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Economy

home-foreclosures

National and State Mortgage Risk Indices are tracked and released by AEI’s International Center on Housing Risk.

The composite National Mortgage Risk Index (NMRI) for Agency purchase loans hit another series high in the month of May, clocking in at 12.33 percent. The NMRI is up 0.4 percentage point from the prior 3-month average and 0.7 percentage point on a year-over-year basis, fueled by an increase in the share of high-risk FHA loans.

The survey comes after a report from the National Association of Realtors released Monday showed existing home sales in the U.S. jumped 5.1 percent to the highest level since November 2009. The 5-1/2-year high was widely celebrated as an indicator that the flimsy housing market is beginning to firm.

But Edward Pinto, the former executive vice president and chief credit officer for Fannie Mae, warned that credit standards for first-time buyers are not tight, with the median FICO score of first-time buyers in May coming in below the median in the market. With the NMRI for first-time buyers also hitting a new series high 15.66 percent in May, the NAR report should be cause for concern, not celebration.

“Home sales are surging, with increasing leverage and a strengthening job market spurring an already strong first-time buyer volume,” said Ed Pinto, co-director of AEI’s International Center on Housing Risk. “Liberalized FHA credit terms combined with tight inventories of homes for sales are driving up prices for entry buyers.”

In April, the market share of high-risk loans outnumbered the share of low-risk loans for the first time since NMRI tracking began. In May, the index for VA loans also reached a series high, while Agency loan originations continued to migrate from large banks to nonbanks in May. This shift in market share has accounted for much of the upward trend in the composite NMRI, as nonbank lending is substantially riskier than the large bank business it replaces.

“Many first-time buyers with far from pristine credit are purchasing homes every month,” said Dr. Stephen Oliner, a senior fellow at UCLA’s Ziman Center for Real Estate and co-director of AEI’s International Center on Housing Risk. “The false narrative about tight credit is driving efforts to ‘open up the credit box’ that will not end well if left unchecked.”

The NMRI results are based on nearly the universe of home purchase loans with a government guarantee, including 223,000 such purchase loans, a 23-percent increase from a year earlier. With the addition of these loans, the total number of loans that have been risk rated in the NMRI since November 2012 increased to 6.2 million.

“With leverage unconstrained by the Qualified Mortgage regulation, increasing competition between Fannie and FHA, and eventually Freddie, will slowly introduce destabilizing risk nationally,” Pinto added. “The goal of the NMRI is to quantify and pinpoint these leverage trends in real time.”

 

Other notable takeaways from the May NMRI include the following:

• The cut in FHA’s annual mortgage insurance premium, which went into effect in late January, has boosted its market share at the expense of Fannie and RHS, FHA’s most direct competitors.  In addition, the riskier FHA loans have been used to purchase higher priced homes.

• The decline in the large-bank market share of agency loans slowed in May, and the large-bank share of the FHA market edged up.  While too early to say for sure, the downward “seismic” shift away from large banks may be nearing an end.

The composite National Mortgage Risk Index (NMRI)

Economy

GDP-Shipping-Cranes-Trade-Portland-Oregon

File photo: Shipping-cranes-in move containers at a port in Portland, Oregon. (Photo: REUTERS)

The U.S. economy contracted in the first quarter by less than initially anticipated as trade deficits ballooned and consumer spending fell. The Commerce Department said on Wednesday gross domestic product fell at a 0.2 percent annual rate in the first quarter, up from the 0.7 percent pace of contraction initially reported last month.

While a higher pace of consumer spending than previously estimated accounted for much of the upward revision, the ballooning trade deficit was went unrevised. Exports were revised up, but that adjustment was offset by an upward revision to imports, leaving an enormous trade deficit that sliced nearly 2 percentage points from 1Q GDP.

Consumer spending, which accounts for more than two thirds of U.S. economic activity, was revised up to 2.1 percent growth pace from the 1.8 percent rate reported last month.

Still, with personal savings at a $720.2 billion pace, consumer spending could either pick up in the second quarter or Americans could send the economy a signal by holding their money at a higher rate than the historical average.

Now, elements in the Federal Reserve are pushing to make yet another adjustment to the methodology for calculating GDP in the wake of the Commerce Department report. Naturally, these “adjustments” will boost GDP measurements.

The revision would mark the second time the government has changed the previously long-standing methodology. In July 2013, the U.S. government made a significant change in the gross investment number (I), which now includes research and development (R&D) spending, art, music, film royalties, books and theatre. In the entertainment industry, for instance, much of those numbers are expected projections, such as how much they believe a movie will make at the Box Office.

This change in the method to gauge GDP — or, rewriting the GDP number — was first implemented by the United States, and India was quick to express an interest.

Yet, those at the San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank say the problem with the model the government currently uses to adjust the data for seasonal fluctuations also contributes to depressing the GDP number. They argued the so-called seasonal adjustment is leaving “residual” seasonality.

So, get ready to be fooled, and not by the contraction apologists who scapegoat bad weather, a “strong dollar, spending cuts in the energy sector and disruptions at West Coast ports.” The government said last month it was aware of the potential problem and was working to address it when in publishes annual GDP revisions in July.

When measured with their new method, the economy expanded at a rate closer to the income measurement of a 1.9 percent pace in the first quarter, up from the 1.4 percent previously reported. A measure of domestic demand growth was revised up four-tenths of a percentage point to a 1.2 percent rate.

There are mixed signs for second quarter growth even if the government wasn’t getting ready to play with the numbers.

Retail sales in May were stronger-than-expected and helped to stave off recession fears. The housing market saw data from the National Association of Realtors that showed a 5 1/2-year high pickup in existing home sales, which was heralded by traditional media, but the National Mortgage Risk Index hit a series high last month. For the first time since tracking began, the number of new, high-risk mortgages in the housing market last month outnumbered the low-risk share.

Businesses inventories were more than previously estimated in the first quarter, which means they have little incentive to keep on adding to it in the second quarter. That translates into worse news for an already-weak manufacturing sector nationwide. The value of inventory accumulated in the first quarter was revised up by Commerce to show a gain of $99.5 billion from the $95 billion rise reported last month, which means inventories contributed 0.45 percentage point to GDP instead of the previously reported 0.33 percentage point.

Inventories are likely to be a drag on second-quarter GDP.

Further, after-tax corporate profits were slightly weaker in the first quarter than previously thought. In fact, after-tax profits — along with inventory valuation and capital consumption adjustments — were revised to reflect a 8.8 percent decline.

The U.S. economy contracted in the 1Q

Politics

Civil-War-Reenactment-Confederate-Flag

Civil War re-enactors carry Confederate flags in Forth Worth, Tex. (Photo by Steven Martin, Flickr)

The U.S. Supreme Court has pretty much kicked the First Amendment’s freedom of speech clause to the curb – and you can blame one of the most conservative voices for that, Justice Clarence Thomas.

In a ruling just handed down Monday, the court found in Texas Department of Motor Vehicles Board v. Texas Division of the Sons of Confederate Veterans the government does indeed have the authority to regulate political speech.

Yes, that’s the ruling: The government can now legally regulate private citizens’ political speech.

The justices should have glanced at the statements of one of their colleagues, Justice Thurgood Marshall, who in 1972 made it clear: “Above all else, the First Amendment means that government has no power to restrict expression because of its message, its ideas, its subject matter, or its content. To permit the continued building of our politics and culture, and to assure self-fulfillment for each individual, our people are guaranteed the right to express any thought, free from government censorship. The essence of this forbidden censorship is content control.”

Content control, indeed. And content control on the part of the government toward the free American citizen is what we now have.

The court case began as a spat over what constituted a proper license plate in Texas. The Sons of Confederate Veterans thought a little emblem of the rebel flag to the left of the tag number would be OK – especially since the state’s Department of Motor Vehicles Board regularly and with seeming abandon pretty much approved all the other requests for specialty plates – roughly 350 of them.

But the Texas DMV Board, to paraphrase, said, “No, Sons of Confederate Veterans, your confederate flag is offensive.” So the two sides went to court. And the Sons of Confederate Veterans argued what would seem to be the obvious: that the government board was breaking First Amendment free speech provisions. One court found in favor of the DMV Board; another, for the vet group. Enter the U.S. Supreme Court.

In an opinion written by Justice Stephen Breyer, the court’s conclusion was the government just “would not work” without having the right to determine what constitutes rightful and proper free speech. He then posed from left field: “How could a state government effectively develop programs designed to encourage and provide vaccinations, if officials also had to voice the perspective of those who oppose this type of immunization?”

Can you say, whaaat?

But he clarifies: Allowing the Confederate flag on the license plates could give the impression the Texas government endorses the rebel emblem, Breyer said.

Sanity seems to have made a brief appearance, on the wings of Justice Samuel Alito who wrote in his dissenting opinion: Dude, that’s just stupid. Referencing the license plates in Texas that carry Dr. Pepper and NASCAR emblems, Alito asked, “Would you really think that the sentiments reflected in these specialty plates are the view of the State of Texas and not those of the owners of the cars?”

But it was too late. Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan had already cast their constitutional caution to the wind and joined with Breyer – and, in a shocker to a conservative’s core, so did Thomas. One can only guess he had personal reasons and a personal vendetta against the rebel flag, because constitutionally speaking – the ruling just bites.

Think this is a license plate matter confined to Texas? Or maybe a cause for silently applauding the court’s boldness in booting that much-hated Confederate flag?

Well, it’s not. It’s a massive First Amendment ding. And now we’re already feeling tremors elsewhere. Right after the Supreme Court released its horrific Texas ruling, a federal judge in Manhattan issued one of his own, putting the halt on Pamela Geller’s American Freedom Defense Initiative to post ads on city buses and subway cars of a menacing man with a masked face alongside warnings about radical Islamists. The case of Geller versus the Metropolitan Transportation Authority had traversed a similar path as the Sons of Confederate Veterans – it led to a court fight about so-called offensive speech, which led to a First Amendment win for Geller, which led to the MTA’s sulky decision to quit posting any and all political ads.

Now curiously, right after the Supreme Court decided government can in fact control political speech, the same judge who previously found in Geller’s favor then ruled that the MTA ban on all ads moots his earlier support of her cause based on the First Amendment. That means she can’t put up her political ads after all. As Geller’s attorney rightly raged: So the government gets to break the First Amendment and then simply change its rules to “avoid the consequences of its unlawful behavior?”

They’re vowing to pursue the matter all the way to the Supreme Court. Let’s hope Thomas has recovered his senses when they arrive.

[mybooktable book=”police-state-usa-how-orwells-nightmare-is-becoming-our-reality” display=”summary” buybutton_shadowbox=”true”]

The U.S. Supreme Court has pretty much

Opinion

alexander-hamilton-replaced-10-bill

A woman is set to replace Alexander Hamilton on the $10 bill.

A woman will be on the new $10 bill, bumping Alexander Hamilton aside. Treasury Secretary Jack Lew says he will choose the woman by year’s end, based on “input from the public.”

In one survey of the “public,” the first female chief of the Cherokee Nation, Wilma Mankiller, placed fourth. I understand the wish to counter sexism prevalent in early America, but “Mankiller?” The name alone probably reveals something about the attitude of some of those voters.

Fortunately, more voted for Harriet Tubman. Tubman escaped slavery to become a leader of the Underground Railroad, then repeatedly returned to slave territory to help others escape. Tubman would be a good choice. What’s more libertarian than helping people escape slavery and resist being governed without their consent?

But I feel bad about Alexander Hamilton.

He was courageous in the American Revolution, co-wrote the Federalist Papers that defended the new Constitution and helped put the new republic on a sound financial footing when it was deep in debt. He was a poor immigrant with an absent father who rose to advise George Washington and become one of the most important men in the nation.

Hamilton was also decent and fair-minded enough to singlehandedly stop a mob when it threatened to harm an unarmed Tory. In his spare time, he founded the newspaper New York Post, now headquartered a few floors below my office.

Hamilton biographer Ron Chernow, who opposes demoting Hamilton, argues that “Hamilton was undeniably the most influential person in our history who never attained the presidency.”

Before the talk of replacing Hamilton, the movement to put a woman on U.S. currency targeted the $20 bill. That would be a better choice. Andrew Jackson was a violent man who ignored a Supreme Court ruling and killed thousands of Indians by forcing them off their land. But the government says it’s not ready to replace the $20 bill.

Jackson opposed central banking, founded in the U.S. by Hamilton. So maybe there’s poetic justice in Hamilton getting pushed aside by the central currency-printing bureaucracy he helped create.

But none of us would have to fight about whom to put on currency if it weren’t all created and printed by a central government. Bitcoin is private currency that comes in many forms. People who prefer dogs as the symbol of their money can even use the digital currency Dogecoin.

Private currencies aren’t just a 21st-century novelty. Numerous banks used to print their own competing currencies. Contrary to the claims of John Kenneth Galbraith and other left-wing economists, private competition tended to prevent runaway inflation and deep depressions.

Economist Thomas Hogan writes, “There were 1,600 private corporations issuing banknotes and an estimated 8,370 varieties of notes” in the 19th century, while the U.S. economy “grew at an average rate of 4.4 percent per year [and] the price level remained roughly constant.”

The central bank known as the Federal Reserve was supposed to provide greater stability, but it didn’t. Just 16 years after the U.S. created the Fed, the Great Depression began. And since then, the U.S. dollar lost 96 percent of its value.

Since government can’t run the rest of the economy wisely, why let it be in charge of money itself?

The money printing that central banks love — to pay government’s bills and try to trick, er, stimulate the economy into greater activity — isn’t real wealth creation. It just means more pieces of paper float around representing the same amount of wealth. It distorts markets, creating things like housing bubbles, and eventually it will mean inflation. It also lets politicians think they can ignore our debt ($18 trillion and counting) and keep spending.

Let private currencies compete and not only will we be on firmer ground financially, but also everybody will be free to choose whether they want to use Tubmans, Hamiltons or Mankillers to pay their bills.

Some people want Eleanor Roosevelt. Some want Ayn Rand. A movement on Twitter wants Caitlyn Jenner on their money.

Great! Go for it. If we had private, competing currencies, all these options could coexist. Choice is always better than the government’s one-size-fits-all solution.

In one survey of the "public," the

Politics

Bill-Clinton-Jeffrey-Epstein

Jeffrey Epstein, a convicted sex offender and owner of the Caribbean retreat dubbed, “Orgy Island,” left, and former President Bill Clinton, right.

Judicial Watch has sued the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to uncover details about Bill Clinton’s trips on the “Lolita Express” to “Orgy Island.” The watchdog group said Tuesday they filed the lawsuit to obtain records of all Secret Service expenses incurred to provide “security and or/other services” to the former president during his trips to the private Caribbean island retreat owned by convicted sex offender and Clinton friend, Jeffrey Epstein.

Epstein’s private Caribbean Island of Little Saint James was first exposed as “Orgy Island” in December 2014, when Virginia Roberts – who is now a married, 31-year-old mother of three – filed an affidavit in a Florida federal court alleging that when she was just 15 years-old she was procured as sexual entertainment by liberal socialite Ghislaine Maxwell for Epstein and his friends.

Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said DHS failed to comply with a January 15, 2015, FOIA request, which named “any and all records reflecting expenses incurred to provide security and/or other services to former President Bill Clinton and any companions for trips to the Caribbean island owned by Jeffrey Epstein known as Little St. James from 2001 to the present date.”

According to a flight manifest (logbook) — viewable below — Clinton flew aboard Epstein’s private Boeing 727, dubbed the “Lolita Express,” on more than a dozen trips to “Orgy Island.” Clinton, on at least one occasion was accompanied by “4 secret service” agents and Maxwell, the very woman prosecutors claim procured underage girls to sexually service Epstein and his friends.

“If there is nothing to hide in the Epstein scandal, then why is the Obama administration breaking federal transparency law rather than giving us information about his travels?” Fitton said. “That we’ve now had to go to federal court to try to get this Secret Service information speaks volumes.”

Epstein pleaded guilty in 2008 and served just 13 months after Mrs. Roberts alleged he enjoyed the company of multiple teenage sex slaves. Roberts also put the former president at the scene, but only Epstein ended up a registered “Tier 1” sex offender.

Via the The New York Post:

“I remember asking Jeffrey, ‘What’s Bill Clinton doing here?’” Roberts said in 2011. “The former president, she added, was accompanied by four young girls during his stay — two of whom were among Epstein’s regular sex partners. And [Jeffrey] laughed it off and said, ‘Well, he owes me a favor.’ He never told me what favors they were.”

Flight logs from the “Lolita Express” during Clinton’s week-long anti-poverty and anti-AIDS tour, also listed the name Chauntae Davies for a period of five days. Davies, who appeared in Epstein’s address book under an entry for “massages,” is a soft-core pornography movie actress.

“Beginning with his misuse of state troopers when he was an Arkansas governor,” Fitton added, “Bill Clinton has a long record of abusing his taxpayer-funded security details to facilitate and cover-up his illicit sexual activities.”

Requests for comment put into both DHS and the Clinton campaign were not immediately returned. In the past, the Clintons have dismissed the questions surrounding Epstein, stressing that Bill severed ties with Epstein following his arrest in 2005. However, they have yet to provide an explanation for the flight logs.

The Justice Department says they believe that Epstein had upwards of 40 victims, in total.

Judicial Watch has sued DHS to uncover

Policy

us-president-obama-greece-pm-tsipiras

U.S. President Barack Obama, right, and Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras, left. (Photos: AP)

I detest writing about Greece. I suggested back in 2010 that the best outcome was default, which would have been the most likely outcome of a no-bailout approach.

And for the past five years, events have confirmed – over and over again – that this was the right approach.

So you can understand how frustrating it is to comment again on this issue.

But sometimes the policy proposals from national governments and international bureaucracies are so blindly insane that I feel compelled to restate obvious points.

Consider what is happening now. The various members of the Troika (the International Monetary Fund, the European Commission, and the European Central Bank) are pressuring Greece to make reforms in exchange for additional subsidies, handouts, and bailouts.

But since the Greek government is run by lunatics, the net result of “reforms” is more and more bad policy. To be blunt, the Troika crowd is subsidizing and encouraging a process that is resulting in suicidal tax hikes in Greece.

Here are some excerpts from a story in the EU Observer.

Greece edged closer to a last-ditch agreement with her eurozone creditors on Monday (22 June), after Alexis Tsipras’ government promised to raise an extra €8 billion over the next two years. Under the proposal submitted to eurozone ministers, the Greek government would raise just under €2.7 billion in extra revenue this year, followed by a further €5.2 billion in 2016. …Tsipras’ government has proposed to raise €645 million over the next two years by increasing health contributions to 5 percent. …As expected, the remaining proposals are almost exclusively based around new tax increases, the most significant of which is a new 12 percent levy on all corporate profits over €500,000, which the Greek government expects to bring in €1.35 billion in extra revenue. …together with €100 million per year from a new TV advertisements tax. It also wants to widen the scope of a so-called ‘luxury’ tax to cover private swimming pools, planes and boats.

Here’s a look at the breakdown of the new deal, which I got off Twitter from a pro-liberty Greek citizen (i.e., an endangered species).

Greek-offer-EU

So the latest deal is 93 percent tax hikes and 7 percent spending cuts. And I’m sure those so-called spending cuts are probably make-believe reductions in previously planned increases instead of genuine reductions.

That’s so imbalanced that it makes President George H.W. Bush’s disastrous 1990 tax-hike deal seem good by comparison.

And just in case you wonder whether there’s no fat in the Greek budget, consider this shocking sentence from the EU Observer story.

Public spending on pensions currently amounts to 16 percent of Greece’s GDP.

To give you an idea of how crazy that number is, Social Security outlays in the United States consume “only” 4.9 percent of GDP.

And don’t forget the Greeks also squander money on a bloated bureaucracy and a preposterous regulatory regime (click here and here to see I’m actually understating the problem).

Yet rather than change any of these anti-growth policies, the government wants more and more revenue to prop up a bloated government.

The bottom line is that Greek politicians and interest groups are trying to impose an upside-down version of my Golden Rule.

golden-rule

But while my Rule says that the private sector should grow faster than the government, their version is that the tax burden should grow faster than the private sector.

Needless to say, that’s an approach that is guaranteed to produce economic ruin.

Productive people leave the country or operate in the underground economy. And many others decide that it’s far more comfortable to climb into the wagon of government dependency.

The situation is utterly ludicrous, as explained by George Will.

…a nation that chooses governments committed to Rumpelstiltskin economics, the belief that the straw of government largesse can be spun into the gold of national wealth? Tsipras…thinks Greek voters, by making delusional promises to themselves, obligate other European taxpayers to fund them.

But George sees a silver lining to the dark cloud of Greece’s economic illiteracy.

Greeks bearing the gift of confirmation that Margaret Thatcher was right about socialist governments: “They always run out of other people’s money.” …This protracted dispute will result in desirable carnage if Greece defaults, thereby becoming a constructively frightening example to all democracies doling out unsustainable, growth-suppressing entitlements.  …It cannot be said too often: There cannot be too many socialist smashups. The best of these punish reckless creditors whose lending enables socialists to live, for a while, off of other people’s money.

I fully agree with this final point. Just like it’s good to have positive examples (think Hong Kong, Switzerland, Texas, or Singapore), it’s also good to have bad examples (such as France, Italy, California, and Illinois).

Though it’s unclear whether politicians even care about learning any lessons.

P.S. Don’t forget that some American politicians want America to be more like Greece, as illustrated by this Henry Payne cartoon.

P.P.S. Also keep in mind that Greece is just the tip of the iceberg. Other European welfare states are making the same mistakes and will soon suffer similar fates.

For the past five years, events have

Politics

Obama-Bergdahl-Rose-Garden

President Obama hugs the father of U.S. Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, a known deserter now charged with that and more under the UCMJ, after delivering a statement on their son’s swap for the notorious Taliban Five.

The White House on Wednesday will release its review of U.S. policy that will recommend allowing ransoms to be paid by the families of American hostages. PPD has confirmed that President Obama will change longstanding U.S. policy and allow the families to pay ransoms without fear of prosecution.

President Obama ordered the review following the deaths of several Americans held by Islamic State militants. However, the president will announce this policy change despite the law remaining the same and the data not in support of his decision.

While some families complained about their dealings with the government, including threats of prosecution if they paid ransom to secure their loved ones’ release, the president’s scapegoating of U.S. policy doesn’t do much to solve the problem.

First, the recent executions of journalists James Foley and Steven Sotloff were unlikely to be avoided even if the families were allowed to negotiate a ransom for their release. According to a recent study by PPD, even when families in fact did negotiate for their loved ones’ release regardless of threats, there was little impact. Unfortunately, the goal of these two kidnappings was terror, not money. The Islamic State, unlike other terror organizations such as the Haqqani Network, a Taliban- and al Qaeda-linked group that held deserter and Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, does not generate their money from kidnappings.

Further, our investigation of available data found paying ransoms to Islamic radicals holding Western hostages merely increases both kidnappings and death rates, rather than having the intended effect of saving lives. Kidnapping Europeans for ransom, on the other hand, has become a global enterprise for al Qaeda, Boko Haram, al Shabaab, the Taliban (particularly the Haqqani Network), and other Islamic radical groups seeking to bankroll both established and new terror groups, as well as operations worldwide.

Most European governments deny paying ransoms, but according to the U.S. Treasury Department, from 2008 to 2014 roughly $165 million has been paid to al Qaeda and its affiliates. The predominant problem with this policy, which they repeatedly deny engaging in, is that it only leads to more kidnappings and there is no evidence to suggest that it reduces the lives lost in a participating country. Although the data (courtesy of the NYT) below needs updating, it illustrates the argument.

ransom-payments-per-country

As we can clearly see from the tragic policy adopted by France, the Western European country has ended up paying the most in kidnapping ransoms to terror groups — by far. But, as we can see from the data below, it only results in a higher number of citizens targeted for kidnapping, and are consequently killed because of the obvious and not-so obvious risks of being in captivity.

fate-of-kidnapped-westerners-per-country

France far and away has the largest number of hostages killed in captivity, either by their captors or from some other condition. The United States, on the other hand, which had zero citizens released for ransom, has not been a particularly attractive target for radical Islamic groups.

Yet, despite how convincing those two graphs may be, even they are somewhat misleading. It is very important to remember that the U.S has a significantly higher population than the other countries on the list, a factor that must be controlled for along with travel to high-risk regions. In fact, from 2008 to 2014, while President Obama largely adhered to the long-standing policy, there wasn’t a single American killed by captors and only 3 kidnappings for a country home to over 300 million.

Kayla-Mueller-Kiwanis

In this May 30, 2013, photo, Kayla Mueller is shown after speaking to a group in Prescott, Ariz. (AP/The Daily Courier)

In fact, America did not suffer a somewhat comparable hostage fatality until the case of Kayla Mueller, the female aide worker who died while in ISIS captivity. The Islamic State claimed to the family that Kayla was killed by a coalition airstrike, but counter-terror experts believe that she, too, was initially captured for terror purposes, not for the $6.2 million ransom payment they demanded from the family.

Kayla-Mueller-ap

Kayla Mueller (AP/The Daily Courier)

In fairness, we will never know for sure if they concocted the story to allude American outrage and retribution. But what we do know is that the president’s decision to break with another longstanding American policy — to not negotiate with terrorists — contributed significantly to Kayla’s demise.

The Mueller family said that the Obama administration’s swap of the Taliban Five held at Guantanamo Bay for Army deserter Bowe Bergdahl doomed any hope to work out a deal with ISIS to get Ms. Mueller back.

kayla-mueller-family

Kayla Mueller’s mother gives a press conference in Arizona. (Photo: Video Screenshot)

Carl Mueller, the father, told NBC in a February interview that after the White House agreed last year to swap Bergdahl, who was captured and held for five years after he deserted his unit on June 30 of 2009, ISIS raised the ransom for their daughter.

“That made the whole situation worse,” Kayla Mueller’s brother, Eric, told the network. “Because that’s when the demands got greater. They got larger. They realized that they had something. They realized that, ‘Well, if they’re gonna let five people go for one person, why won’t they do this? Or why won’t they do that?’”

A senior administration official would not confirm that policy change, but said the review would be made public Wednesday. The official insisted on anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the review publicly by name.

The White House on Wednesday will release

News, Politics

Conservative talk radio host Mark Levin ripped House Oversight Committee Chair Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, for stripping Rep. Mark Meadows of his subcommittee chairmanship after he defied party leaders.

Levin referred to the top three House leaders — Speaker John Boehner, Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy and Majority Whip Steve Scalise — as “Moe, Larry and Curley,” with Chaffetz being the “shrimp in there somewhere.”

“The shrimp I guess would be Jason Chaffetz,” Levin said. “Jason Chaffetz is a fraud. Jason Chaffetz pretends to be conservative but is John Boehner’s boy. He’s his lap dog.”

Meadows was one of 34 conservatives who voted against the rule to move the trade deal forward, which will provide the president with fast-track negotiating authority and expand Trade Adjustment Assistance – a leftwing entitlement program that was added to grease Democrats’ palms.

Levin’s outrage over GOP leaders punishing their own members for fighting to stop what many view as a bad deal with President Obama, was echoed within conservative circles.

Jason-Chaffetz

House Oversight and Government Reform Chairman Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah. (Photo: AP)

“House Republican leaders have punished another conservative lawmaker for standing up for our principles,” Senate Conservatives Fund President Ken Cuccinelli said in an email to PPD. “Freedom-loving Americans need to fight back.”

Senate Conservatives have pledged to raise funds for Rep. Meadows until July 1st, at which point the group will start to decide whether to endorse and support him throughout the rest of his campaign.

“But right now, we’re going to do everything we can to support him,” Cuccinelli added. “This man is a leader and we need to defend him against these attacks.”

As Levin rightly pointed out, Speaker Boehner and House leaders have targeted various conservatives in an effort to silence critics and move their particular special interest-favored legislation forward without fail. Meadows, who stated he simply “voted his conscience,” was made an early example.

“The Republican establishment is trying to make an example out of Congressman Meadows so other conservatives won’t fight to stop more deals with President Obama later this year,” Cuccinelli added. “Speaker Boehner and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell want to pass a massive highway bailout, raise the debt limit, and save Obamacare’s subsidies and mandates if the Supreme Court strikes them down.”

PPD previously reported and confirmed that McConnell and House leaders are prepared to backstab the base and conservative members if the Supreme Court nixes ObamaCare subsidies this month.

Conservative talk radio host Mark Levin ripped

Politics

confederate-flag-press-conference

Republican Gov. Nikki Haley, flanked by Sens. Tim Scott and Lindsey Graham, both Republicans, hold a press conference to call for the removal of the Confederate Flag in Colombia, South Carolina.

Should the Dixie flag of the South, the venerable “Stars And Bars”, be removed from the South Carolina statehouse?

While the voters of South Carolina have every right to decide who hangs what flag on the statehouse grounds, the argument against the Dixie flag in invalid. First of all, it flies over a tomb monument, not the actual courthouse itself and therefore is not either commemorating Dixie nor is it honoring it.

It flies over a Civil War War Memorial honoring the men killed in the war. It also has nothing to do with what happened at the Charleston church shooting where 9 people were killed by a racist who was looking to seek justice for wrongly perceived slights to whites.

In short, it’s simply because some unknown persons are offended. No one to date has filed an official grievance or petition with the Governor’s office.

‘I’m offended’ is the new motto for the United States.

It won’t stop with the Dixie flag however– soon any notion of the Confederacy except as an historical pejorative will be destroyed. History texts will be amended. Statues of Lee and other Confederate heroes and veterans will come down. Historical monuments of the Confederacy will be removed. Confederate uniforms, sayings, reenactments and clothing will be banned.

In short, its the liberal agenda seeking to re-litigate the Civil war, and in turn reestablish the Reconstruction South that was so desperately resisted by President Lincoln, who wanted the people just to go home and heal the nation.

The real agenda of the left here is to destroy the notion of an independent state from the federal government, which is a threat to the statist left. They are going to open old wounds and drag up the argument of North versus South to once again, divide a nation further and capitalize on the dissension. 

Mark my words, if they take that flag down, it will only be the beginning.

That’s why you can’t do it South Carolina.

There is too much at stake.

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While the voters of South Carolina have

Opinion

Hillary-Clinton-Newscom

Hillary Clinton at a campaign event in Iowa. (Photo: Keiko Hiromi/Polaris/Newscom)

There are no sure things in politics, but Hillary Clinton is the closest thing to a sure thing to become the Democrats’ candidate for president in 2016.

This is one of the painful but inescapable signs of our time. There is nothing in her history that would qualify her for the presidency, and much that should disqualify her. What is even more painful is that none of that matters politically. Many people simply want “a woman” to be president, and Hillary is the best-known woman in politics, though by no means the best qualified.

What is Hillary’s history? In the most important job she has ever held — Secretary of State — American foreign policy has had one setback after another, punctuated by disasters.

U.S. intervention in Libya and Egypt, undermining governments that were no threat to American interests, led to Islamic extremists taking over in Egypt and terrorist chaos in Libya, where the American ambassador was killed, along with three other Americans.

Fortunately, the Egyptian military has gotten rid of that country’s extremist government that was persecuting Christians, threatening Israel and aligning itself with our enemies. But that was in spite of American foreign policy.

In Europe, as in the Middle East, our foreign policy during Hillary Clinton’s tenure as Secretary of State was to undermine our friends and cater to our enemies.

The famous “reset” in our foreign policy with Russia began with the Obama administration reneging on a pre-existing American commitment to supply defensive technology to shield Poland and the Czech Republic from missile attacks. This left both countries vulnerable to pressures and threats from Russia — and left other countries elsewhere wondering how much they could rely on American promises.

Even after Russia invaded Ukraine, the Obama administration refused to let the Ukrainians have weapons with which to defend themselves. President Obama, like other presidents, has made his own foreign policy. But Hillary Clinton, like other Secretaries of State, had the option of resigning if she did not agree with it. In reality, she shared the same flawed vision of the world as Obama’s when they were both in the Senate.

Both of them opposed the military “surge” in Iraq, under General David Petraeus, that defeated the terrorists there. Even after the surge succeeded, Hillary Clinton was among those who fiercely denied initially that it had succeeded, and sought to discredit General Petraeus, though eventually the evidence of the surge’s success became undeniable, even among those who had opposed it.

The truly historic catastrophe of American foreign policy — not only failing to stop Iran from going nuclear, but making it more difficult for Israel to stop them — was also something that happened on Hillary Clinton’s watch as Secretary of State.

What the administration’s protracted and repeatedly extended negotiations with Iran accomplished was to allow Iran time to multiply, bury and reinforce its nuclear facilities, to the point where it was uncertain whether Israel still had the military capacity to destroy those facilities.

There are no offsetting foreign policy triumphs under Secretary of State Clinton. Syria, China and North Korea are other scenes of similar setbacks.

The fact that many people are still prepared to vote for Hillary Clinton to be President of the United States, in times made incredibly dangerous by the foreign policy disasters on her watch as Secretary of State, raises painful questions about this country.

A President of the United States — any president — has the lives of more than 300 million Americans in his or her hands, and the future of Western civilization. If the debacles and disasters of the Obama administration have still not demonstrated the irresponsibility of choosing a president on the basis of demographic characteristics, it is hard to imagine what could.

With our enemies around the world arming while we are disarming, such self-indulgent choices for president can leave our children and grandchildren a future that will be grim, if not catastrophic.

There are no sure things in politics,

People's Pundit Daily
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