Awwww:
Poppy the otter pup has come a long way since she was admitted to Alaska SeaLife Center’s Wildlife Response Program ❤️
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Poppy: https://www.alaskasealife.org/rescue_rehab_journal/152/427
My God, what a baby:
Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu were the closest of political allies during the four years they overlapped in office, at least in public. Not anymore. “I haven’t spoken to him since,” Trump said of the former Israeli prime minister. “F**k him.”
<Trump repeatedly criticized Netanyahu during two interviews for my book, “Trump’s Peace: The Abraham Accords and the Reshaping of the Middle East.” The final straw for Trump was when Netanyahu congratulated President-elect Biden for his election victory while Trump was still disputing the result.
blockquote class=”wp-block-quote”>“The first person that congratulated [Biden] was Bibi Netanyahu, the man that I did more for than any other person I dealt with. … Bibi could have stayed quiet. He has made a terrible mistake.” — Donald Trump
Now opposition leader, Netanyahu is waging a continuous campaign to win back the Prime Minister’s Office while on trial for corruption.
One of his primary political calling cards is his close relationship with key players in U.S. politics, and with one man in particular who remains hugely popular in Israel: Trump.
For domestic political reasons, both Trump and Netanyahu cultivated the public perception that there was no daylight between them as they worked closely together on key issues. But by the end of his presidency, Trump had concluded that Netanyahu didn’t really want peace with the Palestinians and was using him on Iran.
Trump also felt he’d helped ensure Netanyahu’s political survival, but didn’t get the same in return. He positively fumed about the video in which Netanyahu congratulated Biden.
“I liked Bibi. I still like Bibi. But I also like loyalty. The first person to congratulate Biden was Bibi. And not only did he congratulate him, he did it on tape,” Trump told me, referring to Netanyahu by his nickname.
Netanyahu was far from the first world leader to congratulate Biden. In fact, he waited more than 12 hours after the U.S. networks called the election.
But Trump claimed he was shocked when his wife Melania shared Netanyahu’s video with him: “He was very early — like, earlier than most. I haven’t spoken to him since. F**k him.”
The former president was fixated on the fact that while the likes of Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro and Russia’s Vladimir Putin held off — “they felt the election was rigged,” Trump claimed — Netanyahu acknowledged Biden’s win.
“For Bibi Netanyahu, before the ink was even dry, to do a message, and not only a message, to do a tape to Joe Biden talking about their great, great friendship — they didn’t have a friendship, because if they did, [the Obama administration] wouldn’t have done the Iran deal,” Trump said. “And guess what, now they’re going to do it again.”
Those remarks came during a 90-minute, face-to-face interview at Mar-a-Lago in April, during which Trump repeatedly contended that he’d done more for Israel and for Netanyahu than any other president.
He cited his decisions to withdraw from the Iran deal, move the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem, keep troops in the region and recognize the occupied Golan Heights as part of Israel.
He noted that he announced the Golan Heights move “right before the election” in April 2019, when Netanyahu had been trailing in the polls. “He would have lost the election if it wasn’t for me.”
It’s unclear whether the move actually swung the result of the election, which ended in a deadlock, but a poll conducted ahead of the vote by the Israeli Institute for Democracy found that 66% of Israelis thought Trump’s decision strengthened Netanyahu’s stature.
18 months later, when Trump held an on-camera call with Netanyahu 10 days before the U.S. election to mark the normalization agreement between Israel and Sudan, Trump asked Netanyahu whether “Sleepy Joe” could have cut such a deal.Mr. President, one thing I can tell you is we appreciate the help for peace from anyone in America,” Netanyahu replied cautiously. Trump bristled.
There were also more substantial disagreements between Trump and Netanyahu over Iran, Netanyahu’s plan to annex parts of the West Bank, and Trump’s desire for a peace deal with the Palestinians.
Even as he criticized Netanyahu, Trump expressed some admiration for him as a politician. He also showed great interest in Netanyahu’s legal troubles, though he said he’d never discussed them with Netanyahu himself.
I spoke to Trump again in July, this time on the phone, after Netanyahu had been ousted from power after 12 years.
“Well, I like him, but he has been there a long time,” Trump said when asked about Netanyahu’s exit.
Trump repeated his grievances with Netanyahu, albeit in a milder tone. “I can tell you that people were very angry with him when he was the first one to congratulate Biden,” he said.
“The video was almost like he’s begging for love. And I said, ‘My, my how things change.’ So, you know, I was disappointed. That hurt him badly with the people of Israel. As you know, I’m very popular in Israel. I think it hurt him very badly.”
This reporting comes from “Trump’s Peace: The Abraham Accords and the Reshaping of the Middle East.”
A Prime Minister congratulated the new president, a totally pro-forma event between two allied countries. Trump said “fuck him” and refuses to speak with him for doing it.
And the GOP establishment is just fine with it.
There are many republicans who are looking to Ron DeSantis as a normal, mainstream leader who can harness the Trump energy without being Trump.
Sorry, he is Trump 2.0:
You read that right. He wants to prosecute Dr. Fauci for what he calls “medical authoritarianism.”
The demand rests on the flimsy pretext that Fauci supposedly lied to Congress when he testified that the NIH did not fund gain-of-function research. Tom Cotton and Ted Cruz, two other Republicans in the DeSantis wing, have claimed a subsequent NIH letter disproved this testimony. As Glenn Kessler notes in a careful fact-check, that’s wrong: “No such admission appears in the letter, and NIH officials continue to insist that the EcoHealth work using NIH funds did not constitute gain-of-function research.”
Even if Fauci did mislead Congress, of course, the notion of throwing him into prison would be ridiculously disproportionate to the offense. Imprisonment is not how fact-checking of congressional testimony is enforced in this country. DeSantis’s call to jail Fauci is a pure echo of the Trumpian call to lock up Hillary Clinton over her violation of State Department email protocols. The thinnest pretext of a scandal is a sheen to cover the raw authoritarian ambition to imprison any figure who angers the right-wing base.
Whether DeSantis is a genuine authoritarian maniac or merely pretending to be one is immaterial. The structure of the party is such that it incentivizes these positions and rhetoric. He may be less unhinged than Trump, but DeSantis points the way toward a future in which the cancer that has consumed the Republican Party continues to grow.
DeSantis is just as bad as Trump, probably worse, because he isn’t as stupid or as psychologically disturbed. I think he would figure out how to actually get this done.
Paul Krugman explains in his newsletter the inflation numbers that came out today and which has the media in a full-blown frenzy:
Today’s consumer price report came as a huge surprise to almost everyone — because the numbers came in almost exactly in line with expectations, which basically never happens. Analysts whose job is to forecast what official numbers will say a few hours before they come out — a job of dubious usefulness, but whatever — expected the one-year rate of inflation to come in at 6.8 percent; it came in at … 6.8 percent. “Core” inflation that strips out volatile food and energy prices came in right on expectations too.
If there was any information content in today’s release, it was that extreme scenarios in both directions became a bit less likely. There wasn’t anything in the report suggesting that inflation is rapidly spiraling upward; nor was there anything lending comfort to those hoping to see inflation fade away in the next few months. For what it’s worth, financial markets appear to have taken onboard the reduction in risks of really high inflation: “breakeven rates,” which measure market expectations of the inflation rate over the next few years, came down modestly. But nothing major happened.
That said, the headline number is highly likely to come down over the next few months, if only because the big run-up of oil prices from their pandemic lows seems to have gone into reverse.
Some other components may also be coming down — or will at least stop rising rapidly. Hyun Song Shin, head of research for the influential Bank for International Settlements, recently made the case that a lot of recent inflation reflects the “bullwhip effect”: panic or at least precautionary buying of goods that seem to be in short supply, which intensifies the shortage. Remember last year’s toilet paper shortage?
Shin points out, among other things, that shipping costs, while still very high, seem to have peaked.
But even if you try to adjust for special circumstances, underlying inflation appears to be running high by recent standards, maybe around 4 percent instead of the 2 percent that is the Fed’s target and has been the norm since the mid-1990s. This in turn reflects an economy in which spending is more or less back to the prepandemic trend but production is constrained both by bottlenecks and by the withdrawal of several million Americans from the labor force.
As an aside, 4 percent inflation isn’t hyperinflation; it isn’t even the double-digit inflation of the 1970s. In fact, whether they know it or not, Americans of a certain age can attest that it’s not so bad. It was, after all, the inflation rate that prevailed for much of the Reagan years — you know, after morning in AmericaI, at least, don’t remember the late 1980s as hellish.
Still, the Fed would consider a sustained doubling of the inflation rate a blow to its credibility. So how long will elevated inflation last?
The secret answer (don’t tell anyone) is that we don’t know.
I still think the most likely scenario is a minor-league version of the 1946-48 inflation spike, when pent-up demand after the end of wartime rationing caused an inflationary boom — inflation peaked at around 20 percent — but price stability quickly and more or less painlessly re-emerged once the spending surge was over. I still don’t see any evidence that 1970s-type stagflation, in which everyone kept raising prices because they expected everyone else to keep raising prices, is emerging.
But today’s numbers neither reinforced nor challenged my beliefs. This report was shockingly unsurprising.
Weeks after the 2020 election, a Chicago publicist for hip-hop artist Kanye West traveled to the suburban home of Ruby Freeman, a frightened Georgia election worker who was facing death threats after being falsely accused by former President Donald Trump of manipulating votes. The publicist knocked on the door and offered to help.
The visitor, Trevian Kutti, gave her name but didn’t say she worked for West, a longtime billionaire friend of Trump. She said she was sent by a “high-profile individual,” whom she didn’t identify, to give Freeman an urgent message: confess to Trump’s voter-fraud allegations, or people would come to her home in 48 hours, and she’d go to jail.
Freeman refused. This story of how an associate of a music mogul pressured a 62-year-old temporary election worker at the center of a Trump conspiracy theory is based on previously unreported police recordings and reports, legal filings, and Freeman’s first media interview since she was dragged into Trump’s attempt to reverse his election loss.
Kutti did not respond to requests for comment. Her biography for her work at the Women’s Global Initiative, a business networking group, identifies her as a member of “the Young Black Leadership Council under President Donald Trump.” It notes that in September 2018, she “was secured as publicist to Kanye West” and “now serves as West’s Director of Operations.”
When Kutti knocked on Freeman’s door on Jan. 4, Freeman called 911. By then, Freeman said, she was wary of strangers.
Starting on Dec. 3, Trump and his campaign repeatedly accused Freeman and her daughter, Wandrea “Shaye” Moss, of illegally counting phony mail-in ballots after pulling them from mysterious suitcases while working on Election Day at Atlanta’s State Farm Arena. In fact, the “suitcases” were standard ballot containers, and the votes were properly counted, county and state officials quickly confirmed, refuting the fraud claims.
But Trump and his allies continued to accuse Freeman and Moss of election-rigging. The allegations inspired hundreds of threats and harassing messages against them and their family members.
By the time Kutti arrived, Freeman needed help but was cautious and wouldn’t open the door because of the threats, according to Freeman and a police report.
So Freeman asked a neighbor to come over and talk with Kutti, who was with an unidentified male. Like Freeman, Kutti and the other visitor were Black. Kutti told the neighbor that Freeman was in danger and that she’d been sent to provide assistance. Freeman said she was open to meeting them. She asked Cobb County Police to send an officer to keep watch so she could step outside, according to a recording of her 911 call.
“They’re saying that I need help,” Freeman told the dispatcher, referring to the people at her door, “that it’s just a matter of time that they are going to come out for me and my family.”
An officer arrived and spoke with Kutti, who described herself as a “crisis manager,” according to the police incident report.
Kutti repeated that Freeman “was in danger” and had “48 hours” before “unknown subjects” turned up at her home, the report said. At the officer’s suggestion, the women agreed to meet at a police station. The officer’s report did not identify the man accompanying Kutti.
Inside the station, Kutti and Freeman met in a corner, according to footage from a body camera worn by an officer present at the meeting. Reuters obtained the video through a public-records request.
“I cannot say what specifically will take place,” Kutti is heard telling Freeman in the recording. “I just know that it will disrupt your freedom,” she said, “and the freedom of one or more of your family members.”
“You are a loose end for a party that needs to tidy up,” Kutti continued. She added that “federal people” were involved, without offering specifics.
Kutti told Freeman that she was going to put a man Kutti identified as “Harrison Ford” on speakerphone. (Freeman said the man on the phone wasn’t the actor by the same name.) Kutti said the man had “authoritative powers to get you protection,” she said.
At that point, Kutti can be heard asking the officer to give them privacy. The body camera did not capture a clear recording of the conversation that followed after the officer moved away from the two women.
Kutti and the man on the speakerphone, over the next hour, tried to get Freeman to implicate herself in committing voter fraud on Election Day. Kutti offered legal assistance in exchange, Freeman said.
“If you don’t tell everything,” Freeman recalled Kutti saying, “you’re going to jail.”
Growing suspicious, Freeman said she jumped up from her chair and told Kutti: “The devil is a liar,” before calling for an officer.
Later at home, Freeman said, she Googled Kutti’s name and discovered she was a Trump supporter.
Police say they did not investigate the incident further.
West, who changed his name in October to “Ye,” did not respond to requests for comment sent through another publicist who represents him.
Reuters could not independently confirm whether Kutti still works for West, or in what capacity.
Media reports have cited her association with the rapper since 2018, when she ceased working with R. Kelly, an R&B singer who was convicted in September of racketeering and sex-trafficking charges. Kutti’s biography says she is the founder of Trevian Worldwide, a media and entertainment advisory firm with offices in four cities. Among her clients, she says, are boxer Terence Crawford and Queen Rania Al Abdullah of Jordan.
The meeting took place two months after West ended a failed bid for the White House that drew media attention when several publications revealed that allies and supporters of Trump were working on the ground to advance West’s campaign. Some Democrats said they regarded West’s presidential bid as a ruse to siphon off Black votes from Democrat Joe Biden. Groups assisting the rapper’s campaign denied that charge.
On Jan. 5, the day after Freeman’s meeting with Kutti, an agent from the Federal Bureau of Investigation called Freeman and urged her to leave her home of 20 years because it wasn’t safe, Freeman said.
The following day, Jan. 6, Kutti’s prediction that people would descend on Freeman’s home in 48 hours proved correct, according to a defamation lawsuit Freeman and Moss filed last week against a far-right news site. Freeman, the lawsuit said, left hours before a mob of angry Trump supporters surrounded her home, shouting through bullhorns.
This is so batshit crazy, I don’t know what toy about it. This woman is a nut but she was clearly in possession of information about a mob descending on Freeman’s house which the cops were aware of because they were there.
Why wasn’t his woman questioned about what she apparently knew was going to happen? What the hell?
It seems like it was only a month or so ago that the political establishment had decided the Republicans had found the electoral holy grail in the campaign of Virginia governor-elect Glenn Youngkin. Out of 3.3 million votes cast, he had won with 63,000 votes and it was widely seen as a landslide victory that totally repudiated everything the Democratic Party stands for. The fact that Virginia has consistently elected a governor of the opposite party that holds the White House for more than 30 years (and usually by much wider margins than Youngkin’s) didn’t hinder the conventional wisdom in any way. The Youngkin campaign showed the way for the GOP to win again: All they had to do going forward was distance themselves from Donald Trump.
Fast forward just a few weeks later and it’s as if it all never even happened.
Donald Trump is firmly in the driver’s seat of the GOP and any thoughts of the party extricating itself from his grasp are but a faint memory. Of course, the notion was always ridiculous. Trump didn’t hold rallies for Youngkin but he made it clear to his base that he backed him. And Youngkin may not have gone down to Mar-a-Lago to kiss the ring but he did make “election integrity” a centerpiece of his campaign, which was exactly the dog whistle Trump and his followers needed to see to prove that he was on the team. If any of those Biden to Youngkin voters thought they were voting for a Republican Party that had left Trump behind they were sadly mistaken.
It’s been obvious that Trump’s Big Lie would be the organizing principle of the GOP ever since January 6th. It’s a nice delusion to think that the party would sober up but if it wasn’t clear before, it’s certainly clear now that they are going to stay on their Trump bender for the foreseeable future. And it’s highly unlikely that Trump and his people are going to allow any more candidates to hedge on the Big Lie or pretend to distance themselves from their leader.
Earlier this week, former Senator David Perdue of Georgia threw his hat into the ring to challenge incumbent governor Brian Kemp in the Republican primary. You may recall that he lost his Senate seat in a runoff last January to Jon Ossoff. Most political analysts attribute his loss and that of former Senator Kelly Loeffler to Raphael Warnock to the fact that Trump suppressed the Republican vote by insisting the election system in the state was corrupt. If that’s so one might expect Perdue to harbor some resentment but apparently not. The formerly mild-mannered businessman’s announcement was so Trumpian you’d almost expect him to launch into a rousing chorus of YMCA at the end:
Perdue later said that he would not have certified the 2020 presidential election in Georgia which really means that if he wins the Governor’s seat in 2022, he will do everything in his power not to certify an election for anyone but Donald Trump. Not only is Trump running his enemies out of the party, he’s demanding that anyone who wants to run for office also sign on to his Big Lie.
Trump remains obsessed with the 2020 election.
Jonathan Swan of Axios reported on Thursday that people who see him at Mar-a-Lago say “it’s impossible to carry out an extended conversation with him that isn’t interrupted by his fixations on the 2020 election” and he continues to insist that there should be more “audits” that will somehow overturn the results. He is obviously very disturbed at this point if he actually believes that.
But it doesn’t matter. Whether his delusional obsession is born of his narcissistic personality disorder or it’s a canny form of salesmanship to inspire his supporters to take over the election systems in the states he must carry in 2024, he’s reorganized the Republican Party around the belief that the 2020 election was stolen and he must be restored to the White House. This goes way beyond Trump himself picking and choosing officials who will help overturn the 2024 election or unseat disloyal Republicans. Swan reports that Trump’s allies have been working just as feverishly putting together institutional support (and not coincidentally providing nice sinecures for his most loyal acolytes.)
Former Trump administration officials founded a think tank, America First Policy Institute. Former Trump adviser Stephen Miller runs America First Legal, challenging the Biden administration’s agenda in court.Former Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought is driving education battles, heading up the new Center for Renewing America, a think tank that’s focused on cultural issues including “critical race theory.” America First Policies, a high-dollar advocacy group run by allies when Trump was in office, was recently refashioned America First Works and primed to activate at the federal, state and local levels on issues including education policy and “election integrity.”
Barton Gellman wrote a major cover story in The Atlantic on this subject that seems to have finally captured the mainstream media’s attention. He makes a compelling case that Trump and his cronies are literally laying the groundwork for a coup in 2024 using all the tactics outlined above including the use of an obscure, untried legal theory called the “independent state legislature” doctrine which holds that statehouses have “plenary” control of the rules for choosing presidential electors. (I wrote about it here last June.)
These are the acts of GOP officials, not Trump.
Yet it’s garnered not a peep of protest from the Republican political establishment. Where Trump comes in is another aspect of this potential coup plot: He has created a mass movement (some might call it a cult.) Gellman writes that Trump’s followers, numbered in the tens of millions, are people who have been convinced that they lost the White House and ” are losing their country to alien forces with no legitimate claim to power” — and they are ready to fight by any means necessary, including bloodshed.
After January 6th, that threat of violence underlies everything else they are doing.
As The Hill reported, Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina addressed the GOP Senate caucus this week as they debated whether to allow the Democrats to raise the debt ceiling to prevent the US from defaulting on its debt. Trump was apoplectic that they would do this because he believed the Democrats would suffer politically if the country defaults and the markets crash, which is his fondest hope. Graham counseled his fellow Senators against saving the country saying, “It’s pretty obvious to me that this will not be received well by the Republican faithful, including Donald Trump.” He said that Majority Leader Mitch McConnell had led them up a hill and they were being shot in the back.
What a metaphor. (It is a metaphor, right?) The Hill quoted another senator saying, “Graham was warning us about what Trump was going to do and ‘May God have mercy on your souls.” I couldn’t have said it better myself.
“We have a system of governance that nobody in their right mind would design,” observes Catherine Rampell in trying to explain Senate rules. The filibuster, reconciliation, and the role of the parliamentarian are “challenging for even journalists to follow along, and we’re paid to understand this stuff,” she laments:
So imagine how difficult it is for regular voters to understand what’s going on. All they know is that Democrats have promised to do lots of big, ambitious things — and then, for opaque reasons, simply aren’t getting them done.
It is even harder to understand for non-news-geeks. They hire politicians every other year to understand it for them so they can go about their daily lives worrying about the myriad of things normal people do.
This week here in one of the country’s “Laboratories of Autocracy,” filing for 2022 races was scheduled to open at noon on Monday. That is, until a North Carolina state court responding to a lawsuit challenging Republican-drawn state legislative and congressional districts issued an injunction just before noon Monday (candidates for local races could still begin filing). Later in the day, a state appeals court overturned the lower court, allowing filing to resume for all races. Then on Wednesday, the state supreme court put a stop to the entire process and moved the planned March primary to May while we sort this out. This is how it started the last time Republicans redistricted the state.
Like Rampell said, it’s challenging for even a political blogger to follow along.
Democracy itself has gotten messy. All that one-person, one-vote, majority rules stuff is no longer intuitive. Marc Elias tries to explain. We’re defining democracy down:
In 1965, Congress enacted the Voting Rights Act, the most consequential piece of pro-democracy legislation in our country’s history. President Reagan called it the “crown jewel” of American democracy when it was reauthorized in 1982. In 2006, George W. Bush signed the reauthorization into law after it passed the U.S. Senate 98-0.
That was then. This is now.
By 2021, every Republican in the U.S. House and 49 of 50 Republicans in the U.S. Senate would vote against it. As a result, the Voting Rights Act is no longer a bipartisan litmus test for supporting democracy. It is now entirely possible and indeed expected that Republicans who claim to support democracy will also oppose the Voting Rights Act. By engaging in a mass partisan movement to oppose essential federal voting rights legislation, the Republican Party unilaterally redefined what it means, or does not mean, to be pro-democracy. In a sense, Republicans made opposing voting rights legislation the political equivalent of “too big to fail.” The media was simply unwilling to declare the entire GOP in opposition to democracy. Instead, the standard for democracy was lowered to no longer require support for — of all things — voting rights.
In its place, we have created a new test for being considered anti-democratic: support for the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. Only those politicians who directly support the attempted coup are now considered extreme enough to be considered anti-democratic. Republicans can spread the Big Lie, express sympathy for the goals of the insurrectionists, and support removing Rep. Liz Cheney from leadership because she wants to investigate Jan. 6, but as long as they did not directly support the insurrection itself, they can pass the test. In short, we are defining democracy down.
Inside the Beltway and in state capitols there are so many examples of Republicans normalizing anti-democratic behavior “that the sheer volume of examples makes the extraordinary seem ordinary.”
Quantum conservatism, I once called it, a dimension of belief, not fact, where up is down, black is white, in is out, and wrong is right. Where Ann Coulter’s cat can be both alive and dead. Where the Kentucky Fried Chicken company is a person … headquartered in Louisville … in a bucket.
We cannot expect better from Republicans, Elias writes,” but it is also time that we stop accepting less”:
Instead, those of us who care about democracy must focus on our own expectations and what we accept as normal or acceptable. We should not accept as normal a system that disenfranchises voters simply because it must do that in order to compete. We should not accept a system where simply opposing a coup is a free pass to support voter suppression. And, we should not accept a system when Republicans are expected to play by one set of rules and Democrats another.
In short, we must demand that our leaders work to expand democracy rather than normalize its contraction. It may be uncomfortable at times to call out Republicans as anti-democratic, but that is what we must insist upon if we are not to allow our democracy to be defined down until it no longer exists.
Elias is being overly polite. The Republican Party is not simply anti-democratic, it is anti-American and pro-autocracy. Republicans are playing a white-nationalist version of Mad Magazine‘s “What They Say and What it Really Means.” They have redefined liberty like they have redefined pro-democracy. What they say is not what they mean. When they promote election integrity they mean vote suppression, election-rigging, and invalidating majority rule where and when it suits them.
Nobody in their right mind would run a democracy like this. But then Republicans are not in their right minds and they do not want democracy.
It’s a Biden Boom—and No One Has Noticed Yet published at Washington Monthly considers the economic track record of Joe Biden’s first year as president and the title tells the tale. Economic policy consultant Robert J. Shapiro’s read of the data suggests “the strongest two-year performance on growth, jobs, and income in decades.” Meaning Democrats may head into the 2022 elections with a strong economic tailwind.
Over the first three quarters of this year, real GDP increased at a 7.8 percent annual rate—that’s adjusted for the current inflation. The Federal Reserve expects real growth of 5.9 percent for all of 2021, followed by another 3.8 percent increase in 2022. By any recent standard, these are extraordinary gains. From 2000 to 2019, real GDP grew at an average annual rate of 2.2 percent and never reached 3 percent. Investors have noticed: From January 20 to December 7, 2021, the S&P 500 Index jumped 21.7 percent.
Wages, too, are up. By 2.4% after inflation “compared to gains of 0.3 percent for the comparable period in 2019 and 0.7 percent in 2018.” Disposable income as well, up by “3 percent after inflation over the 10 months from January to October.”
Unemployment benefits claims dropped to their lowest level in half a century, even Fox Business acknowledges.
Now, can Democrats make something of it?
When Donald Trump held rallies to feed his gluttonous ego, they streamed widely and received insult-by-insult coverage on social media. Joe Biden’s speeches touting his Build Back Better legislation receive no comparable earned media. Good news about the economy is like the tree falling in the forest. Does anyone hear it?
At PressRun, Eric Boehlert reports:
By a staggering ratio of six-to-one, Americans say they are seeing and hearing bad economic news more often than they are positive reports. The new polling results confirm the deep disconnect the media have constructed, as news outlets stress. discouraging news regarding the Biden economy, while often ignoring or downplaying the cascading positive developments.
Still committed to the GOP-friendly — and fictitious — storyline about a U.S. economy in decline, the press is damaging President Joe Biden’s approval rating by painting a false portrait of America. It’s doing the Republicans’ bidding — and the messaging is working.
Recently asked in a YouGov poll if they had “heard mostly positive or mostly negative news stories about the economy,” 48 percent of Americans said “mostly negative,” and just 8 percent said “mostly positive.” (28 percent said both negative/positive, and 16 percent said they hadn’t heard much about the economy at all.)
Those results are stunning, considering how many positive economic developments are being generated. Just in recent days we’ve learned that gas prices will soon be falling, wages are hitting record heights for workers, and that weekly jobless claims haven’t been this low since the Summer of Love at Woodstock. Yet for most Americans, there’s only one economic story being told — a doomsday one.
“Remember that weird CNN milk story?” Boehlert asks. Forty-two percent of YouGov respondents said inflation was their greatest concern. Biden consistently gets more downbeat coverage than Trump did just a year ago, according to a data analytics study done recently for the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank.
“The nonstop hype of “inflation, inflation, inflation” unsurprisingly leads many people to believe inflation is a really big problem, even if their own finances are pretty good, because they hear all those wise reporters at CNN, NPR, the NYT and elsewhere telling them it’s a really big problem,” notes economist Dean Baker.
A new Associated Press poll confirms Baker’s claim. The headline: “Income Is Up, But Americans Focus on Inflation.” Why is that? Probably because Americans are inundated with the media’s obsessive inflation coverage.
It’s a “political nightmare for Biden,” CNN recently stressed, while the New York Times published well over 100 articles and columns that mentioned “inflation” three or more times last month. The Washington Post announced inflation is the “defining” challenge of Biden’s presidency. Why inflation? Because the press decided.
“We’re witnessing the Biden Boom,” Boehlert concludes. “So why are news consumers being buried with bad news?”
Biden needs more than to take his message to heartland states like Kansas with set-piece speeches the press will largely ignore. Press outlets that cover them at all will reflexively both-sides them with coverage of Republicans posturing over the debt ceiling or with more hype of inflation undercutting whatever message he hoped to send.
Democrats need a good PR team (a non-Beltway-insider team) producing TV and social media ads the press will find harder to both-sides if Biden himself is not the star. It’s one thing during a speech the press will ignore for Biden to invite Joe-average to do a walk-on to tell the local audience how his life has improved this year. It’s another for Americans to see Joe-farmer or Jane-teacher where they live and work talking about how much brighter their Christmas looks this year. Or about how much more they have in their pockets at the end of each month. Or about the relief they feel to be more secure in their jobs this year than last. Or that thanks to Biden’s handling of the vaccine rollout they feel they can breathe again.
The dollar-value of free press, good or bad, Trump received in his four years must be staggering. But that ol’ liberal media will not do the same for a Democratic president. Advertising is not cheap, but it works. Democrats’ penny-foolish dependence on national media for delivering their positive message is self-defeating.
I’m not trying to make fun of the Mormon religion, but I do think it’s important to point out when people diss some of the wilder beliefs of religions like Islam (the whole 7 virgins thing, for instance) they should be reminded that plenty of mainstream religions are, well …. weird:
Iowa is known for its rich soil, and a group of Mormon researchers hope that same soil holds the secrets to a lost sacred city.
The Heartland Research Group thinks it may have found the site of Zarahemla—a notable city in the Book of Mormon—outside of Montrose, a small southeast Iowa town located on the banks of the Mississippi River.
John Lefgren of the Heartland Research Group said in his faith, Zarahemla would be comparable to Jerusalem for Christians. The exact location of Zarahemla has not been verified, so being able to pinpoint it would be a milestone.
“Iowa is an important place,” Lefgren said. “In the fourth century, Montrose, Iowa, had the largest city in North America.”
According to Lefgren, in its heyday of AD 320, Zarahemla had a population of about 100,000 and it was the largest city in the Americas.
“The Book of Mormon takes place at a time in ancient America; great civilizations and great armies are in the book,” Lefgren said. “The conclusion of the book, a nation, a great nation is destroyed. Mainly, it’s a cautionary tale, of course, because they did not keep God’s commandments and they do bad things and they are destroyed.”
The Book of Nephi in the Book of Mormon chronicles the destruction of Zarahemla and its eventual reconstruction. Zarahemla also was the namesake of a settlement founded by Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism, in 1839. Smith’s version of Zarahemla would later be incorporated into Montrose.
People can believe what they want. In a free society you must defend that. But privileging religion over everything else the way the far right judiciary in the US is in the process or doing, forcing taxpayers to subsidize these teachings, making it more important than scientific knowledge and understanding is maddening.
It would have been awful in its own way. Trump would have launched The Big Lie four years earlier and the Republicans would have made Clinton’s presidency a total shitshow. But the world would have been immensely better off anyway if only because it wouldn’t have to deal with that orange monster in the White House fior four years.
For the first time, Hillary Clinton is sharing the speech she would have made if she had won the 2016 presidential election.
The former first lady and secretary of state grows emotional in an upcoming MasterClass lesson as she shares the speech that she had hoped to give on Nov. 8, 2016, when she ultimately lost the election to former President Donald Trump.
Clinton’s speech is featured in her new talk on the power of resilience for MasterClass, the streaming platform featuring luminaries from all walks of life sharing what they have learned to inspire and teach others.
An excerpt of her speech was shared on TODAY Wednesday, and her full MasterClass will be released on Thursday. Clinton is also the guest on this week’s Sunday TODAY with Willie Geist to talk about her MasterClass appearance and her would-be presidential speech.
“In this lesson, I’m going to face one of my most public defeats head-on by sharing with you the speech I had hoped to deliver if I had won the 2016 election,” Clinton says in the video.
“I’ve never shared this with anybody. I’ve never read this out loud. But it helps to encapsulate who I am, what I believe in, and what my hopes were for the kind of country that I want for my grandchildren, and that I want for the world, that I believe in that is America at its best.”
In parts of the speech shared with TODAY, Clinton shares the remarks she had prepared if she had won the contentious election against Trump.
“My fellow Americans, today you sent a message to the whole world,” she says. “Our values endure. Our democracy stands strong. And our motto remains: e pluribus unum. Out of many, one.
“We will not be defined only by our differences. We will not be an us versus them country. The American dream is big enough for everyone. Through a long, hard campaign, we were challenged to choose between two very different visions for America. How we grow together, how we live together, and how we face a world full of peril and promise together.
“Fundamentally, this election challenged us to decide what it means to be an American in the 21st century. And for reaching for a unity, decency, and what President Lincoln called ‘the better angels of our nature.’ We met that challenge.”
Clinton then talks about the significance of what becoming the first female president in U.S. history would have meant.
“Today with your children on your shoulders, your neighbors at your side, friends old and new standing as one, you renewed our democracy,” she says. “And because of the honor you have given me, you have changed its face forever. I’ve met women who were born before women had the right to vote. They’ve been waiting a hundred years for tonight.
“I’ve met little boys and girls who didn’t understand why a woman has never been president before. Now they know, and the world knows, that in America, every boy and every girl can grow up to be whatever they dream — even president of the United States.
“This is a victory for all Americans. Men and women. Boys and girls. Because as our country has proven once again, when there are no ceilings, the sky’s the limit.”
She also addresses the deep partisan divide in the country.
“If you dig deep enough through all the mud of politics, eventually you hit something hard and true,” she says. “A foundation of fundamental values that unite us as Americans. You proved that today.
“In a country divided by race and religion, class and culture, and often paralyzing partisanship, a broad coalition of Americans embraced a shared vision of a hopeful, inclusive, big-hearted America.
“An America where women are respected and immigrants are welcomed. Where veterans are honored, parents are supported, and workers are paid fairly. An America where we believe in science, where we look beyond people’s disabilities and see their possibilities, where marriage is a right and discrimination is wrong. No matter who you are, what you look like, where you come from, or who you love.
But her emails.
Here’s the whole segment: