Brent Nyitray
Fairlington Blade
Let the mutherfuker burn!
jnc4p
Kevin S. Willis
Michigoose
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markinaustin
Memetrics
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quarterback
ScottC
yellojktVital Statistics:
| Last | Change | |
| S&P futures | 3066 | 64.1 |
| Oil (WTI) | 36.64 | -0.39 |
| 10 year government bond yield | 0.7% | |
| 30 year fixed rate mortgage | 3.19% |
Stocks are rebounding after yesterday’s bloodbath. Bonds and MBS are down small.
CNBC reported that Quicken Loans is planning an IPO. I guess the S4 was filed confidentially, so we can’t tell much about the company’s financials. The company said that it originated $52 billion in the first quarter. Certainly the timing for a sale is right, with what looks to be a record period for refinances as far as they eye can see.
Realtor.com reports that the summer house shopping season is in full swing, with prices up about 5%. “The big surprise of the housing market is that prices have remained quite resilient,” says realtor.com Senior Economist George Ratiu. He doesn’t expect prices to drop over the next few months. “The summer housing market will be better than expected, but far off the normal pace.” The inventory situation is even worse than before – listings are down 25% from a year ago. That said, it is a bifurcated market, with multiple offers for lower priced homes, and little demand for higher priced ones. “For most people it will be a competitive buying market,” says Lawrence Yun, chief economist of the National Association of Realtors®. “For lower-priced and medium-priced homes, multiple offers will be fairly common. On the luxury end, some price reduction will be required because there’s plentiful inventory.”
More evidence that people are fleeing the cities: May rentals in Manhattan are down 62%. “The supply of available rental units continues to accumulate,” UrbanDigs said in its report, which looked at all five New York City boroughs, “hinting that renters will have the upper hand in negotiability when the market finally reopens.”
Mark Calabria said that the forbearance rates for the GSEs is manageable. “We’ve seen over the last few weeks those numbers start to stabilize,” Calabria said. “Within the GSE portfolio, you see as many borrowers canceling their forbearance programs as you see rolling on. I certainly over the last few months have been concerned about what the direction of the housing market would be coming out of COVID-19,” Calabria said. “I’ve been very pleasantly surprised.”
Filed under: Economy, Morning Report |
All Things in Moderation 
Worth watching:
NoVA, note the comment on institutions lying to everyone.
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He thinks about stuff, and it’s good he’s out there. I think Candace Owens is as entitled to her opinion as anybody, including him, which is probably the only part that made me really roll my eyes.
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I watched it last night. good stuff
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“We’ve seen over the last few weeks those numbers start to stabilize,” Calabria said.
My in-laws were born in Calabria.
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“The Abrupt, Radical Reversal in How Public Health Experts Now Speak About the Coronavirus and Mass Gatherings
Glenn Greenwald,
June 11 2020, 1:01 p.m”
https://theintercept.com/2020/06/11/the-abrupt-radical-reversal-in-how-public-health-experts-now-speak-about-the-coronavirus-and-mass-gatherings/
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the public health experts better hope that we don’t see a resurgence of cases, because people are not going to believe them when they tell them to stay at home again…
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Opps:
“NBA star J.R. Smith kicks a protester on the ground after he ‘smashed his car during George Floyd protests’ in Los Angeles – and defends his attack by saying, ‘he broke my window so I whooped his a**
…
Smith said in his clarifying video: ‘One of these mother***ing white boys didn’t know where he was going and broke my f***ing window in my truck.’ ‘”
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8375007/NBAs-J-R-Smith-caught-video-beating-protester-broke-car-window.html
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Mark….in case you find yourself with a couple free hours, here is today’s arguments on the writ of mandamus in the Flynn case.
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What’s your opinion Scott?
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McWing:
What’s your opinion Scott?
I haven’t listened to it all, but from what I understand one of the three judges is definitely not going to vote to grant the writ, and a second one seems to think that Sullivan must be given a chance to do the right thing (ie allow dismissal) himself, and so was reluctant to grant the writ prior to Sullivan’s final ruling. Given that Flynn is the only one in the entire circus who is paying out of his own pocket, such a ruling would basically grant Sullivan the ability to unilaterally punish Flynn financially by simply delaying his ruling. And so the injustice continues.
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So I just did a 6 mile walk and listened to the whole thing.
It seems to me that everyone, except for perhaps Judge Wilkinson, agrees that Sullivan will ultimately have to dismiss the case. Through her questions (and her silence during some presentations) Judge Rao gave the impression that she is ready to force him to do so right now. Judge Henderson seemed very reluctant to grant the writ prior to Sullivan actually ruling on the motion to dismiss, and appeared to be ready to allow the July 16 hearing to go ahead in order to give Sullivan the chance to do what even she seemed to think he has to do anyway. Judge Wilkinson, on the other hand, seems to think that Judges exist not to apply the law, but to “do the right thing”, and so he appeared to think an investigation into the motives of the DOJ before ruling on dismissal was allowable.
I will say that I didn’t find Sydney Powell all that impressive. She seemed to repeatedly contradict herself in arguing both that the District Court has no general power to allow amicus briefs, and that in certain hypothetical cases it could. She attempted to draw distinctions that would explain away the seeming contradiction, but she wasn’t that convincing. Her best point was in arguing against the notion that there was no harm involved is simply letting “regular order” play out to allow Sullivan to do himself what he is required to do anyway, and that was that the financial harm to Flynn, as the only party not using taxpayer dollars, is pretty much undeniable. Why force him to continue to drain his funds for however long Sullivan wants to drag this out, and perhaps even longer if Sullivan rules against dismissal and forces an appeal, if the ultimate required outcome is already known?
The DOJ, on the other hand, I thought was very impressive. His argument was very structured and logical. Wilkinson repeatedly tried and failed to trip him up. In fact Wilkinson was quite irritating, in that he would repeatedly jump back and forth between two lines of questioning, and each time he would completely ignore what the DOJ had already answered. It was like “What about X?” to which the DOJ would respond with a reasonable answer, and then Wilkinson would say “OK, in that case what about Y”, and the DOJ would respond again with a reasonable argument. Wilkinson would then say “OK, but then what about X?” I wanted the DOJ to say “Weren’t you listening just 5 minutes ago when I answered that?” I think the DOJ presented a much better case than Powell did.
The DOJ’s case was pretty straight forward. Basically he argued that there were two things at issue with regard to whether or not to issue the writ of mandamus. First, does Sullivan have discretion to refuse to grant dismissal under rule 48a, and second, if not, is there an irreparable harm done to any party due to the process Sullivan is requiring prior to ruling as he must? The DOJ argued that, under the precedent of Fokker, the answer to the first question is clear…Sullivan does not have discretion to refuse to grant dismissal. Therefore, that brings us to the second question. The DOJ did not focus on the obvious harm to Flynn, but rather on the harm to the executive branch, the separation of powers, and even the judicial branch itself.
The two judges who addressed this argument (Rao seemed to sit this one out, which is why I think she will vote to grant the writ) focused exclusively on the first part. Henderson seemed to be skeptical that Fokker was applicable prior to Sullivan actually issuing a ruling. I think the DOJ argued convincingly that that it was, but Henderson did not seem swayed by the end. Wilkinson, on the other hand, focused on the idea that “with leave of the court” had to mean something, and that therefore even in the context of Fokker, a judge must have discretion to make a substantive inquiry into the dismissal before ruling on the motion. The DOJ pointed out that yes, certainly the judge does have some discretion, but that discretion exists for when there is opposition to the motion. In this case, there is no opposition to the motion, and so he does not.
It was in the midst of this discussion that I concluded that Wilkinson is the type of judge who thinks that judges exist to “do the right thing” rather than follow the law. He presented a thinly veiled hypothetical situation based on the George Floyd case, in which the offending policeman is charged, but then the prosecution dismisses the case for obviously corrupt/racist reasons. He wondered whether in such an instance a judge was obligated to grant the dismissal. The DOJ pretty straight forwardly said yes, he is so obligated, and that the remedy to the situation lay elsewhere, including in the political arena. But Wilkinson seemed unable to get his head around this answer, as he repeatedly returned to it as if it were impossible that a judge would not be allowed to fix the problem himself.
So, anyway, I think I will have to revise my earlier prediction, and say that I now think the writ will be denied by a 2-1 vote, and the circus will continue.
BTW, it is both amusing and somewhat irritating to listen to everyone involved, judges and the lawyers together, bend over backwards to praise Sullivan. It is apparently perfectly fine for Sullivan to enlist an obvious political partisan to write an amicus brief accusing (without evidence, as they say) the DOJ of corruption, but it is beyond the bounds of legal etiquette for anyone to suggest that Sullivan has initiated this whole process for his own not entirely wholesome reasons.
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This is not meant as a joke or parody.
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wonder when they go after the BDSM community
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Sooner that you probably think. Raceplay (what they call it) is apparently an aspect of BDSM. Quick Google suggests all the traditional progressive pubs were busy explaining why it was okay and not transgressive around 2012. Top hit for BDSM racist is “NO IT’S DEFINITELY ISN’T” but given the master/slave relationship and the commonality of race-based-BDSM . . . eh, they just haven’t gotten around to it yet. I can’t imagine this holding unless it all just dies down before that crap comes under attack. Someone will mention it and–boom!
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“wonder when they go after the BDSM community”
Male/female connectors as transphobic.
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“The tech industry”. This is a common reference (or was) with IDE hard-drives and devices where it was important that you connect it master-slave, or nothing would work, and that was the terminology.
In modern development–especially in writing code–it’s just not that common. Might be in a particular branch or development process, but I expect that’s a reference primarily to what certain computer courses in college teach–the kind that focus on the philosophy of programming more than actually programming.
Typically the language is one of “controllers” and “workers” or “factories” or “gears” or “machines” or just subprocesses and functions. And these are the language of the high-level libraries appended to the base language. So JavaScript just has the language and functions which can be called, including functions that call multiple other functions. Also recursive functions. And so on.
When you add a library like Angular on top of JavaScript, you need new words to describe the same things, particularly when your functions do certain things and don’t operate in as broad a terms as the general language function. So you have “factories”, for example.
There may occasionally be “master” and “slave” terminology in some libraries or languages–but I can’t imagine many of them are contemporary. For 30 years (and more) it’s been about object-orientation and free-floating functions. You don’t design controller-follower or manager-worker relationships (or they are not required structurally).
So I feel like this may be a battle about correcting the system racism of COBOL and FORTRAN or something.
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“Protesters Pull Down Joe Biden After Mistaking Him For Old Racist Statue”
https://babylonbee.com/news/protesters-pull-down-joe-biden-after-mistaking-him-for-old-racist-statue
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Update on the Autonomous Zone from USA Today:
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2020/06/12/seattle-protest-chaz-capitol-hill-autonomous-zone-police-free/3173968001/
This is just amazing. And apparently the original source is the Associated Press.
Why would anything ever think the mainstream media was acting like a propaganda apparatus for a particular ideology? I just can’t imagine.
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In Seattle, a group of peaceful protesters have cornered off several city blocks and established the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone
This is like saying that a group of “peaceful Germans” took over the Sudetenland and established a new province of Germany, just because they were able to walk in without firing a shot after it was abandoned by those who had committed to defend it.
Perhaps it is just a “fringe” element and unaffiliated delinquents who caused the police to abandon their own precinct.
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It’s got a festival atmosphere! They’ve already planted a lovely garden (that’s been taken over by a homeless guy, but forget that).
“News”.
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someone needs to post this at the entrance
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Taibbi on point as usual:
https://taibbi.substack.com/p/the-news-media-is-destroying-itself?token=eyJ1c2VyX2lkIjo4NTc0NzI2LCJwb3N0X2lkIjo1NDc0MTksIl8iOiJYbmIwRCIsImlhdCI6MTU5MjA2NTYzMywiZXhwIjoxNTkyMDY5MjMzLCJpc3MiOiJwdWItMTA0MiIsInN1YiI6InBvc3QtcmVhY3Rpb24ifQ.Kfu-xY8cZvLZXNnTyyNO7sTq3DrcYRN31sOnZS8DJlc
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“It feels liberating to say after years of tiptoeing around the fact, but the American left has lost its mind. It’s become a cowardly mob of upper-class social media addicts, Twitter Robespierres who move from discipline to discipline torching reputations and jobs with breathtaking casualness.”
I went ahead and subscribed too. Money where mouth is.
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But Russia!
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After being one of the few human beings on point with Russiagate–I felt obligated, so I got a year. Figured if a year didn’t turn out to be worth it I wouldn’t re-up. So far it’s been pretty solid. His media criticism in general is top notch, IMO.
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KW:
Taibbi on point as usual:
He is at his best when he is analyzing his own side. I just wish he didn’t have the need to qualify it with the standard dishonesty about Trump while doing it. He said:
Calls to “dominate” marchers…
Note where the quotation marks are and, more importantly, are not. Trump said absolutely nothing about dominating “marchers”, and while he did not explicitly identify who exactly should be “dominated”, the entire conversation was about the looting and violence that was going on, not any “marches”, and so in context it was pretty clear he was talking about rioters, not “marchers”. But that doesn’t advance the “Trump is a divisive bad man” narrative, so virtually every major media outlet adopted the false “Trump tells governors to dominate the peaceful protesters” framing. Disappointing, although not at all surprising, that Taibbi unquestionably adopts the same false narrative.
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I’m interested how often this happens. Jonah Goldberg often does that too–when he’s invested in something, he can peel it back and examine all the layers but where he’s already made up his mind it’s clear he’s just adopting the most convenient and most consistent narrative. He’s made up his mind his mind up about Trump’s tendency to say outrageous and ill-considered things (which is not inaccurate), and so just assumes whatever misquoting happens in the mainstream is true, even though it is pretty clear the press is intentionally taking quotes out of context to completely invert their actual meaning. Such as the recent “chokeholds are perfect” comment.
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Good read:
“‘Defund the Police’ Does Not Mean Defund the Police. Unless It Does.
Am I supposed to take it literally?
Andrew Ferguson”
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/06/what-does-defund-police-really-mean/612904/
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