Authored by Frank Miele via RealClearPolitics,

It seems as though only one thing motivates Congress to act - the threat of elections.

That's why both the House and Senate have moved to pass a continuing resolution to keep funding the government until December. Originally funding was going to run out on Oct. 1, the date that was decided during the last shutdown crisis.

But with virtually every member of the House of Representatives and one-third of the Senate up for election in November, almost no one in Congress wanted to call attention to their own inaction by letting a new shutdown occur.

It's the political version of Pavlov's dogs. You know, the famous experiment by the Russian scientist Ivan Pavlov who trained canines to salivate at the sound of a bell because they associated the bell with the expectation of food being served.

The same thing happens with members of Congress when they hear that an election is scheduled within the next three months. Suddenly they want to be productive.

A representative can ignore constituents for 22 months and then suddenly rediscover them during the last two. And

With mortgage rates rising and the 'low hire, no fire' economy leaving many anxious about their household finances, the ugly spring selling season has not been followed by a consistent rebound in existing home sales in the US.

After falling 1.4% MoM in June (revised up from a 2.4% MoM decline), US existing home sales fell again -1.7% MoM in July (worse than the -1.0% MoM exp). This dragged the annual increase in sales down to just 0.74% YoY...

Overall, existing home sales SAAR is holding very modestly off record lows, holding just above the 4 million mark...

"Home sales have been remarkably stable, even amid the rising mortgage rate environment of the past few months," Lawrence Yun, NAR chief economist, said in a statement.

He added that "there's no doubt that the housing market would be thriving if average mortgage rates were to return near 6%."

In recent months, home-financing costs and prices went in the wrong direction. Thirty-year mortgage rates have been climbing since the late-February start of the war in Iran, and recently

Authored by Jonathan Turley,

We have previously discussed how many professors seem to compete in finding new forms of racism in every facet of society and education.

Astrophysics, math, runoffs, science, statistics, and meritocracy have all been denounced as racist. In this academic cottage industry, professors secure publications and speaking opportunities by identifying racism in the expressions, images, or entire fields. Even time itself has been declared racist.

Now, however, academics have found another undiscovered continent of white privilege: niceness.

When I saw a story in The College Fix on a study of "niceness as Whiteness," I was skeptical and decided to take a look. The study by Vanderbilt Postdoctoral Research Fellow Abigail Beneke, Professors Benjamin Fisher (U. Wisconsin-Madison), F. Chris Curran (U. Florida), and Samantha Viano (George Mason) was first flagged by Dr. James Nuzzo.

The paper "Niceness as Whiteness in School Police Officers' Perceptions of Student Arrest" addresses the "perceptions of arrest" by school resource officers, or SROs) in two school districts.

The officers appear to be precisely what you are looking for in an SRO: empathetic and reluctant to make arrests. The researchers admit

Chicago wheat futures are coiling for a breakout (one way or another) as ongoing Russia-Ukraine attacks on Black Sea grain infrastructure and bulk carriers threaten exports from one of the world's most important breadbaskets.

Most-active Chicago wheat has been choppy in the last few days...

Hard red winter wheat gained as much as 2.7% to $7.505 a bushel.

Soft Red Winter wheat futures are poised for a much larger breakout if prices sustain a move above $7 a bushel.

Bloomberg noted Monday that Turkey temporarily suspended Black Sea transits by its cargo ships over the weekend amid ongoing maritime security risks in the critical shipping corridor. Ukraine warned that its agricultural exports for the 2026-27 season could be halved due to Russian attacks.

Joe Davis, director of commodities at brokerage Futures International, was quoted by the outlet as saying that potential supply disruptions had boosted US-grown hard red winter varieties more sharply because the grain is seen as a direct competitor to higher-protein milling wheat from the Black Sea region and Europe.

"While the disruptions don't necessarily