Morning Report: Homebuilder confidence falls

Posted on August 15, 2022 by Brent Nyitray

Vital Statistics:

 LastChange
S&P futures4,251-29.50
Oil (WTI)87.46-4.67
10 year government bond yield 2.79
30 year fixed rate mortgage 5.42%

Stocks are lower this morning on weak Chinese data. Bonds and MBS are up small.

The upcoming week won’t have much in the way of market-moving data, however we will get some housing data with the NAHB Housing Market Index today, housing starts on Tuesday, and existing home sales on Thursday. We will also get the FOMC minutes on Wednesday.

Mortgage delinquency rates were 3.64% in the second quarter, which is a series low dating back to 1979. The delinquency rate and the unemployment rate track super-closely, as you can see from the chart below.

Wells Fargo is looking to shrink its mortgage footprint and cut costs. It looks like correspondent lending will take a hit and the bank will probably focus on its own retail origination. The other area is Ginnie Mae servicing. Wells has pulled back from FHA lending and is looking to get out of FHA servicing as well. Ginnie Mae servicing requirements are much harsher than Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac servicing requirements.

“We’re not interested in being extraordinarily large in the mortgage business just for the sake of being in the mortgage business,” Scharf, 57, told analysts on a conference call last month. “We are in the home-lending business because we think home lending is an important product for us to talk to our customers about, and that will ultimately dictate the appropriate size of it.”

Theoretically all of these players exiting / downsizing their presence in the mortgage market should be good news for margins going forward, however both Rocket and United Wholesale guided for compressed margins in Q3. UWM said that margins would fall from 99 bps in Q2 to 30 – 60 in Q3.

Homebuilder confidence fell for the 8th straight month, according to the NAHB Housing Market Index. Sentiment is overall negative for the first time in a while. “Ongoing growth in construction costs and high mortgage rates continue to weaken market sentiment for single-family home builders,” said NAHB Chairman Jerry Konter, a home builder and developer from Savannah, Ga. “And in a troubling sign that consumers are now sitting on the sidelines due to higher housing costs, the August buyer traffic number in our builder survey was 32, the lowest level since April 2014 with the exception of the spring of 2020 when the pandemic first hit.”

Filed under: Economy |

« »

111 Responses

  1. Let the mutherfuker burn!, on August 15, 2022 at 12:34 pm said:

    Or it could have instructions on how to make an airborne Ebola virus with just common kitchen items!

    Or, and bear with me here, it could also contain instructions that even a novice computer user could follow, that would destroy ALL digital information in existence!

    Or, how to make you’re own Universe Ending black hole in you’re garage with duct tape and carburetor cleaner!

    Like

    Reply
    • Brent Nyitray, on August 15, 2022 at 12:45 pm said:

      I am still betting that he has stuff related to the russian collusion hoax

      Like

      Reply
    • jnc4p, on August 15, 2022 at 12:59 pm said:

      Or even John Podesta’s creamy risotto recipe.

      https://www.vox.com/2016/10/12/13253852/wikileaks-john-podesta-risotto

      Like

      Reply
    • jnc4p, on August 15, 2022 at 1:03 pm said:

      “Or, how to make you’re own Universe Ending black hole in you’re garage with duct tape and carburetor cleaner!”

      Like

      Reply
    • Kevin S. Willis, on August 15, 2022 at 7:31 pm said:

      A perfect example of why the MSM is just people making shit up rather than, you know, reporting factual information to the public.

      Like

      Reply
      • Brent Nyitray, on August 15, 2022 at 7:32 pm said:

        which is why i trust the D party / MSM / deep state about as much as i trust trump

        Like

        Reply
        • Kevin S. Willis, on August 15, 2022 at 9:40 pm said:

          I trust Trump a little bit more because his biases are clear. That’s why I trust Ben Shapiro more than I would any talking head on CNN. I also don’t have much trust for Fox because they are essentially funded (like most major news networks) by the pharmaceutical industry.

          Which doesn’t mean I take Trump at face value. He’s clearly a narcissist and will either lie or be delusional when it comes to anything about how awesome he thinks he is. He will lie or be deluded—if necessary—about how rotten the other guy is.

          Still his constantly lying is entirely self-serving. So it’s scope is limited. I’ll take that over the constant propaganda drive from the MSM any day. Also helps that his egregious falsehoods are basically his and his alone, rather than the product of multiple billion dollar corporations, dozen of government agencies, and all the mainstream press organizations.

          Like

    • ScottC, on August 15, 2022 at 3:55 pm said:

      Do passports qualify as something they can take under the terms of the search warrant?

      Like

      Reply
      • lmsinca, on August 15, 2022 at 4:40 pm said:

        We don’t know yet if it’s true, but if so, I read that there are only 2 reasons to take passports in a search warrant. Either the person is a possible flight risk or investigators want to track his/her movements. Neither seems that likely to me. It could just be something else that Trump threw in the water to distract everyone……………..again.

        Like

        Reply
      • Kevin S. Willis, on August 15, 2022 at 7:29 pm said:

        It’s a federal document so they could use that rationale. Not that I think that would play well.

        Like

        Reply
        • jnc4p, on August 16, 2022 at 8:59 am said:

          Apparently they just screwed up and grabbed it with everything else. Probably was in the safe.

          Like

        • ScottC, on August 16, 2022 at 9:18 am said:

          jnc:

          Apparently they just screwed up and grabbed it with everything else.

          Which suggests to me that they were hardly being fastidious about taking what the warrant stipulated they could take. Just more indication that Andy McCarthy is probably right, and that this warrant about proper maintenance of archival records was just a pretext for a fishing expedition trying to find something, anything, that might help incriminate Trump in some way.

          Like

        • lmsinca, on August 16, 2022 at 9:07 am said:

          Thanks for the update Jnc……………makes sense to me!

          Like

        • Brent Nyitray, on August 16, 2022 at 9:31 am said:

          I don’t buy the “mistake” narrative for a second. IMO, they took it to give the impression that their case is so solid they need to prevent trump from fleeing the country.

          Since the left generally lives in its own narrative bubble, it didn’t dawn on them that people might perceive this as petty and authoritarian.

          They were surprised by the blowback, and are now backtracking.

          Like

  4. Let the mutherfuker burn!, on August 15, 2022 at 5:09 pm said:

    “Now, watch this drive. “

    Like

    Reply
    • lmsinca, on August 15, 2022 at 8:18 pm said:

      Hmmmmm, on the other side of that coin…………..

      A special education teacher in Pensacola, Florida, resigned after they said an employee from the school district removed pictures of historic Black Americans from his classroom walls.

      Micheal James,61, resigned from O.J. Semmes Elementary School on Tuesday, a day after a board-certified behavioral analyst from the Escambia school district removed images of historical Black figures from his classroom bulletin board, citing that they weren’t age-appropriate, according to the Pensacola New Journal.

      “It really floored me,” James told the local news outlet. “I’ve been teaching special education for 15 years, and it just really floored me when she did that.”

      James taught special education to students ranging from kindergarten to fifth grade, according to the report. Next to the pledge of allegiance, he displayed historical Black figures such as Martin Luther King, Jr., Harriet Tubman, Colin Powell, and George Washington Carver in his classroom because he wanted to motivate his students with figures that represented the students.

      https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/florida-teacher-resigns-after-district-removes-pictures-of-black-heroes-from-wall/ar-AA10B44E

      With a teacher shortage you’d think this wouldn’t been the desired result.

      Like

      Reply
      • Let the mutherfuker burn!, on August 15, 2022 at 8:21 pm said:

        As a product of public schools we’d all be better off if all teachers are fired.

        Like

        Reply
      • Kevin S. Willis, on August 15, 2022 at 8:29 pm said:

        In my experience SPED positions are easier fill than regular classroom teachers. If they have a shortage of SPED teachers I’d be surprised.

        That the district did that in 2022 sounds really fucking weird to me. I’d think it was either incompetence (this usually being the most likely explanation in public education) or there was some kind of internecine battle going on, and this was or is part of it.

        Like

        Reply
      • Kevin S. Willis, on August 15, 2022 at 9:17 pm said:

        Nope, but the full story suggests that the teacher resigned because he didn’t want to follow the guidelines for teaching his students.

        https://www.wkrg.com/northwest-florida/escambia-county/teacher-quits-after-escambia-co-schools-staff-take-down-his-black-leaders-posters/

        “Mr. James’s room was, at that point, set up in a more ‘traditional’ classroom configuration, with rows of desks facing the front of the room, which is a wholly inappropriate use of space for a group of students like the one’s he was assigned,” the statement said. “The two ECPS employees engaged Mr. James in reconfiguring the room and making it more academically sound for his teaching assignment.”

        During the course of this action, according to the investigation, one of the employees asked James where his teaching area was going to be. He indicated a kidney-shaped table directly in front of the bulletin board displaying the Pledge of Allegiance and the African-American luminaries.

        “The Behavior Analyst informed Mr. James the bulletin board directly behind his teaching area needed to be dedicated to state-required curricular materials he would need to engage this specific group of students in their daily learning and development activities, as they were seated at his teaching table with him,” the release said. “To be clear, due to the nature of this specific population of students, it is critical the instructional materials be within their line of sight during instruction, for the purposes of student focus and retention.”

        James disagrees with this assessment but it sounds entirely typical to me.

        This also sounds, unfortunately, not unusual: “Had Mr. James objected at that time, or had he raised his concerns with school administration, we believe this situation could have been resolved to the satisfaction of all parties,” the school board said in a release. “The instructional materials could have been displayed appropriately, and Mr. James’s display could simultaneously have been honored.”

        Like

        Reply
    • Kevin S. Willis, on August 15, 2022 at 9:44 pm said:

      I don’t see how that survives a court challenge.

      Like

      Reply
  6. Let the mutherfuker burn!, on August 15, 2022 at 8:19 pm said:

    Trump’s lawyers now saying the the FBI has returned his passport.

    Why’d they take it in the first place? It’s not like it looks like a regular 8.5×11 sheet of copy paper.

    Weird.

    Like

    Reply
    • ScottC, on August 16, 2022 at 7:43 am said:

      McWing:

      Orange Man Bad released the email confirming the FBI seized his passports and returned them.

      Once the DOJ’s mouthpieces in the media started claiming to have “debunked” Trump’s claim by saying that the FBI “does not have” his passports rather than saying that they “did not take” his passports, I assumed this was the case.

      Like

      Reply
  9. lmsinca, on August 16, 2022 at 8:49 am said:

    I actually took a rather long break from all social media during the first couple of years of Trump’s presidency. We had a lot going on here and I couldn’t stand all the political back and forth. I started paying attention again when Covid hit, but primarily because our business went into the can for almost 5 months so I got bored. I don’t really think I’ll go back now and look into the pee tape. It sounds like a lot of nothing to me.

    Also, I don’t have a Twitter account, I dropped out of Facebook and Instagram years ago. I have a MFP (My Fitness Pal) account where I track diet and exercise and no politics or religion is ever discussed there and if it is………….then I delete that person from my list of friends.

    I only have 2 subscriptions, the NY Times and The Bulwark. I’m working for a local candidate here for Congress in my district and donate to a couple of Senate campaigns in other states. I’m also going back to being a poll worker in the upcoming elections.

    I read whatever I can find without subscriptions………….left and right. I don’t like super progressive websites or super conservative ones TBH. I often sort of speed read through stuff that is too boring and probably miss a few things.

    That’s me in a nutshell I guess.

    Like

    Reply
    • ScottC, on August 16, 2022 at 9:08 am said:

      Well, lms, if you are as unaware of the Steele dossier and the pivotal role that it played in the whole Russia collusion hoax (are you familiar with that?) as you are implying, I would highly recommend that you do some research. It played a key role in the 3 year long investigation into Trump that hamstrung his administration for most of its term, and was instrumental is driving the attitudes of many people towards the entrenched authorities in DC about which you expressed sadness the other day.

      Like

      Reply
      • lmsinca, on August 16, 2022 at 9:22 am said:

        Scott, to the extent that his administration was hamstrung, that sounds like a good thing. And yes I do know about the Russia collusion and care about it now about as much as I care about Trump’s Presidency at all. I’m not going to go back and debate these issues with any of you here and no, I’m not going to do more research on it. Trump isn’t the president and hopefully won’t be our president again. He’s done enough damage to our country so I really don’t want to read both sides of the Russian collusion story right now. Sorry if I missed the Pee Tape episode but it doesn’t really sound interesting to me. I’m much more interested in moving forward. I don’t like debates that end up…………….”well…………..both sides do/did it.” It’s a road without a destination.

        Like

        Reply
        • Let the mutherfuker burn!, on August 16, 2022 at 9:39 am said:

          Lms, what would you say are the two most damaging things Trump did to the country while he was POTUS?

          Like

        • ScottC, on August 16, 2022 at 9:42 am said:

          lms:

          I’m not going to go back and debate these issues with any of you here…

          There is not much, really, to debate. That it was all a hoax instigated by the Hillary campaign is not in much dispute anymore.

          He’s done enough damage to our country…

          I am genuinely curious what damage, specifically, you think he did as president.

          I’m much more interested in moving forward.

          Which, if true, makes your interest in and support for the Jan 6 committee, and desire to see Trump indicted and tried for, er, something, rather inexplicable.

          Like

        • Kevin S. Willis, on August 16, 2022 at 9:16 pm said:

          “I am genuinely curious what damage, specifically, you think he did as president.”

          The left went from nutty to complete lunacy after Trump was elected, all humor disappeared from late night talk shows and they became tedious virtue-signaling exercises. The Democrats as a party proved that they could move much farther left much faster than even I could believe.

          All this corresponds directly with Trump’s election. So arguably he did real damage.

          Like

        • lmsinca, on August 16, 2022 at 12:50 pm said:

          Let me clear……………I think Presidents make mistakes, I think politicians lie, including Presidents, but I honestly believe that Trump is the worst President, even worse than Nixon, in my lifetime. He also pushed the Vaccination quest at least through one avenue of experimentation at “Warp Speed”. Of course he can’t actually take credit for that, every time he does he gets booed by his followers.

          He did some good things…………..Space Force, the First Step Act, and made headway against ISIS. I’m sure most R’s consider his major accomplishment is installing 3 very conservative justices on the SC. I don’t consider that a positive.

          His tax reform didn’t nearly live up to his or Mnuchin’s promises, he disbanded the Global Health Security Team that was created after a nearly botched response to Ebola, he installed folks in prominent positions with very little experience in the matters they were overseeing, and he certainly had a negative impact on the Climate Change front

          His two biggest failures were his response to Covid and lying about the results of the election. I consider him to be responsible for the death of thousands of Americans because of his false Covid claims. As far as the elections lie…………….it was huge and has changed our country in measurable ways.

          His compulsive lying is deadly at times and ridiculous at other times, and serves no purpose other than to elevate his opinion of himself and pull the wool over the eyes of his devotees. I think he’s a very dangerous man.

          I’d like to mention that I also think Biden has made mistakes……………in particular his draw down in Afghanistan and the death of 13 brave soldiers. One of them was a local boy, a brave marine. There’s a trail I walk 3 or 4 days a week and the fence has 13 flags recognizing the 3 service branches of these soldiers and I’m reminded of this failure weekly.

          I’m not sure what kind of alternative to our government is that any of you envision but I’m pretty sure Trump’s or the Republican Party. of today’s vision is not something I want.

          Like

        • ScottC, on August 16, 2022 at 1:16 pm said:

          lms:

          I honestly believe that Trump is the worst President, even worse than Nixon, in my lifetime.

          I never know how to understand such claims about the “worst” president. Does “worst” mean a really ineffectual leader who was unable to implement his policies? Does it mean a really effective leader who was able to implement all of his policies, that were really bad? Does it mean someone had no sense of what problems were actually important to the nation, and “solved” al the wrong things? Is it someone who had a great sense of what problems were actually important to the nation, but was incompetent at solving them?

          What makes Nixon the 2nd worst president of your lifetime? Was it the mere fact of Watergate that makes him so horrible? What exactly is your metric for establishing the “best” and “worst” president?

          I consider him to be responsible for the death of thousands of Americans because of his false Covid claims.

          Which false claims, and how did those claims lead to thousands of deaths?

          Did those claims lead to more deaths than actual policies implemented by state governors, such as that of Andrew Cuomo in NY who forced nursing homes to take in Covid patients, thus spreading the virus to the very people who were most likely to die from it? Do you blame those governors for thousands of deaths?

          I’m not sure what kind of alternative to our government is that any of you envision…

          What do you mean by “alternative to our government”, exactly? Do you mean alternative to our Constitutional framework, or do you mean alternative to the policies of our current administration?

          Like

        • Kevin S. Willis, on August 16, 2022 at 8:46 pm said:

          More people died of COVID (supposedly) under Biden—who had vaccines—than under Trump, who did not. So I’m not sure who is the bad guy in there body count.

          That being said: Biden is not responsible for deaths related to the virus just as Trump is not. The impulse to blame or credit figureheads for natural disasters or lucky windfalls they had almost nothing to do with is kind of magical thinking.

          Thunderstorms aren’t the gods showing their anger at us for not worshipping them well enough. They are just storms.

          Like

        • Kevin S. Willis, on August 16, 2022 at 8:49 pm said:

          Nixon was the “anti-communist” who thought the communists had good ideas. He contributed massively to the expansion of the bureaucratic (re:nanny) state). Wage and price controls to fight inflation. Crap energy policy.

          Meh. He was awful. Way worse than Trump.

          Like

        • Kevin S. Willis, on August 16, 2022 at 9:09 pm said:

          “he installed folks in prominent positions with very little experience in the matters they were overseeing”

          Although we probably come at it from different directions, I could not agree with this more. It was that and his uncontrolled narcissism that were his biggest flaws, IMO.

          While I’m not blaming Trump for the virus deaths (when he was trying to limit travel from China early on, the Democrats called it racist and fought it hard—why aren’t they to blame?) or Biden (despite more deaths “from COVID” under Biden), I will say Trump mishandled the COVID response terribly outside of Operation Warp Speed which was well done.

          I’m okay with the justices. None so far have struck me as brilliant as Thomas but it’s just a stroke of luck Bush appointed him.

          I liked Space Force. Abraham Accords we’re excellent (even though Netanyahu says he could have had them much earlier but Trump wanted to broker a peace between Israel and the Palestinians which was impossible, so Trump wasted a lot of time). Moving the embassy to Jerusalem was great. Removal of the state income tax deduction was aces in my book (goes to how things provide perverse incentives and lead to bad choices becoming systemic within systems).

          I have no problem with him disbanding the pandemic response team. The intent as I recall was to fold its remit into DHS or the DoD, I don’t remember which. The idea was not to get rid of pandemic response but to restructure. Not that it would have been any more effective.

          Like

        • lmsinca, on August 16, 2022 at 12:55 pm said:

          Another editing mistake that I can’t fix but the sentence re the vaccines was supposed to go under the good things Trump accomplished. I added that to the wrong paragraph. 😉

          Like

        • Kevin S. Willis, on August 16, 2022 at 8:47 pm said:

          Some people would say you got it right the first time! 😂

          Like

        • lmsinca, on August 16, 2022 at 1:12 pm said:

          I forgot to answer Scott’s questions about focusing on the future when I’m concerned still about Jan 6. The Russian thing isn’t really in the news right now but Jan 6 still is. I’m concerned with the effects of Trump’s lie and the repercussions of it.

          Like

        • ScottC, on August 16, 2022 at 1:24 pm said:

          lms:

          The Russian thing isn’t really in the news right now but Jan 6 still is.

          So you are interested in moving forward, except in those instances where you are not. Got it.

          I’m concerned with the effects of Trump’s lie and the repercussions of it.

          You are constantly speaking in vague generalities. Which lie (there are so many, remember!) and what repercussions?

          Like

        • markinaustin, on August 16, 2022 at 2:19 pm said:

          Scott, the subpoena was from a Grand Jury and cannot be publicly accessed. Trump’s lawyers did admit it had been served two months ago but their story is that they complied. Seems unlikely that they did, considering the number of boxes recovered.

          The National Archives has a provisional trumplibrary site, and they say as soon as the docs are collated the non-sensitive ones will be available on line. NA reported asking DJT for docs several times after Feb ’21. NA then asked for the Justice Department to intervene with a subpoena. The part of this that is questionable to me procedurally is why a Grand Jury issued the subpoena – I didn’t think that was necessary. But maybe it was, I don’t remember my FRCP and FRCrimP well enough.

          To partly reply to your question to LMS, I think Trump has called anyone who disagrees with him an enemy [of America] rather than a political adversary. He continues to thrive on dividing America into his supporters and his “enemies”, without regard to their loyalty as Americans. By “thrive”, I substantially mean “raise money for himself” from enthralled followers. The rest of America owes it to him, apparently, from his conduct.

          Following his own line of thinking he not only promulgated an enormous lie about winning the election, which many now believe, and that tends to undermine the prospects of orderly succession after elections, he ignored the plight of the Congress in session when it was attacked and assailed Pence for doing his duty while a mob wanted to hang the VP. If the only fall out from the J6 Committee hearing is the strengthening of the Electoral College Act that will be a positive, looking to the future. It also will probably result in much tighter security around the Capitol and the WH.

          Joe and I thought he would be Berlusconi, and he was, but much worse. A con man who never respected facts, his Press Secretary [?] famously raised the notion of “alternative facts.”

          However, Buchanan was a worse President, I’m sure.
          ——-

          Like

        • ScottC, on August 16, 2022 at 4:48 pm said:

          Mark:

          Scott, the subpoena was from a Grand Jury and cannot be publicly accessed. Trump’s lawyers did admit it had been served two months ago but their story is that they complied. Seems unlikely that they did, considering the number of boxes recovered.

          Right, but just to be clear, when you say that you think the feds are telling the truth, I get the sense that the story you convey is not anything that the feds have actually said anywhere, but is what you speculate they would say if they were saying anything. Is that not correct? Again, from what I am aware, no one in the FBI or DOJ has made any substantive comments about the history of events leading up to the decision to raid Mar-a-lago. It has all been just anonymously sourced stories in the media.

          Like

        • markinaustin, on August 16, 2022 at 5:57 pm said:

          I think the federal government is telling the truth about request-subpoena-warrant over the months since 2/21 – the National Archives are part of the federal government. If your point is that the FBI and AG ain’t saying much, I agree. That’s partly why I don’t understand exactly how NA’s request to DoJ is related to a Grand Jury, as well, and I would have to get familiar with a whole lot of law I am not going to read to figure that out.

          I do still think Putin had him completely buffaloed – I probably always thought that – but I did not think he was a conscious Russian agent. I did think his take on China was correct, although I thought his policy was overkill. And now the Ds are coming around to his take, although trying to temper the policy. I gave him credit for a few things, policy wise, but I never thought he was anything but a con artist and a crook. And I don’t think there has been a comparable one in the Presidency.

          I think a President’s job is to speak to all Americans,as Americans, even the Americans who hate him. Silly me.

          Like

        • ScottC, on August 16, 2022 at 7:59 pm said:

          Mark:

          Trump is surely a unique figure in American politics, but what I object to is the plain double standards employed to portray him as uniquely bad. You accuse Trump of calling anyone who disagrees with him an enemy of America rather than a political adversary. Beyond the obvious exaggeration – he is far more likely to call people he disagrees with incompetent or stupid than to call them an enemy – Democrats do the same or similar things all the time without it being particularly notable by you.

          Why is Trump calling the press enemies of the people any more objectionable than the routine vitriol from Democrats that people who oppose their policies are “un-American” and “racists” and “threats to American Democracy”? The difference isn’t the rhetoric. It’s merely the person using it.

          And it is genuinely difficult to take seriously objections to the “stolen election” narrative from people who were all in on the Russian Collusion narrative and supported the 3yr fiasco that was the FBI/Mueller probe based upon it, and then just shrugged when it turned out to be based on bogus oppo research that the authorities knew was bogus research from the beginning. Sure, the events of Jan 6 were justifiably condemnable, but not by the same people who can’t bring themselves to voice even a tepid condemnation of the widespread attempt to destroy a presidency through the Russia Collusion Hoax.

          You either object to big lies in principle, or you don’t. The only principle that I see at play here is the Orange Man Bad principle.

          Like

        • Kevin S. Willis, on August 16, 2022 at 9:32 pm said:

          Objecting to big lies in politics is like objecting to the existence of rain.

          Like

        • ScottC, on August 16, 2022 at 8:25 pm said:

          Mark:

          I think a President’s job is to speak to all Americans,as Americans, even the Americans who hate him. Silly me.

          Yeah, I think it is silly. I think the President’s job is to run the executive branch and fulfil the obligations set out in Article II of the Constitution, none of which says anything about “speaking to all Americans as Americans”.

          I’m not sure I even know what that means. If the president gives a televised speech to the nation, is he not speaking to all Americans as Americans, even if many of those American don’t like what he is saying? Was Joe Biden speaking to all Americans as Americans when he suggested that anyone who opposes the Dems election reforms, which is a lot of Americans, is a racist who wants to prevent black people from voting? What does this actually mean?

          Like

        • ScottC, on August 16, 2022 at 5:31 pm said:

          Mark:

          To partly reply to your question to LMS, I think Trump has called anyone who disagrees with him an enemy [of America] rather than a political adversary.

          I know he said that about the media. Who else has he called an enemy of America? And isn’t that exactly what his political adversaries were saying about him when they spent 3 years accusing him of being an agent of Russia? You didn’t seem to mind that.

          Following his own line of thinking he not only promulgated an enormous lie about winning the election, which many now believe…

          Sort of like how his adversaries promulgated an enormous lie about colluding with Russia, which many believed (and probably still do). Hell, I think even you believed it (and perhaps still do).

          …his Press Secretary [?] famously raised the notion of “alternative facts.”

          I am pretty sure it was Kellyanne Conway, and it came up over a dispute about size of the crowd at the inauguration, an issue of strangely enormous import, I guess.

          Like

        • Kevin S. Willis, on August 16, 2022 at 7:59 pm said:

          “it came up over a dispute about size of the crowd at the inauguration, an issue of strangely enormous import”

          That was my first “ugh” moment of Trump’s presidency. I felt it portended ill that he was making such a big deal about it. That sort of stuff ultimately was kind of irrelevant to policy but still I really wished he could have just shrugged it off.

          Like

        • Kevin S. Willis, on August 16, 2022 at 8:39 pm said:

          The Big Lie is always about his winning in 2020. He lied about that. Like Gore did and Kerry’s surrogates did in 2004 (Diebold voting machines) and like Hillary did after 2016 (well she did win the popular vote so there was that) and Stacy Abrams lied about winning her governors race … but that’s different.

          The Lie is always that he won. What I actually think is a delusion that the election was stolen from him like Dr. Evil did it with a election-stealing satellite ray. Why the left is so sure he’s intentionally lying I don’t get it. There’s so much evidence that he truly believes the election was stolen. Starting with his obsession over his inauguration crowd in 2017.

          Like

    • jnc4p, on August 16, 2022 at 12:10 pm said:

      “We had a lot going on here”

      How’s Walter doing?

      Like

      Reply
      • lmsinca, on August 16, 2022 at 12:53 pm said:

        Thanks for asking JNC. He’s doing okay right now but we’ve had a roller coaster ride here the last 4 or 5 years. I’ve had my hands full to be sure.

        Like

        Reply
  10. jnc4p, on August 16, 2022 at 9:19 am said:

    A good summation of the mindset of people who aren’t necessarily pro-Trump, but don’t buy the media narrative that’s being sold about him.

    https://sashastone.substack.com/p/the-raid-that-red-pilled-america?utm_source=email#details

    Like

    Reply
    • ScottC, on August 16, 2022 at 12:51 pm said:

      jnc:

      I find analyses like these interesting in that they always assume the good faith and proper motivations of the authorities. For example:

      Lawfare posted a good account of the warrant, the documents seized (which included ones with classified markings), and this summary of what it all implies…

      That “implies” does a lot of heavy lifting. They read the warrant and conclude “Well, they must have serious evidence of criminal activity related to X Y and Z, otherwise they wouldn’t have sought and gotten a warrant claiming to be searching for evidence related to X,Y, and Z.” But how many times over the last 6 years has it turned out that what would normally be “implied” by some action of the authorities has in fact no basis or substance to it at all? How many times can people be fooled by this act? It’s like Charlie Brown with Lucy and the football.

      Like

      Reply
      • Brent Nyitray, on August 16, 2022 at 1:23 pm said:

        supposedly the judge is a partisan democrat, which means you can’t dismiss it just being political.

        Like

        Reply
        • Kevin S. Willis, on August 16, 2022 at 8:40 pm said:

          Even if it isn’t political you cannot dismiss biases and the distorted incentives of the beltway leading to the principals involved making bad decision without sufficient justification.

          Like

  12. lmsinca, on August 16, 2022 at 2:14 pm said:

    Scott, I consider pathological liars like Trump and Nixon to be unfit to be the President of the United States. A simple internet search can reveal Nixon’s lies in regards to Vietnam, my generation’s war, and I can’t forgive those. Another simple internet search will reveal Trump’s lies regarding Covid. It’s my opinion that numerous Covid deaths could have been prevented if Trump had just been honest with the American people. We’ll never know I guess. I can’t prove it so there’s no sense arguing about it.

    I don’t have the time to link all the lies right now and even if I did you would just find another way to have me explain it to you. There was an Atlantic article in 2020 that explained Trump’s lies vs the truth, I’ll link that for you(I don’t have access to the Atlantic any longer though so can’t read it again). Nixon’s lies re Vietnam are well documented also. I’m going to walk away for now because no matter what I say you’ll find a way to entangle me further in a debate that never really ends.

    I have opinions, some of them strong, and if you think I’m being too vague I can’t help you with that. I spend as much time here as I have.

    To help you out here’s the Atlantic piece in case you want to read it. I have a “vague” memory of reading it almost 2 years ago. I can’t get into the article to post quotes.

    https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/11/trumps-lies-about-coronavirus/608647/

    And here’s a piece that gives what I think is a pretty accurate depiction of Nixon/Kissinger and the Vietnam war.

    Exposing Nixon’s Vietnam Lies

    Like

    Reply
    • ScottC, on August 16, 2022 at 4:28 pm said:

      lms:

      A simple internet search can reveal Nixon’s lies in regards to Vietnam, my generation’s war, and I can’t forgive those.

      I didn’t ask for a list of Nixon’s lies. I was simply trying to figure out what you mean when you talk about the “worst” president of your lifetime. I now think what you mean by the “worst” is nothing more than simply the one that you personally disliked the most. On that metric, my worst would be Obama, far and away. Second worst would probably be Trump, although I wasn’t really politically aware enough during their time to have a personal feeling towards Nixon or LBJ.

      My “best” and “worst” metric would be a subjective combination of policy priorities, leadership qualities, simple executive competency, and change in the state of the nation pre- and post-presidency. In my life time, from best to worst, mine would be;

      1. Reagan
      2. Clinton
      3. Bush I
      4. Nixon
      5. LBJ
      6. Trump
      7. Bush II
      8. Obama
      9. Carter

      I left out both Biden and Ford as 2 years is too short a time to judge, but frankly unless they quickly come up with a miracle cure for old age dementia which drastically changes one’s politics, Carter will no longer be the basement dweller. BTW, I wouldn’t rate anyone outside the top 2 as “good”.

      It’s my opinion that numerous Covid deaths could have been prevented if Trump had just been honest with the American people.

      Yeah, that is just a restatement of what you already said.

      …if you think I’m being too vague I can’t help you with that.

      There is a difference between “can’t” and “won’t”. And frankly if it is true that you “can’t” be any more substantive, then I don’t know why anyone should take your claim seriously.

      To help you out here’s the Atlantic piece in case you want to read it.

      I’d love to, but I don’t have a subscription either.

      Like

      Reply
      • jnc4p, on August 16, 2022 at 5:25 pm said:

        You don’t need a subscription. Use NoScript with Firefox, Private Browsing mode with another browser or the reader view.

        Like

        Reply
        • ScottC, on August 16, 2022 at 8:48 pm said:

          Thanks…I know you have told me this before but I only just figured out how to do it in my browser (incognito mode).

          Like

      • lmsinca, on August 16, 2022 at 8:01 pm said:

        Scott, I’m shocked…………you don’t take me seriously………….lol, Is that a new attitude or one that we’ve know since we began this endeavor here at ATIM?

        I wish I knew why I was here right now but I guess it’s because I believe we’re in a new world of dangerous discourse in politics. I’d like to think my opinion might matter. If not just kick me to the curb now!

        I might try to find you all the links to lies Trump told re Covid tomorrow but honestly, I was pretty invested in the entire thing so I actually watched his lies in real time at his crazy press conferences. It was literally one lie or misdirection after another but if you want me to do the research for you I will………………

        Guys………….I’m not a banker, lawyer, mathematician or anything like that. I’m good with numbers but that’s just a
        business bookkeeping advantage here. My Masters is in Psychology. I was a high school counselor, turned grief counselor, turned costume and quilt designer followed by a business owner the last 22 years.

        The most income Walter and I have ever had is around 100K so we’re not rich. We paid for all our kids to go to college and all have advanced degrees. I have a husband with serious health issues, a daughter who had 3 high risk pregnancies, one resulted in a miscarriage at 16 weeks. Luckily I have 3 grandsons and one granddaughter who is a sheriff in WY. I’m not adverse to differing opinions but I won’t tolerate outright lies, especially if they lead to violence.

        Trump is a danger to our democracy……………he’s a drifter, liar and consumed with his own image. I saw a video tonight from a Sarah Palin event with Trump standing behind her while she praised his balls for taking on the “Deep State” or something like that and if you could have seen his face, you might have thrown up…………..I almost did!

        Like

        Reply
        • ScottC, on August 16, 2022 at 8:41 pm said:

          lms:

          Scott, I’m shocked…………you don’t take me seriously

          I want to take you seriously, but when you make these big but vague accusations and then are unable/unwilling to provide any substance to them when asked, apparently expecting us to simply agree with you simply because you said them, you make it very difficult to do so.

          Would you take this guy seriously?

          https://youtube.com/shorts/75szEeDAZhE?feature=share

          I might try to find you all the links to lies Trump told re Covid tomorrow …

          jnc explained how I can read the Atlantic article without a subscription, and I was just able to bring it up, so I will be reading that ASAP.

          Trump is a danger to our democracy……………he’s a drifter, liar and consumed with his own image.

          If that is what makes one a danger to our democracy, then it is a wonder it survived 8 years of Obama.

          Like

        • Kevin S. Willis, on August 16, 2022 at 9:31 pm said:

          “ Scott, I’m shocked…………you don’t take me seriously……”

          I take you seriously, lmsinca. I disagree with your take on most things, but I do so with utmost gravity!

          😀

          Like

        • ScottC, on August 16, 2022 at 10:02 pm said:

          lms:

          I am wading through The Atlantic article. I’m only about halfway through, but so far it is largely a joke, a typical anti-Trump attempt to oversell his badness. While there are a few things that might reasonably be construed as lies, most of them aren’t. For example, there are several like this:

          The claim: The coronavirus would weaken “when we get into April, in the warmer weather—that has a very negative effect on that, and that type of a virus.”

          The truth: When Trump made this claim, it was too early to tell whether the virus’s spread would be dampened by warmer conditions, though public-health experts and epidemiologists were immediately skeptical of Trump’s comment. But the spring and summer have passed, and the pandemic is still raging.

          That is an incorrect prediction, not a “lie”.

          Then there are the “lies” in which “the truth” as explained by The Atlantic doesn’t actually address the claim made by Trump. For example:

          The claim: Trump “launched the largest national mobilization since World War II” against COVID-19, and America “developed, from scratch, the largest and most advanced testing system in the world.”

          The truth: These claims are incorrect and misleading. The federal government’s coronavirus response has been roundly criticized as a failure because of flawed and delayed testing, entrenched inequality that has amplified the virus’s effects, and chaotic federal leadership that’s left much of the country’s response up to the states to handle. Trump vacillated on fully invoking the Defense Production Act in March, set off international panic when he mistakenly said he was banning all travel from European nations, and was slow to support social-distancing measures nationwide. Widespread use of the DPA was still rare in July, despite continued shortages of medical supplies.

          None of the info in “the truth” section actually contradicts or precludes the claim attributed to Trump. (And don’t you just love the nod to wokeness about “entrenched inequality”. It’s all about the science!!! lol)

          Then we have that staple of left-wing fact checks in which the “lies” are actually confirmed to be true, but are deemed to be false because they don’t include some other information that the fact checker would like to have been included. Such as:

          Another claim: Trump celebrated a gain of 9 million jobs as “a record in the history of our country” and said that the United States had experienced “the smallest economic contraction of any major Western nation.”

          The truth: The country did gain 9 million jobs from May to July—after losing more than 20 million from February to April, during the pandemic’s first surge.

          Then there are the “lies” that are actually just subjective opinions with which the “fact-checker” disagrees.. Such as:

          The claim: Referring to criticism of his administration’s response, Trump tweeted: “Compare that to the Obama/Sleepy Joe disaster known as H1N1 Swine Flu. Poor marks … didn’t have a clue!”

          The truth: It is misleading to compare COVID-19 to H1N1 and to call the Obama administration’s response a disaster, as my colleague Peter Nicholas has reported. In 2009, the CDC quickly flagged the new flu strain in California and began releasing antiflu drugs from the national stockpile two weeks later. A vaccine was available in six months.

          Then there are the “lies” that are obviously just completely innocuous mistakes where the underlying substance is totally true. Such as:

          The claim: Google engineers are building a website to help Americans determine whether they need testing for the coronavirus and to direct them to their nearest testing site.

          The truth: The announcement was news to Google itself—the website Trump (and other administration officials) described was actually being built by Verily, a division of Alphabet, the parent company of Google. The Verge first reported on Trump’s error, citing a Google representative who confirmed that Verily was working on a “triage website” with limited coverage for the San Francisco Bay Area. But since then, Google has pivoted to fulfill Trump’s public proclamation, saying it would speed up the development of a new, separate website while Verily worked on finishing its project, The Washington Post reported.

          Most of claims that actually might reasonably be called “lies” are of the typical, Trumpian exaggeration variety. Such as:

          Another claim: The United States has conducted more testing “than all other countries together!”

          The truth: By May 18, when Trump last made this claim, the U.S. had conducted more tests than any other country. But it had not conducted more tests than the rest of the world combined.

          In any event, regardless of whether or not the claims are properly characterized as “lies”, not one of them that I have seen so far could be remotely seen as having caused the deaths of thousands of people. I’ll keep reading, but so far I don’t see anything that could lend support to your earlier claim.

          Like

      • Kevin S. Willis, on August 16, 2022 at 8:14 pm said:

        As a young liberal I thought Reagan was the worst president ever while he was president, but have completely revised my opinion and now he’s at the top of the list. Although I also had no political awareness of Nixon, he would probably be my worst president (of my lifetime) with Biden running second, Dubya and Obama tied for 3rd.

        Worst president ever would probably be Wilson. Then FDR. Then LBJ. Or maybe LBJ more than FDR—at least FDR didn’t completely screw up WWII though he certainly deepened and lengthened the depression.

        Best presidents in my lifetime would go Reagan, Trump, Clinton, Bush Sr, then Carter, I guess. Which is not a cheer for Trump or Bush Sr. or Carter just I don’t have a lot of quality options to pick from.

        All time gives us a lot of great options. Washington, Jefferson, Coolidge, Lincoln, Polk, Teddy Roosevelt (although he was a fan of expanding executive power).

        Like

        Reply
      • jnc4p, on August 17, 2022 at 10:08 am said:

        Why did you rate Clinton so high? The economy?

        Like

        Reply
        • ScottC, on August 17, 2022 at 10:59 am said:

          jnc:

          Why did you rate Clinton so high? The economy?

          Well, largely because the competition was so weak. And the soft bigotry of low expectations, perhaps? lol

          But from a non-policy, non-partisan point of view, as a pure politician he was very impressive. In that sense he was a good leader. As far as policy goes, he was not a leftist ideologue, and so didn’t push the kind of lunacy that has now become a staple of Democrats. His worst policy idea never succeeded. Part of that, of course, was that he was saddled with a Republican congress, but he did in fact work with them and even signed onto some traditionally Republican policy ideas, such as welfare reform, which is something that it is difficult to imagine happening with an ideologue like Obama. His SCOTUS picks were bad, but at least did not make the Court any worse than it already was. And over the course of his term, I think it is safe to say that at the very least the overall state of the nation as a whole didn’t get any worse, and perhaps even got a bit better. Which is a huge accomplishment for a Democrat president. While I never liked him as President and I disagreed with most of his politics, I don’t think I ever thought he was trying to take the nation to a place from which it might not recover.

          Certainly I have a much greater appreciation of Clinton in retrospect, post Obama, than I did at the time. Just as I now have less of an appreciation for Bush II than I did while he was in office.

          Like

    • Kevin S. Willis, on August 16, 2022 at 8:28 pm said:

      Nixon’s lies about Vietnam didn’t hold a candle to LBJ’s lies about Vietnam. But they both lied and I’d argue Nixon was a worse president. Although not about his lying, they all lie, all the time. Thinking the politician we like is uniquely honest is self-deception, IMO.

      My problems with LBJ and Nixon were policy. Honestly the worst thing about Watergate was it spoke to the incompetence of the administration.

      As did wage and price controls and the EPA and OSHA and the rest of Nixon’s big government liberalism, in addition to mishandling Vietnam.

      Like

      Reply
      • ScottC, on August 16, 2022 at 8:46 pm said:

        KW:

        As did wage and price controls and the EPA and OSHA and the rest of Nixon’s big government liberalism, in addition to mishandling Vietnam.

        That is precisely why he wasn’t higher on my list.

        Like

        Reply
  13. lmsinca, on August 16, 2022 at 2:49 pm said:

    Here’s a recent quote from Liz Cheney who is about to lose her congressional seat.

    “America cannot remain free if we abandon the truth,” Cheney said. “The lie that the 2020 presidential election was stolen is insidious, it preys on those who love their country, it is a door Donald Trump opened to manipulate Americans to abandon their principles, to sacrifice their freedom, to justify violence, to ignore the rulings of our courts and the rule of law.”

    And here’s one from her opponent, Harriet Hageman.

    “Joe Biden is the largest or most destructive human trafficker in our history.”

    Trump elevated people like her and gave them a platform to spread his lies and fool them into parting with their money and their moral fiber.

    Like

    Reply
    • Kevin S. Willis, on August 16, 2022 at 8:21 pm said:

      Cheney’s comment: Trump has done what he does. He’s turned her into him. Just like he can’t let election 2020 go neither can she. Of all the things going on the world that she is so singularly devoted to telling the story again that Trump definitely loss and his ever saying any different is just like the Holocaust is exhausting. At least when Trump does it he cracks some jokes.

      She’s earning her loss. She’s worked hard to deserve her loss. And it’s not because she “turned on Trump” it’s because she’s not remotely representing her constituents.

      Harriet Hageman’s comment: I don’t believe Biden is cognizant enough to traffick anything. Also she’s not running for president so again … representing your constituents. What’s she going to do for the people of Wyoming?

      Like

      Reply
    • Brent Nyitray, on August 17, 2022 at 8:43 am said:

      she sounds like a garden-variety democrat now. she’ll get a gazillion dollar gig working for CNN as the embarrassed “conservative” in a few months. she’ll be fine.

      Like

      Reply

Be kind, show respect, and all will be right with the world.