The challenges ahead (Biden's America)

[Frelga]

I do think some of this is mere baiting by Republicans trying to rile up their base and that neither Democrats nor Swift should overplay their responses.

Note the date of the tweet

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[N.E. Brigand]

I do remember that back in 2016, white nationalists believed that Taylor Swift was secretly supporting them. Arieh Kovler says that partly explains why they’re so mad at her: they feel betrayed by the woman they imagined was their Aryan goddess.

(To Nikki Haley's credit, she dismissed the right-wing conspiracy theories tonight, saying "Taylor Swift is allowed to have a boyfriend.")

Some conservatives are upset not only with Taylor Swift but with the Sesame Street puppet Elmo.

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House Republicans are planning to impeach Homeland Security Sec. Alejandro Mayorkas, but they’re not all on board, and even sometime-Trump defender Alan Dershowitz has weighed in to say that Mayorkas hasn’t done anything to merit impeachment.

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Meeting Wednesday, the Federal Reserve did not cut interest rates and suggested that it will be slow to cut them in the future. Even so, the Dow Jones stock market average hit a new record Thursday, the eighth time that's happened so far this year.

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Axios reports on "Why the U.S. Economy Is Beating the World." Among the G7, Japan was a solid second place in 2023 but likely will be overtaken by Canada and France in 2024. "Strong growth in the U.S. labor force was one factor — both due to more Americans choosing to enter the workforce and a surge in immigration."

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President Biden’s brother James will be testifying to the House on Feb. 21, a week before Hunter Biden does the same.

And Marcy Wheeler discusses some problems with the search warrants used to build the gun case against Hunter.

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Vladmir Putin–-er, I mean his guest Tara Reade, is suing the FBI for $10 million.

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Climate activists appear to be very happy about this news, although at this point, it's only a pause:

"'It’s a massive win,' says environmentalist, after Biden Administration delays natural gas expansion."

Matt Yglesias argues that if this pause becomes permanent, it would have "one of two effects: Foreign suppliers make up the gap and the climate impact is minimal; or Foreign suppliers don't make up the gap and poor countries suffer."

Here's a little more information on the LNG pause.

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Last week the Los Angeles Times let go a bunch of writers and Sports Illustrated terminated all its writers. And as mentioned in another thread, The Messenger (a newer outlet) shut down entirely yesterday. Why aren’t most conservative media outlets likewise struggling? Because often they are funded by rich guys who care more about getting the message out than making money. For example, the New York Post has been owned by Rupert Murdoch since 1976 but didn’t turn a profit until 2021.

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Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin apologized today for not informing his staff or his boss about his cancer diagnosis in a timely manner.

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This is an interesting essay on one challenge of border patrol: lie-detector tests. Federal law bans most employers from requiring candidates pass a lie detector test as a condition of employment. But the Border Patrol requires them. Setting aside whether or not they’re even reliable, a problem is that two-thirds of candidates fail the test and can’t be hired. The reason Border Patrol takes extra steps with the aim of ensuring honest employees is that bribery is a big problem for border agents.

I forgot or didn’t know that one complaint about King George III in the Declaration of Independence was that he was making immigration too difficult: "He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands." To be sure, the man who wrote those words quite content to own slaves! And the first U.S. immigration law passed in in 1790 only allowed naturalization to white people. But the doors were wide open for more than a century. And of course, the U.S. has birthright citizenship, which surely wouldn't be the case if immigration was seriously opposed.

Rep. Troy Nehls, Republican of Texas, today asked why Republicans should do anything about the supposed border concerns if that would help President Biden.

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Earlier this week, the publishers and top editors at several major media outlets met with the Dept. of Justice to push for better treatment of the press, in response to recent revelations about how DOJ had obtained subpoenas for reporters' records in the course of leak investigations (investigations that may have been politically motivated). There were some calls this week among other journalists for those media bigwigs to use the meeting as an opportunity to demand that the Justice Dept. drop its charges against Julian Assange, on the grounds that he too is a journalist deserving the freedoms afforded by the First Amendment....

Because it may become relevant to Julian Assange's case (it's nearly a certainty now that he will be extradited to the U.S.), I'm noting this new AP story here: "Ex-CIA engineer convicted in massive theft of secret info."

The defendant, Joshua Schulte, is apparently a brilliant engineer who now has been convicted of stealing and providing Wikileaks with the "Vault 7" documents that reveal the tools (some developed in part by Schulte himself) that the CIA uses to hack phones, and the release thus severely undermined the CIA's information-gathering ability. ... He was convicted of all counts: eight counts of espionage and one count of obstruction. ... Schulte also faces yet another trial on an unrelated matter.

Today Schulte was convicted on that other matter (three charges for receipt, possession, and transportation of child pornography).

Josh Schulte today was sentenced to 40 years in prison, followed by supervised relief for the rest of his life. The government sought life imprisonment. The judge said he was "blown away" by Schulte's "complete lack of remorse." The judge cited a classified document provided by the government which seemingly indicates that Schulte's actions cost the government far more than the $300 million figure previously cited. He was sentenced for both the espionage and child pornography convictions. He’ll continue to be held under Special Administrative Measures that limit his contact with the outside world because even while in prison, he continued to try to leak classified information.

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"What Biden really says about Trump behind closed doors" (Politico).

[N.E. Brigand]

Is this the fault of the Biden administration, of the media, or of the public?



"And there was one thing in particular about watching Biden up close that had surprised him, Riley said. 'He talked about multiple topics, the things he's juggling and navigating and processing. He is very sharp,' Riley said. 'That man? He's sharp. He's with it.'"

[Voronwë the Faithful]

More evidence that Biden is ruining the U.S. economy.

JUST IN: The US economy added a blockbuster 353,000 jobs in January, far exceeding expectations of 180,000. This is a really healthy economy. (December jobs revised up to 333,000)

Unemployment rate: 3.7%

Wage growth: 4.5% in past year —>far ahead of 3.4% inflation

[N.E. Brigand]

More evidence that Biden is ruining the U.S. economy.

JUST IN: The US economy added a blockbuster 353,000 jobs in January, far exceeding expectations of 180,000. This is a really healthy economy. (December jobs revised up to 333,000)
Unemployment rate: 3.7%
Wage growth: 4.5% in past year —>far ahead of 3.4% inflation

This time the nay-sayers got an early start. This video was posted to Youtube on Thursday by an economics data reporter at the Wall Street Journal (a newspaper which today laid off its entire D.C. bureau). It attempts to show that the top-line unemployment number is misleading, and the reporter clearly stands by it, since he was posting to the comments after today's January jobs report came out. Specifically, he says that the good numbers back in December are belied by:

1. The prime age (18-54) labor force having declined for three straight months.
2. Every month in 2023 "except October" having seen the number of jobs added revised down later.
3. A decline in weekly hours, which often portends a recession.
4. Outstanding unemployment claims remaining high even as new claims are low.

However, I would note that:

(1) The labor force ticked up slightly in January, and also even in December it was higher than it had been since one month each in 2007 and 2008. In fact, the only period in U.S. history when it's been at or above the current level for a sustained period is 1989-2003 (peaking in Jan. 1999).
(2) December was revised up from 216,000 to 333,000. (And July was also revised up back in September. In the end, October was flat.)
(3) Weekly hours have been declining for three years without a recession starting. And the January decline was due in part to winter weather.
(4) People are staying on unemployment longer because they can afford to be picky when looking for their next job.

Today's report also revised November up by 9,000, but that wasn't enough to offset the previous revision down. In all, 2023 saw 3.1 million jobs added.

In other employment notes, "there are more manufacturing jobs now than at any point" during Donald Trump's presidency.

There was less gloom this morning than I feared. On Fox Business, one analyst today said: "This is Goldilocks. This is as good as it gets, and we already know that inflation's coming down, which means purchasing power is going up this year: consumers are going to have money to spend." (Video of Fox this morning at the link as shared by the Biden-Harris campaign.) And Larry Kudlow said "We had a blowout jobs report ... I know many of my conservative friends are trying to drill holes in this report. But you know what, folks? It is what it is. It's a very strong report. Not every economic stat should be viewed through a political lens."

[N.E. Brigand]

House Republicans are planning to impeach Homeland Security Sec. Alejandro Mayorkas, but they’re not all on board, and even sometime-Trump defender Alan Dershowitz has weighed in to say that Mayorkas hasn’t done anything to merit impeachment.

So the Republican's official report on Sec. Mayorkas says: "This Committee, through these articles of impeachment, begins the process of deporting Secretary Mayorkas" -- that's my emphasis. Say again, Republicans?

Mayorkas was born in Cuba in 1959 but came to the U.S. a year later when his parents fled the new Castro regime. He's been a U.S. citizen for many decades.

[N.E. Brigand]

House Republicans are planning to impeach Homeland Security Sec. Alejandro Mayorkas, but they’re not all on board, and even sometime-Trump defender Alan Dershowitz has weighed in to say that Mayorkas hasn’t done anything to merit impeachment.

So the Republican's official report on Sec. Mayorkas says: "This Committee, through these articles of impeachment, begins the process of deporting Secretary Mayorkas" -- that's my emphasis. Say again, Republicans?

Mayorkas was born in Cuba in 1959 but came to the U.S. a year later when his parents fled the new Castro regime. He's been a U.S. citizen for many decades.

The vote to impeach Alejandro Mayorkas, the Secretary of Homeland Security, has failed in the House. That said, Republicans probably will try again in the near future. It was a 215-215 tie as time ran out, so then, in order to allow them to vote later, one of the Congressmen who introduced the bill voted no on it (so it went down 216-214). When you do that, you preserve the right to try again. (I think. I don't really understand parliamentary procedure.)

[N.E. Brigand]

Meeting Wednesday, the Federal Reserve did not cut interest rates and suggested that it will be slow to cut them in the future. Even so, the Dow Jones stock market average hit a new record Thursday, the eighth time that's happened so far this year.

This happened again today.

[N.E. Brigand]

I don't know enough about this specific case to speak confidently, but it seems to me that by blocking wind projects like this and thus keeping Americans on fossil fuels, lawsuits like this will also irreparably harm this valley due to global warming.

Speaking of global warming:

(1) in December, U.S. gas and oil production reached all-time highs and U.S. carbon dioxide emissions were at a 30-year low.

(2) A D.C. jury has found that climate scientist Michael Mann is owed $1 million by climate-denying commentator Mark Steyn for defamation for having wrriten in the conservative magazine National Review that Mann had faked the famous "hockey stick" graph showing global temperature increases and for comparing Mann to a convicted child molester.

Steyn wrote that in 2012. It took twelve years for Mann to get some justice.

[N.E. Brigand]

The S&P market index closed above 5,000 points for the first time ever. ||| The December inflation rate was revised down today, i.e., it was better than previously reported. |||And NPR reports that "the EPA tightened rules on soot pollution (deadly PM2.5) for the first time since 2012," which should save about 4,500 lives per year and prevent hundreds of thousands of emergency room visits.

[N.E. Brigand]

Bloomberg: "Biden to Offer $1.5 Billion Loan to Restart Michigan Nuclear Power Plant."

That plant is in my backyard; or maybe I should say that I'm in its fallout zone....

We have two nuclear power plants in Ohio, both adjacent to Lake Erie. One is 70 miles west of Cleveland and the other is 30 miles east of Cleveland. Both were scheduled to be closed but then this happened (as I've noted before here):

The Ohio nuclear bribery scandal (2020) is a political scandal in Ohio involving allegations that electric utility company FirstEnergy paid roughly $60 million to Generation Now, a 501(c)(4) organization purportedly controlled by Speaker of the Ohio House of Representatives Larry Householder in exchange for passing a $1.3 billion bailout for the nuclear power operator....

Householder was removed from the Ohio House, but not until another year had passed. He was convicted of racketeering in 2023 and sentenced to the maximum of 20 years' imprisonment. In 2021, First Energy was fined $230 million and had to pay a civil penalty of nearly $3.9 million to the IRS. I think the company should have paid an even larger fine and also have gone to jail (if corporations are persons, then they should face the same consequences), but our legal system isn't set up to do the latter.

Did I speak too soon? While First Energy remains at large, Ohio's attorney general today announced new charges in the House Bill 6 scandal against the company's former CEO Charles Jones (10 charges including theft, bribery, fraud, and money laundering), its former Senior Vice President Michael Dowling (the same 10 charges plus two more for records tampering), and Sam Randazzo, who had been the chair of the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio (22 charges: the same ones Dowling faces but more counts of each).

[N.E. Brigand]

CNBC reports that the Biden administration is developing plans for yet more student debt relief. Thus far, working within the constraints of a Supreme Court ruling that blocked their original efforts, the White House has approved forgiveness of $136 billion of student debt for more than three million people.

[N.E. Brigand]

"GOP's Star Witness in Hunter Biden Probe Has Ties to Russian Oligarch" (The Daily Beast).

That witness, Tony Bobulinski, is testifying again to the House behind closed doors today.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

Of course behind closed doors, so that the GOP can cherry-pick from his testimony.

[N.E. Brigand]

Here's a statistic for you: 40 years ago, in 1984, there were 1,786 homicides in New York City. By contrast, in 2023, there were 384 homicides in NYC (down 21% from 488 homicides in 2021). For that matter, as you may have gathered from the charts in other posts I've made to this thread, U.S. inflation was also lower in 2023 (3.4%) than 1984 (3.9%). And unemployment was lower in 2023 (ending at 3.7%) than 1984 (ending at 7.3%).

Ronald Reagan was president in 1984. In light of facts like these, why is it that so many people think life was better with Reagan than with Joe Biden in the White House?

[N.E. Brigand]

"If you want to hang out
You've gotta take her out
Sawdust.

If you want to get down
Get down on the ground
Sawdust.

She don't lie, she don't lie, she don't lie
Sawdust."

[Voronwë the Faithful]

[N.E. Brigand]

"Consumer sentiment rises again in February," although it was a small increase. (The big increases came in December and January.)

[N.E. Brigand]

This is a useful list of current annualized inflation rates in 60 countries, ranging from Argentina at +254% down to Thailand at -1.11%. Here's how the 18 individual G20 member countries (besides Argentina) ranked from highest to lowest:

4. Turkey: 64.9%
16. Russia: 7.4%
17. India: 5.1%
18. South Africa: 5.1%
19. Mexico: 4.9%
23. Brazil: 4.5%
26. Australia: 4.1%
28. UK: 4%
35. Canada: 3.4%
41. France: 3.1%
43. US: 3.1%
44. Germany: 2.9%
46. South Korea: 2.8%
48. Japan: 2.6%
49. Indonesia: 2.6%
54. Saudi Arabia: 1.6%
58. Italy: 0.76%
59. China: -0.8%

Economists generally recommend a target of 2%.

When Republican pollster Frank Luntz shared this list today, the responses were overwhelmingly disbelief. A lot of people pointed out that, e.g., food prices in the U.S. are more than 15% higher than they were in 2020. But even if we set aside the fact that wages in the U.S. have risen faster than inflation during that period, and even if we set aside that a rise in food prices might be offset by a dip in other prices, inflation of 15% over four years doesn't contradict inflation being 3.1% now.

I note one respondent said, "We haven't seen inflation like this in the modern history of America." I guess it depends on when that period started. Inflation averaged 8% in 2022, topping at 9.1% in June of that year. It was last that high in 1981, Ronald Reagan's first year in office, when it averaged 10.3%, having declined slowly from 11.8% in January. That was the third year in a row averaging above 10%, something which also happened in 1974 and before than not since 1947, when inflation averaged a whopping 14.4%. The three years 1946-1948 saw a cumulative inflation of 33.9%. The two years 2021-2022 had cumulative inflation at 13.1%. If we stay at or below the past six months' average (3.4%), then 2021-2023 will see a cumulative inflation of 16.9%, about half of that post-World War II spurt. You may recall that Harry Truman was the U.S. president then. He won reelection in 1948 in what is remembered as a nailbiter -- the famous "Dewey Defeats Truman" headline -- but it wasn't as close as all that, although a third-party challenger muddled things up. The electoral votes and popular vote percentages were:
>> 303 -- 49.6% -- Harry S. Truman (Democrat)
>> 189 -- 45.1% -- Thomas E. Dewey (Republican)
>> 39 -- 2.4% -- Strom Thurmond (Dixiecrat)

Is this a possible model for Joe Biden later this year?

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New from Semafor: "State Department Inspector General probing suspension of Biden’s Iran envoy." Robert Malley was suspended last April when the State Department told him it had "received information regarding you that raises serious security concerns and can be disqualifying under National Security Adjudicative Guidelines."

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Fox News reports on a new poll of 150 political scientists which ranks Barack Obama among the top ten presidents (he's at seventh; Abraham Lincoln is first), with "Ronald Regan and Donald Trump below Joe Biden." That's a bit of an understatement. While Biden is in fourteenth place and Reagan is in sixteenth place, Trump is dead last in that list:

41. William Henry Harrison (1841-1841)
42. Franklin Pierce (1853-1857)
43. Andrew Johnson (1865-1869)
44. James Buchanan (1857-1861)
45. Donald Trump (2017-2021)

There have been 46 presidential administrations, but only 45 presidents, because Grover Cleveland's two terms weren't consecutive.

Even among Republican respondents to this poll, Obama ranked 15th and Trump ranked 41st. Curiously, Republicans put Bill Clinton higher than Democrats did.

[N.E. Brigand]

Wal-mart's CEO today said: "Our general merchandise prices are lower than they were a year ago."