By RuthThe Money Desk

On September 3rd, Freddie Mac's benchmark 30-year fixed mortgage rate hit 6.71 percent, the highest mark in more than a year, the Hill reported, a climb it said was "portending lower purchasing power for prospective homebuyers."

Five weeks later, on October 5th, Mortgage News Daily's daily tracker put the same 30-year rate at 7.53 percent. The Washington Examiner filed that one as the highest level since 2023, next to a line noting investors growing "increasingly concerned about the federal government's fiscal footing."

Two mornings running, October 6th and October 7th, the Hill filed the next one: the 30-year rate's highest mark since late November 2023, back to 7.28 percent on Freddie Mac's own weekly count.

This week, the New York Post filed the fourth entry in that column: home sales at their lowest point since the late-2000s crash, sixteen years back. "Just a tough market," the report called it. The filing tallies what three record rate readings, stacked across five weeks, did to the number of buyers who could sign.

The gap worth measuring here, hon, sits between those three dated rate filings and the number of answers entered against them: zero. September's record held five weeks before October beat it. Both times the Hill ran its sentence about the midterms and named the GOP. The midterms came. The GOP lost Congress on affordability. The answer count for the run stayed at zero straight through the loss.

Sixteen years is a long stretch for a sales count to sit that low. Five weeks is a short stretch for a mortgage rate to set three records. Both numbers sit in the same drawer, filed under the same four months, under the same signature that never answered any of the three.

By LouOne More Question

Walk me through it once—not the outcome, I know there isn't one yet, just the procedure, the way it actually happened the tenth time.

Here's what I've got, if I can find the page... hold on... here. Mr. Kushner and Mr. Witkoff fly to Abu Dhabi first. They sit down with the Ukrainians there. Then they get back on the plane and fly to Moscow. They're driven through the gates and into the Kremlin, and they sit down with Mr. Putin. That happened this week. And after that, the schedule I've got says they fly on to Ireland, to brief Mr. Zelenskyy. Abu Dhabi, then Moscow, then Dublin. Three capitals, one trip, same two men.

I want to ask you something plain, because I wrote the number down twice to be sure I had it right. Putin, in person, about this war? The wire I've got says ten. Not nine. Ten.

I've got a car in the garage that needs a fan belt. I've taken it in four times this year, and four times I've driven it home with the same belt still on it, because something else came up first—the brakes, the battery, whatever it was that week. I'm not telling you that's the same thing. I'm asking you: is it?

Because back in September—the fourth, the fifth, somewhere in there—the same two men made almost this same trip. The president confirmed it himself on a Friday: Kushner and Witkoff, the Kremlin first, Kyiv after. And the day they landed in Moscow, Mr. Putin ordered a three-day pause on strikes against Kyiv. Three days. State media said so. I wrote that down too. The two men got back on the plane the very next day and flew to Kyiv themselves, to sit with Mr. Zelenskyy.

So here's a fair question. After that three-day pause ran out in September, did the fighting stop? I don't have a page that says it did. Do you?

And this week—the tenth time—does the item I'm holding say anything about a pause? I've read it three times. Abu Dhabi, the Kremlin, then Ireland. No three days. No cease-fire. Just the three cities and the two men. I checked twice because I didn't want to put a word on the page that wasn't on the wire.

The fighting itself—and I want to get this part exactly right, so let me read it back slow—has now run longer than the Soviet Union's whole war against Nazi Germany. I read that one over twice myself before I believed it. That's not the ten trips. That's just how long the thing the ten trips are about has been going on.

Oh—before you go. One more thing, and then I'll let you get back to your evening. The item I've got open says this is the tenth meeting between Mr. Witkoff and Mr. Putin, in person, over this one war. Not a phone call. Not a committee. The tenth sit-down. And in ten sit-downs, near as I can tell from my own notes, nothing has happened that only had to happen once.

By MitchInvestigations

Before a single subpoena existed, the fight over oversight had already picked its vocabulary. That was last week's column: White House counsel told the incoming Oversight chair that the investigations he had not yet opened were already "blatant criminality." On Nov. 8, Attorney General Todd Blanche told reporters that Democrats "are not allowed to just go around threatening existing members of the administration, to go around threatening companies" — and that this was what the president was "extremely worried about." The same week, the Justice Department answered a separate probe, into the donors financing the White House ballroom, by calling the probe itself a threat against Trump supporters.

On Wednesday, the threat got a letterhead. Aaron Reitz, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Texas, sent Sen. Richard Blumenthal a letter dated Nov. 11 warning him to preserve records tied to his ballroom-donor inquiry. The Hill's account of the letter describes Reitz accusing the senator of using congressional oversight to harass private citizens — the senator who opened the inquiry is now the one told to keep his own files in order.

The same day, Rep. Robert Garcia, the incoming chair of House Oversight, sent a warning in the other direction. All together now — the plainest sentence in the whole file: Stephen Miller, the new White House chief of staff, "should be preserving documents," Garcia said.

And in the Senate, Ron Wyden opened a formal investigation into evidence that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. "unlawfully lied" to Congress during his 2025 confirmation hearings, citing a Guardian report. Wyden, the incoming chair of the Senate Finance Committee, is seeking records from Children's Health Defense, the anti-vaccine nonprofit Kennedy once ran, including everything related to a 2019 trip Kennedy took to Samoa.

Three letters, one week, one direction of travel: the party accused of "blatant criminality" before it filed anything is now the party doing the filing. The preservation letters are not evidence yet. They are the instruction to keep the evidence around.