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June 2024

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

The Affordability Crisis Is Shaping Up as a Key Issue in the Election — and Trump Has the Advantage Not enough has been written about this from a political standpoint. Only it sure should come up in the debate next week.Lawrence Kudlow

By on June 23rd, 2024

https://www.nysun.com/article/the-affordability-crisis-is-shaping-up-as-a-key-issue-in-the-election-and-trump-has-the-advantage?

It’s a kitchen table election. Heading toward the CNN Presidential Debate next Thursday, one would think President Trump would be pulling together a scathing critique of President Biden’s performance regarding that old political cliché, kitchen-table issues, which surfaced again in the form of today’s affordability crisis for working folks.

Things like inflation, groceries, gas prices, et cetera — and I’ll get to those. Yet there’s an underrated issue which is looming larger and larger. And that is unaffordable housing.

Existing home sales for May came in just more than 4 million units — which is the lowest in 30 years. During the Trump years, home sales were running around 6 million.

Meanwhile, average home prices came in at $419,300, and that is a record high going all the way back to the recorded data beginning in 1999.

Pre-pandemic, during Trump’s term, home prices were running $270,000-plus.

And one of the keys to the unaffordable housing affordability crisis is the mortgage rate that has been running pretty consistently around 7 percent during the Biden years compared to below 4 percent during the Trump years.

Yes, it’s quite true that all these zoning-related regulatory burdens imposed by blue-state Democrats have limited the available supply of homes.

And it’s also true that a lot of those same blue-state Democrats want to incorporate the suburbs into the cities in order to build public housing and force crazy climate change regulations. Anything to stop gas-powered autos and basically destroy the value of your home.

Yet even in the healthier red states, sky-rocketing mortgage rates and home prices have made it very difficult, if not impossible, for working folks of any color or stripe to afford to buy a home — and in particular that includes younger folks.

Not enough has been written about this from a political standpoint. Only it sure should come up in the CNN Presidential Debate next week.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

Harvard, in New Filing in Court, Suggests Its Jewish Students Were Too Fearful in the Wake of October 7 Who’s to blame — the lawyers or the client? Ira Stoll

By on June 23rd, 2024

https://www.nysun.com/article/harvard-in-new-filing-in-court-suggests-its-jewish-students-were-too-fearful-in-the-wake-of-october-7?lctg=1474955502&recognized_

Harvard reportedly spent more than $25 million, mostly on the law firm WilmerHale, defending the racial preferences in college admissions that the Supreme Court struck down as unconstitutional. After losing the landmark Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard case in June 2023, Harvard again turned to WilmerHale to prepare its president, Claudine Gay, for a December 2023 congressional hearing on Harvard’s response to antisemitism. 

President Gay’s performance at the hearing was widely denounced.  Both she and the president of the University of Pennsylvania, Elizabeth Magill, who also relied on WilmerHale for pre-hearing preparation, resigned after apologizing for giving overly legalistic answers suggesting that whether calls for genocide against Jews violate their university policies would depend on the “context.” 

Now Harvard is facing a third embarrassment. This past week, one of the same lawyers who tried the Asian-American admissions case, Felicia Ellsworth, who sat in the first row behind Ms. Gay in the December congressional hearing, joined three other WilmerHale lawyers and four from another firm in filing a motion to dismiss and strike a complaint filed in court by Jewish students alleging antisemitism at Harvard.

The students, Alexander  Kestenbaum and Students Against Antisemitism, Inc., said that on October 19, 2023, a mob stormed Harvard Law School. “Fearing a violent attack, students in the study room removed indicia of their Jewishness, such as kippot, or hid under desks,” their complaint says. In a memo supporting the motion to dismiss and strike, the lawyers for Harvard said that the Jewish students do not “describe an environment in which an objectively reasonable person would fear physical violence.”

By basically calling Harvard’s own Jewish students unreasonable for fearing violence less than two weeks after the October 7, 2023, Hamas-led terrorist attack on Israel, the lawyers risk proving the complaint’s point about Harvard antisemitism, rather than persuading Judge Richard Stearns to dismiss it. 

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Fauci Was Just a Symptom By Jeffrey H. Anderson

By on June 23rd, 2024

https://tomklingenstein.com/fauci-was-just-a-symptom/

Editor’s Note: Since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, Anthony Fauci has emerged as a living symbol of federal abuses: lockdowns, mask mandates, and myriad other arbitrary restrictions that unduly burdened the lives of ordinary citizens. Yet there is nothing exceptional about the former NIAID head; he is merely one of countless bureaucrats in Washington who feel entitled to rule their countrymen by the mandate of expertise. Jeffrey H. Anderson reviews RFK Jr.’s recent book on America’s most controversial doctor and concludes that Fauci is not just a bad scientist, but an embodiment of the grave threat posed by a new regime to our Constitution and our way of life.

The mainstream press corps prefers to deal with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. by pretending that he doesn’t exist. This is true both for his presidential campaign—which is thought to pose too much of a threat to President Biden to risk acknowledging it—and for his popular book, The Real Anthony Fauci.

Relegated to Skyhorse Publishing, which Wall Street Journal film critic Kyle Smith describes as “something of a refuge for the cancelled,” Kennedy’s book nevertheless cracked the top 15 on the New York Times hardcover nonfiction best-seller list for 15 consecutive weeks—topping out at #7. Yet apparently it did not merit space in the Times for a review. Wikipedia quickly dismisses The Real Anthony Fauci as a “controversial” book by a “conspiracy theorist” who unjustifiably “attacks” Fauci and “offers disinformation.” 

In truth, however, Kennedy’s book is a valuable and generally well-researched indictment of the public health establishment, and more broadly of anti-republican rule by “experts.” While the book’s claims should not be taken as gospel in the way that the credulous press corps hangs on Fauci’s every muddled word, Kennedy shows impressive willingness to stand strong against the current, and his informative and rather countercultural book is very much worth a read. He makes a compelling case that—from AIDS to Covid—Fauci and friends have been pursuing their own agenda at the expense of the American people.

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