[The Soup Nazi]

"FITH!!!"

[The Soup Nazi]

 

Mar-a-Loco: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship DOJ. Its mission: to explore fucked up shit. To seek out new proof of egregious criminal corruption. To boldly go where no prosecutor has gone before!

[Skuj]

Quiz: Who said "If you are innocent, why are you taking the Fifth?"

Hint: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022...the-fifth.html

[Skuj]

It never ceases to amaze me how Trump's bots, both in the GOP and the public at large, see him as a good guy - a leader, honest and caring.

This baffles me more than General Relativity, or what happened "before" The Big Bang.

I'll never comprehend it.

[Skuj]

Originally Posted by The Soup Nazi

Was there a Biden Boom?

By Paul Krugman
Opinion Columnist

Two weeks ago, I wrote a newsletter that I foolishly considered somewhat anodyne, not likely to get much reaction. It seemed probable that the initial estimate for G.D.P. growth in the second quarter would be negative and that many people would declare that this meant the United States was in a recession. So I spent some time pedantically explaining why we don’t actually use “two negative quarters” to define recessions and why, given other data, America probably wasn’t in one.

Silly me. I immediately received the biggest wave of hate mail I’ve gotten since the Iraq War, although it tapered off as many other economists and institutions declared that we weren’t in recession — not yet, anyway — and it pretty much vanished after Friday’s monster jobs report.

But absence of a recession aside, one question I get asked is what happened to the “Biden boom” I — and many other economists — predicted?

And the answer is, it happened! But Americans aren’t feeling it, and it’s worth asking why.

So, about that boom. Here’s a chart of jobs gained since Inauguration Day under Joe Biden and the Former Guy:

 

Yes, there was a Biden boom. FRED

Obviously there was a plunge in employment in 2020, as the Covid-19 pandemic forced the temporary shutdown of much of the economy. But one thing I haven’t seen widely noted is that job growth under Biden has been so fast that the economy added substantially more jobs in the past 18 months than were added in Trump’s first 37 months — that is, before the pandemic recession began.

I’m not saying that Biden deserves all the credit for this employment boom. When he took office, the U.S. economy was already in the process of recovering many of the jobs lost to the pandemic, although unemployment has fallen much faster than most forecasters were expecting in late 2020. But it’s kind of a moot point, anyway: Presidents often, dare I say usually, receive credit or blame for economic developments that have little to do with their policies.

So why doesn’t Biden get credit for the Biden boom, which is a real thing? Part of the answer is that people may not know about it. Some polling suggests that the public may not be aware that we’ve been creating jobs at all, let alone at a record pace. And we’re in a partisan environment where politicians — let’s not bothsides this, right-wing politicians — can make obviously false assertions and have their supporters believe them. The other day Trump told a crowd that gas in California costs $8.25 a gallon, and nobody laughed. (It was actually $5.43 at the time.)

Yet there has, of course, been a genuine dark side to the Biden boom: inflation. And people really dislike inflation. They would probably dislike it even if their incomes were keeping up. They definitely dislike it when prices are rising faster than wages, so the purchasing power of their income falls.

And inflation has, in fact, been outpacing wages since Biden took office; employment may be way up, but the real wages of those with jobs are down. We can argue about whether this episode is bad enough to justify the extreme negativity of public opinion about Biden and his economy, but it’s certainly a bad thing.

But what accounts for the inflation? That’s a huge subject, with scores if not hundreds of dueling studies, but there’s one fairly simple point that I think is clear: The inflation that people really hate, inflation that runs ahead of wage growth, is overwhelmingly a result of forces that were outside the control of the Biden administration, or any U.S. policymaker.

The Federal Reserve, which usually runs U.S. macroeconomic policy — the White House sometimes matters, but most of the time it’s the Fed’s show — has long made use of the concept of “core” inflation: inflation excluding volatile components, typically food and energy. The idea is that core inflation gives a better picture than the overall number of whether the economy is running too hot. In the post-pandemic era, with wild swings in things like the price of used cars, there have been questions about whether traditional core inflation excludes enough stuff. But for today’s purposes, I’ll stick with the traditional definition.

The big critique of Bidenomics, which has a lot of justification, is that big spending last year produced too much of a Biden boom, which led to a rise in core inflation; now the Fed has no choice but to squeeze the economy with higher interest rates until underlying inflation comes down.

But this policy mistake, if that’s what it was, has little to do with the reasons Americans are unhappy despite the jobs boom.

Here’s a comparison of two definitions of real wages for nonsupervisory workers since Biden took office. (I look at this type of worker because it’s a better indicator than the overall average of what’s happening to the working class.)

 

What’s behind falling real wages? FRED

The lower line shows wages adjusted for overall consumer prices and tells us what we already know: Inflation has run faster than wage growth, so real wages are significantly down. The upper line, however, adjusts only for core prices, and it’s basically flat.

I’m sure this will be misinterpreted, no matter what I say, but I’m not saying that Americans should care only about core inflation: What matters for families is the cost of living, in all its components. What the chart does show, however, is that the component of inflation that upsets Americans most — inflation faster than wage growth — is overwhelmingly a result of forces, like the prices of globally traded commodities, that weren’t driven by U.S. economic policy.

In other words, the reasons people feel so bad about the U.S. economy have a lot to do with events outside U.S. control.

That won’t stop voters from punishing Democrats for inflation, although the odds are that over the next few months we’ll see a reversal of what happened over the past year and a half: Job growth will probably slow, but many prices will come down, especially gasoline, which dropped to an average of about $4 a gallon on Tuesday.

Anyway, the Biden boom was real. It just got overshadowed by inflation, much of which had nothing to do with U.S. policy.


Quick Hits

Not a recession, says the Dallas Fed.

Is the American job market too good?

Expected inflation is coming down.

Polarized economic sentiment.

Not only are Dems amazingly good at snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, they also really suck at selling themselves.

And where is the OUTRAGE at every stupid thing the GOP does?

[Skuj]

Merrick Garland will have his revenge! (Fuck you, Mitch McConnell!)

This is fascinating. Trump has by 3pm tomorrow to say if he is ok with this!

https://thehill.com/regulation/court...ions-answered/

[Skuj]

I worked in the Air Force for 40 years. If I ever took a classified doc home, no matter how innocuous the doc, and they found out, I would basically adopt the position. Because I would be finished. No ifs, ands or buts.

I guess things are different in Murica.

[The Soup Nazi]

Jesus Christ Monkeyballs, the documents are about/related to NUCLEAR WEAPONS? Fuck me...

[Skuj]

Oh no, it's "read the transcript" all over again:

https://thehill.com/homenews/3598033...pose-doj-move/

(Yes, I read the fucking transcript. It showed, very clearly, that you were a guilty motherfucker.)

[Skuj]

Would Garland be doing this if the FBI found nothing significant? Fuck, I hope he is a Grandmaster, not a Novice.

When is Trump ever going to go down? Mueller fumbled at the 1 yard line. Two impeachments went nowhere. Teflon Don can't escape this one also, can he?

[Skuj]

Update: Garland is no Novice!!

I swear to God, if Trump somehow escapes this one, I'm moving to Norway. I don't want to be anywhere near Murica.

[The Soup Nazi]

Originally Posted by Skuj

I swear to God, if Trump somehow escapes this one, I'm moving to Norway. I don't want to be anywhere near Murica.

Buy the tickets. He's not going to jail.

[The Soup Nazi]

 

[Skuj]

Yeah, even now some Repukes are rallying around Trump - the usual idiots like Greene and Boebert to the fore. But I wonder if most will.

(Yes, I'm an idiot who has not learned anything.)

[The Soup Nazi]

Opinion | Liz Cheney’s demise was set in motion by her father

By Dana Milbank
Columnist | August 12, 2022 at 7:00 a.m. EDT

It has all the makings of a Greek tragedy.

The tragic hero, a statesman of great ability, is driven by hubris to abuse power. The forces he unleashes spread uncontrollably — and eventually destroy his own daughter. He comes to her aid, but it is too late.

Citizens, I give you the tragedy of Dick and Liz Cheney.

Closing the last hearing of the House Jan. 6 select committee, the younger Cheney, Republican of Wyoming, delivered a powerful indictment of Donald Trump’s abuse of his followers. “He is preying on their patriotism,” she said, turning “their love of country into a weapon.” A moment later, she added: “We must remember that we cannot abandon the truth and remain a free nation.”

She’s right. And Cheney deserves the lionization she is getting as she courageously fights the authoritarianism that has taken over the GOP. For this, she lost her party leadership position, and on Tuesday will likely lose her primary to a Trump acolyte.

There is a bitter irony in Cheney’s fall: She is being undone by the very politics her father championed. Weaponizing patriotism? Abandoning the truth? Vice President Dick Cheney was a pioneer.

In my new book, “The Destructionists: The Twenty-Five-Year Crack-Up of the Republican Party,” I traced the actions of GOP leaders who essentially created the Trump era by removing the guardrails of our political system. Dick Cheney was one such leader.

Liz Cheney speaks rightly of the primacy of truth to a free people. But her father abandoned the truth in the most profound way, starting a war on the basis of lies. Liz Cheney denounces the evil of preying on patriotism. But her father was a key figure in a White House that politicized the 9/11 attacks and portrayed the administration’s opponents as traitors.

There was extraordinary national unity after the 2001 terrorist attacks. But George W. Bush’s strategists argued that Republicans should “go to the country” on the issue of terrorism and “focus on war” in the elections of 2002 and 2004, making the case that Democrats endangered Americans’ security. On the campaign trail, Dick Cheney warned that if people made “the wrong choice” and voted Democratic, “then the danger is that we’ll get hit again, that we’ll be hit in a way that will be devastating.” As Bush said Democrats were “not interested in the security of the American people,” Cheney claimed electing Republicans was “vital” for “defending our homeland.”

In that same year, Republicans close to the administration ran an infamous ad juxtaposing an image of Sen. Max Cleland (D-Ga.), a triple amputee from his service in Vietnam, with images of Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. Two years later, a group with ties to Bush did similarly to Democratic presidential nominee John F. Kerry, with flimsy accusations that he lied about his Vietnam service and betrayed comrades.

Cheney was also the primary force for distorting intelligence about Iraq to make the case for war. He falsely claimed in 2001 that it was “pretty well confirmed” that the 9/11 mastermind met with Iraqi intelligence. He falsely called evidence of a link between Iraq and al-Qaeda “overwhelming” and said Hussein had “long-established ties with al-Qaeda.”He falsely called Iraq “the geographic base of the terrorists who have had us under assault … on 9/11.”

Cheney said in 2002 that he was “convinced that Saddam will acquire nuclear weapons fairly soon”; U.S. intelligence said that was nearly a decade away. Eventually Cheney baldly — and falsely — said Iraq had “in fact reconstituted nuclear weapons.”

In the scandal over the White House’s outing of a CIA operative after her husband questioned the administration’s nuclear claims, Cheney’s chief of staff, Lewis “Scooter” Libby, was convicted of perjury. Former White House press secretary Scott McClellan later complained that Libby “and possibly Vice President Cheney — allowed me, even encouraged me, to repeat a lie.”

Cheney claimed that “we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators” in Iraq; intelligence had (accurately) warned that the situation could “rapidly deteriorate.” Later, Cheney wrongly claimed that Iraq had “turned a corner,” that the insurgency was “in the last throes.”

Those contagions — using disinformation and patriotism as political weapons — spread through the Republican Party and consumed it utterly with Trump’s triumph. Too late, Liz Cheney bravely stood against both, and is on the verge of political exile. Now, in the final act, Dick Cheney has returned, filming an ad for his daughter.

“In our nation’s 246-year history, there has never been an individual who is a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump,” the elder Cheney said. “He is a coward. A real man wouldn’t lie to his supporters.”

No, he wouldn’t. All our Greek tragedy needs now is the catharsis: a glimmer of self-awareness from Dick Cheney about his role in causing this.

[!@#$%!]

salman rushdie was stabbed last night and is hospitalized right now

[The Soup Nazi]

Decades avoiding that bullshit fatwa issued by Khomeini, and now the rest of his life is gonna be torture because of some motherfucker at a minor event in the U.S. Unbelievable.

[tw2113]

Is Class of Nuke'Em High a documentary yet?


Oh wait this is the political thread, not the movies thread.

[Skuj]

James Carville. He tells it like it is:

“The problem the Republican Party has is, they got really stupid people that vote in their primaries. And … really stupid people demand to have really stupid leaders. That’s where the Republican Party is now,”

[The Soup Nazi]

Originally Posted by Skuj

James Carville. He tells it like it is:

“The problem the Republican Party has is, they got really stupid people that vote in their primaries. And … really stupid people demand to have really stupid leaders. That’s where the Republican Party is now,”

I must spread some Reputation around before giving it to Skuj again.