusetts we have some people who are both.
Joked to my wife that a gay will get elected before a woman.
I heard an interesting opinion that the Dems will field Biden as a sacrificial lamb. Biden loses as a Centrist which primes the pump for 2024 for propaganda that Democrats will never win again unless they all step boldly to the left in unison.
New York Post cover was pretty funny:
https://nypost.com/cover/covers-for-friday-june-28-2019/
And yet she’s on regular TV with regular sponsors.
Maddow is the Alex Jones of the left.
Did anybody catch this story? :
https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-investigation-the-all-star-mueller-report-play-fails-to-make-trump-tweet-so-far
Yo Fulop was never kosher. He was a creation of the Kushners, they were grooming him for Gov for the last 20 years. He turned on them over Trump, never bite the hand that feeds. As soon as I saw this starting I knew they were going to take him down. Charlie Kushner is a blackmailer, I don’t doubt that he has some dirt on Fulop that he’ll give to the feds.
Even Joe Scarborough, of Morning Hate fame, thinks all of the Dems on stage last night were big zeros:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CAj2XqubOqo
Expat, the mueller testimony should be interesting. The mueller report is a fraud. Selective examination of the facts and a misleading disposition. There was only ever one goal and it was to bury trumps presidency by any means necessary. He pocketed a bunch of cash in the meantime.
Of course mueller is not going to like having to defend the roster of Clinton hacks he brought on board to conduct his sham. He’s not going to like answering why he didn’t follow any leads to Russian intelligence that were complicit with the Clinton campaign and corrupt members of Obama’s administration. And what about allowing the destruction of official communication pertaining to the sham investigation that took place between dnc hacks.
Can’t wait to see what he has to say.
More stupid laws to fix stupid laws
Legislature sends bill to Phil Murphy that exempts some vacation rentals from hotel tax
https://www.northjersey.com/story/news/2019/06/27/bill-phil-murphy-exempts-some-vacation-rentals-hotel-tax/1586183001/
Not one fact presented. Entire piece is based on opinion. This is what is wrong with journalism this day and age. Total bs.
New Jersey residents fleeing ‘in droves’ as state Democrats fight over millionaire’s
https://apple.news/AdO7JJ9p9SJWz9uK7x17hlw
The 2020 Democrats Lack Hindsight
They ignore reality and march in lockstep with their base. Did they learn anything from 2016?
By Peggy Noonan
June 28, 2019 1:10 pm ET
I’ve received tens of thousands of letters and other communications from Trump supporters the past few years, some of which have sparked extended dialogues. Two I got after last week’s column struck me as pertinent to this moment, and they make insufficiently appreciated points.
A gentleman of early middle age in Kansas City wrote to say he’d sat out the 2016 election because he was dissatisfied with both parties. But now he’s for Donald Trump, and the reason “runs deeper than politics.”
America’s elites in politics, media and the academy have grown oblivious to “the average Joe’s intense disgust” at being morally instructed and “preached to.”
“Every day, Americans are told of the endless ways they are falling short. If we don’t show the ‘proper’ level of understanding according to a talking head, then we are surely racist. If we don’t embrace every sanitized PC talking point, then we must be heartless. If we have the audacity to speak our mind, then we are most definitely a bigot.” These accusations are relentless.
“We are jabbed like a boxer with no gloves on to defend us. And we are fed up. We are tired of being told we aren’t good enough.” He believes the American people are by nature kind and generous—“they would give you the shirt off their back if you were in trouble”—and that “in Donald Trump, voters found a massive sledgehammer that pulverizes the ridiculous notion that Americans aren’t good enough.” Mr. Trump doesn’t buy the guilt narrative.
“It’s surely not about the man at this point. It stopped being about Trump long ago. It is about that counter-punch that has been missing from our culture for far too long.”
The culture of accusation, he says, is breaking us apart.
A reader who grew up upper-middle-class in the South writes on the politics of the situation. His second wife, also a Southerner, grew up poor. She is a former waitress and bartender whose politics he characterizes as “pragmatic liberal.” They watched Mr. Trump’s 2015 announcement together, and he said to her, “He doesn’t have a chance.” She looked at him “with complete conviction” and said, “He’s going to win.”
As the campaign progressed, she never wavered. At the end, with the polls saying Hillary, “I asked my wife how she could be so certain Trump was going to win.” He found her response “astute and telling.”
“She told me, ‘He speaks my language, and there’s a lot more of me than there is of you.’ ”
I have to say after a week of reading such letters that emotionally this cycle feels like 2016 all over again. Various facts are changed (no Mrs. Clinton) but the same basic dynamic pertains—the two Americas talking past each other, the social and cultural resentments, the great estrangement. It’s four years later but we’re re-enacting the trauma of 2016.
And the Democrats again appear to be losing the thread.
They’ve spent the past few months giving the impression they are in a kind of passionate lockstep with a part of their base, the progressives, and detached from everyone else.
And in the debates they doubled down. Both nights had fizz. There was a lot of earnestness and different kinds of brightness.
But what Night One did was pick up the entire party and put it down outside the mainstream and apart from the center.
This is what the candidates said:
They are, functionally, in terms of the effects of their stands, for open borders.
They are in complete agreement with the abortion regime—no reservations or qualms, no sense of just or civilized limits.
They’re all in on identity politics. One candidate warned against denying federally funded abortions to “a trans female.”
Two said they would do away with all private health insurance.
Every party plays to its base in the primaries and attempts to soften its stands in the general. But I’m wondering how the ultimate nominee thinks he or she will walk this all back. It is too extreme for America, and too extreme for the big parts of its old base that the Democrats forgot in 2016.
It was as if they were saying, “Hi, middle-American people who used to be Democrats and voted for Trump, we intend to alienate you again. Go vote for that jerk, we don’t care.”
Another problem: America has a painful distance between rich and poor, but it is hard to pound the “1%” hammer effectively in a nation enjoying functional full employment. Our prosperity is provisional and could leave tomorrow, but right now America’s feeling stronger.
“Grapes of Wrath” rhetoric resonates when people think they’re in or entering a recession or depression. The debaters Wednesday night looked like they were saying, “Who ya gonna believe, me or your lying eyes?”
After these big facts, candidate-by-candidate analysis seems secondary. Beto O’Rourke’s fatuous, self-actualizing journey makes the Democrats look sillier than they have to. Elizabeth Warren was focused and energetic, and her call to break up concentrations of power, including big tech, was strong and timely. She made a terrible mistake in holding to her intention to do away with private health insurance. An estimated 180 million Americans have such policies. Why force potential supporters to choose between her and their family’s insurance? Who does she think is going to win that? Why put as the headline on your plan, “This is what I’m going to take away from you”? Why would she gamble a serious long-term candidacy on such a vow? It is insane.
If she is extremely lucky Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez won’t endorse her soon and make it worse.
Bill de Blasio had the best moment in the first half-hour, suggesting Democrats shouldn’t bicker about policy differences but instead unite as progressives. He has that air of burly, happy aggression that is the special province of idiots. Tulsi Gabbard broke through when it became clear she was the only explicitly antiwar candidate on the stage; this had the interesting effect of showing the others up.
Night two was more raucous but similarly extreme. The first 15 minutes included higher taxes, free college and student-loan forgiveness. Most candidates agreed on free health insurance for illegal immigrants. They also appeared to believe that most or all U.S. immigration law should be abolished.
The big dawgs did OK. If Kamala Harris was not a big dawg, she is now. Joe Biden sort of held his own but seemed to flag. Bernie Sanders seemed not as interesting as last cycle, more crotchety and irritable.
Eric Swalwell’s uncorking of a memory from when he was 6—ol’ Sen. Biden came to town and talked about passing the torch to younger leaders—was an attempt at slyness that so widely missed its mark, was so inelegant and obvious, that it was kind of fabulous. By the end of the night Mr. Swalwell had flamed out from sheer obnoxiousness.
The nonpolitician Marianne Williamson was delightfully unshy, sincere and, until her daffy closing statement, sympathetic. Kirsten Gillibrand yippily interrupted—“It’s my turn!”—and did herself no good.
It was an odd evening in that it was lively, spirited, at moments even soulful, and yet so detached from reality.
It’s a 113 degrees in France. Tell me again how human action has no impact on the planet. So ignorant.
He might get the Seth Rich treatment before he makes it to the microphone; then they can investigate Trump all over again.
Can’t wait to see what he has to say.
The Great Pumpkin says:
June 28, 2019 at 10:54 pm
You post useless garbage. Tell me again how your action has no impact on this blog. So ignorant.
“They’re all in on identity politics. One candidate warned against denying federally funded abortions to a trans female.”
Pointed this out when it occurred. Still perplexed how the basic anatomy of the policy position actually works. Progressive identity politics > biology these days I guess. LOL.
“[de Blasio] has that air of burly, happy aggression that is the special province of idiots.”
Priceless.
“Bennet – The edibles seemed to have kicked in pretty strongly.”
Lib, thanks for the late morning chuckle.
I didn’t even bother with the second night. Treated it like the Stanley Cup playoffs, I’ll tune in for the semifinals.