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Month: July 2022

It’s not as bad as it looks

Published by digby on July 5, 2022

Unfortunately, the country’s bad mood probably isn’t because of economics even though they may think it is

From Zach Carter:

A couple inflation points. First, prices of oil and a bunch of commodities have dropped recently. This is not because there has been a swift reshuffling of overall supply or demand. It’s not because more oil refineries came online or because a drivers stopped driving.

At least some of the declines are likely due to changes in speculative behavior. Maybe the Fed hiking hard has changed investor psychology. Maybe not. But either way, as welcome as lower gas prices may be, I’m wary about reading too much into the better numbers.

Russia’s war in Ukraine didn’t stop, it has fundamentally changed the global commodities map, and none of the governments opposed to Russia’s invasion have adjusted their trade regimes appropriately.

The Biden admin’s effort to arrange an allied price cap for Russian oil is a useful step if they can stick the landing, but it’s at best a stopgap measure. This war is not a disruption, it is a long-term rearrangement of basic resources.

The recent price declines are better than further price jumps, but wild volatility in commodity pricing is a problem no matter which direction the prices are going. Nobody can plan. Private investment to boost supply — the ideal fix for inflation — won’t happen.

Governments need to take stronger and more studied steps to stabilize the supply of essential commodities. In the U.S. that means a serious commitment to industrial policy, and a much broader slate of trade talks with its allies.

Until that happens, most good news on commodity inflation is probably temporary. The inflation issue with Russia isn’t the sanctions, it’s the war itself, and there is no interest rate policy that can make it go away.

More optimistically, as of May, household incomes were keeping pace with inflation. The typical U.S. household, despite the inflation, was doing the better than ever financially.

That tracks with the Fed’s survey of household economic well-being for 2021, which also registered best-ever results.

And more recently, car sales, including sales of gas guzzlers, are very strong. Could be a fluke, but it’s not what you’d expect to see if gas prices had become an insurmountable household burden.

https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220705005511/en/Ford-Outperforms-Industry-in-June-%E2%80%93-Sales-up-31-On-Strong-F-Series-and-SUV-Mix-F-150-Lightning-Best-selling-Electric-Truck-in-June-As-EV-Vehicle-Sales-Jump-77-Lincoln-SUV-Sales-Up-44

In short: inflation isn’t really improving, but it’s also not as bad as the conventional wisdom would suggest. And there is a lot that countries can do through trade policy to keep further supply shocks from creating more trouble.

This is from the link above:

The typical U.S. household earned more than ever as of May—even after accounting for inflation. And their finances were secure, with consumer spending rising at a steady clip even as their saving rate remained elevated.

This is being obscured by the misfortunes of America’s investors, who are being hit by huge tax payments owed on capital gains from 2021, falling asset values so far this year, and ongoing weakness in cash distributions via interest and dividends.

The disconnect between the wellbeing of the vast majority and the discomfort of the few makes it challenging to interpret the aggregate data. But a close reading of the official numbers on income and spending implies that most Americans are doing far better than before the pandemic.

Inflation-Adjusted Spending Remains Largely on Track

Before the pandemic struck, Americans consumed about 2.5% more goods and services each year. The virus knocked things off course, and there was good reason to fear that the damage would be permanent, as is often the case. Remarkably, that’s not what happened this time. By March 2021, real consumer spending had largely returned to the pre-pandemic trend. Americans haven’t yet made up for the ~$1 trillion in spending that they missed out on, but they are doing far better than they did after the global financial crisis.

I continue to believe that this bad mood is really a bad case of collective PTSD from years of Trumpian chaos, the pandemic and the general sense that things are hurtling out of control — and nobody is able to stop it. In other words, I think this national funk is more psychological than economic and even though the latter is certainly affected by the former in many cases, the numbers don’t really bear it out. It’s in our heads.

Mastriano’s Plot

Published by digby on July 5, 2022

The Pennsylvania GOP Governor candidate has it all planned out

No Democrat will ever win again in his state if he gets his way. Amanda Carpenter lays out the plot:

By now, political junkies are familiar with the rucksack of election-denying baggage that Pennsylvania GOP gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano schleps around: He organized a faux post-election legal hearing for Rudy Giuliani in Gettysburg; he asked Congress to deny Pennsylvania’s electors; he spent thousands of campaign funds busing people to the Capitol on Jan. 6th; he was filmed crossing police barricades; some of his supporters were arrested for their activities that day, and he visited Arizona to observe its disastrous Cyber Ninjas audit in hopes of replicating it in Pennsylvania.

Those are only the highlights of what Mastriano has done in the past. But what about the future? People like Mastriano are never going to let Donald Trump’s 2020 election loss go. If anything, Trump’s “Stop the Steal” lies provide a pretext for actions intended to ensure MAGA types win in future elections.

How will they do it? Well, Mastriano has some ideas. (Well above and beyond hiring Trump’s throne-sniffing flack Jenna Ellis as his legal adviser.)

Although Mastriano evades scrutiny by blockading typical media interviews, with some help from his insurrection-friendly friends, he doesn’t hesitate to talk about his plans when he feels comfortable. Put those snippets together, and it shows Mastriano has a pretty well-thought-out election takeover plan in mind.

His platform includes the following:

loosening restrictions on poll watchers to make it easier to challenge votes;

repealing vote-by-mail laws;

appointing a fellow 2020 election-denier to be secretary of state who could enable him to decertify every voting machine “with a stroke of a pen”;

forcing all Pennsylvania voters to re-register; and

defunding the Pennsylvania Supreme Court.

You can read on for the details but this pretty much tells the tale. And if the Supreme Court decides that state legislatures have plenary power over elections to the exclusion of every other official, in the next term you can bet that the Republicans will ensure that Pennsylvania never votes for a Democratic president again, regardless of the will of the people. They will find an excuse to overturn the election.

We’re starting to see people blame the Democrats for “choosing” extreme Republican candidates like Mastriano because there were cross over votes to put the more extreme candidate on the ballot in hopes that they will be rejected in the general election in swing states like Pennsylvania. No:

I’m getting a little bit sick of Democrats being blamed for everything. You see it all day long on social media from both the left and the right. I know it’s hard to believe that these people have the support they have but they do and it’s not because Democrats are so bad that people can’t help but vote for the other side. The sad truth is that a huge number of our fellow citizens affirmatively approve of these extremists and hate everything about the modern world that Democrats represent.

Democrats can certainly do a better job and must do a better job. But it’s very important to stay focused on the real issue which is the impending right wing fascism. The Dems are all we have to fight them. We must push them, but delegitimizing them and holding them responsible for what the other side is doing is for losers — which is what we will be, all of us, if these radicals have their way.

As for right wingers and their “look what you made me do” bullshit. Please ….

Where our violent extremists meet

Published by digby on July 5, 2022

“They’re effectively terror cells with much larger goals”

Collins tweeted:

I think this article is supposed to be a dunk, but it’s true.

The communities that Crimo was in online are far more accelerationist than what’s talked about in traditional political media, and that’s gotta change. They’re effectively terror cells with much larger goals.

We’ve gotta start having bigger conversations about this stuff, about doomerism, about blackpilling, about how extremist cults online interact with everyday politics.

They do not exist in the political binary we’re used to. The internet fractured the culture in a million pieces.

We can keep shoving our heads in the sand and wake up every few days to a new mass murder, or we can recognize this new reality of how people get radicalized and try to figure it out.

There is no one immediate prescription, but snarkily writing it off has led us here.

Originally tweeted by Ben Collins (@oneunderscore__) on July 5, 2022.

Here’s Ben Collins’ article on the shooter:

Robert “Bobby” E. Crimo III, the person of interest identified by police after Monday’s shooting in a Chicago suburb that killed six people and wounded 38 others, left a long trail of tributes to mass shootings and public killings on social media platforms, according to numerous profiles that appear to belong to him.

Crimo performed as a rapper who went by the name “Awake,” whose recent music videos included depictions of mass murder.

Crimo’s most recent video posted to YouTube showed him in the aftermath of a school shooting. It ends with Crimo draping himself in an American flag. Another music video showed a cartoon depiction of a man wearing a shirt with his YouTube channel’s logo on it, holding a long gun and being shot by police.

The YouTube account that hosted his videos, which had previously been accessible to the public, was unavailable Monday night.

Crimo had his own Discord server, where fans and people who knew him would chat. The community featured a politics board filled with nihilistic political memes. The most recent post before the shooting, which was posted in March, was a picture of Budd Dwyer, the Pennsylvania state treasurer who shot and killed himself on live television in the late 1980s, along with the caption, “I wish politicians still gave speeches like this.”

On Discord, fans would share posts that Crimo had made of himself. One apparent selfie Crimo took in March reads: “Cursed image screenshot and send to everyone or commit not alive anymore,” a reference to suicide.

After Monday’s shooting, 4chan trolls invaded the community, using it as a meeting point to laud the shooter and post memes about the attack. The Discord channel was shut down around 6 p.m. ET, just hours after Crimo was named as a person of interest.

Crimo also posted frequently to a message board that discussed graphic depictions of murder, suicide and death. His most recent post to that message board came last week, when he posted a video of a beheading.

Crimo didn’t frequently post about major political figures on his websites, except for two posts about former President Donald Trump.

A video posted to Crimo’s YouTube page on Jan. 2, 2021, appears to show Crimo among a throng of protesters cheering for Trump’s presidential motorcade outside an airport. Crimo flips the phone’s orientation to reveal his face at the end of the video.

Crimo is also seen draped in a Trump flag in a June 27, 2021, post on Twitter. The post is captioned with only the word “spam.”

Mark Heymann, 22, who said he went to Highland Park High School with Crimo, said Crimo was a rapper who released music when they were in school together.

Heymann said he doesn’t recall much about Crimo. “He always seemed a little off, but I can’t describe it much beyond that,” he said.

Crimo’s father, who reportedly owned convenience stores, staged an unsuccessful run for mayor of Highland Park in 2019.

In the neighborhood, the family were known as quiet people who kept to themselves, said people who lived on the block.

Michael Gammel, who lives next door, recalled one conversation in which the elder Crimo alluded to his son having trouble at school that the father described as “emotional issues.”

Gammel and another neighbor who didn’t want to be identified recalled the younger Crimo riding around on an electric scooter with loud music playing so people knew when he came and went. The last time, Gammel said, was Monday morning about 10.

Highland Park Mayor Nancy Rotering told NBC’s “TODAY” show Tuesday that she didn’t believe Crimo was previously known to police until Monday.

She revealed she knew him when he was in the Cub Scouts, a Boy Scouts of America program for children in kindergarten to fifth grade.

“I know him as somebody who was a Cub Scout when I was the Cub Scout leader,” she said. “It’s one of those things where you step back and you say, ‘What happened? How did somebody become this angry? This hateful?’ To then take it out on innocent people who literally were having a family day out.”

When asked what he was like back then, she replied, “He was just a little boy.”

The Christian right is just getting warmed up

Published by Tom Sullivan on July 5, 2022

Rescinding Roe isn’t the end of its labors

Katherine Stewart, author of “The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism,” warns that seeing the end of women’s right to control their reproduction is just the beginning. “Breaking American democracy isn’t an unintended side effect of Christian nationalism. It is the point of the project,” she explains.

At the annual Road to Majority Policy Conference last month in Nashville, the activists were giddy over the expected overturning of Roe, she writes in the New York Times.

“The greatest danger to America is the destruction of our nation from the people from within. And you know the people I’m talking about,” former President Donald Trump said in his keynote address.

He’s talking about Democrats, whom various speakers described as “evil,” “tyrannical” and “the enemy within.” Senator Rick Scott of Florida and Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson of North Carolina invoked the imagery of war.

The intensification of verbal warfare is connected to shifts in the Christian nationalist movement’s messaging and outreach, which were very much in evidence at the Nashville conference. Seven Mountains Dominionism — the belief that “biblical” Christians should seek to dominate the seven key “mountains” or “molders” of American society, including the government — was once considered a fringe doctrine, even among representatives of the religious right. At last year’s Road to Majority conference, however, there was a breakout session devoted to the topic. This year, there were two sessions, and the once arcane language of the Seven Mountains creed was on multiple speakers’ lips.

The hunger for dominion that appears to motivate the leadership of the movement is the essential context for making sense of its strategy and intentions in the post-Roe world. The end of abortion rights is the beginning of a new and much more personal attack on individual rights.

And indeed it is personal. Much of the rhetoric on the right invokes visions of vigilante justice. This is about “good guys with guns” — or neighbors with good eavesdropping skills — heroically taking on the pernicious behavior of their fellow citizens. Among the principal battlefields will be the fallopian tubes and uteruses of women.

They want a federal ban on abortion but will work on state-level bans for now, and on punishing “abortion trafficking.” Women who cross state lines in search of legal abortion services are their targets “along with people who provide those women with services or support, like cars and taxis.”

Stewart advises:

Americans who stand outside the movement have consistently underestimated its radicalism. But this movement has been explicitly antidemocratic and anti-American for a long time.

[…]

Christian nationalism isn’t a route to the future. Its purpose is to hollow out democracy until nothing is left but a thin cover for rule by a supposedly right-thinking elite, bubble-wrapped in sanctimony and insulated from any real democratic check on its power.

This is not new information. Not at this blog, anyway. Digby has written about theocrats’ intentions for well over a decade. The whole point of the doctrine is that their God has promised them dominion — control — over the entire world. Democracy is a convenient means to that end and to fulfillment of God’s purpose for them. The last shall be first, every knee shall bow, etc. Meaning you to them. Jesus was Machiavellian before Machiavelli.

They don’t want to govern. They want to rule … you. In Jesus’ name.

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Request a copy of For The Win, 4th Edition, my free, countywide get-out-the-vote planning guide for county committees at ForTheWin.us.

How I learned to stop worrying and love the gun

Published by Tom Sullivan on July 5, 2022

You might live to die of natural causes. Uh, depending on the breaks.

Black comedy is perhaps the way to best comprehend how the United States of America celebrates freedom: with families running for their lives in Highland Park, Illinois, one of the wealthiest cities in the country, and in Phildelphia, the nation’s birthplace.

Six people died and dozens were injured in Highland Park when a shooter opened fire with a “high-powered rifle” from a rooftop during an Independence Day parade Monday morning. Police later apprehended a suspect, male, 22, after a manhunt. Thus ended hours of residents celebrating their freedom as hostages sheltering in place after their July Fourth holiday became an active-shooter situation.

In Philadelphia Monday evening, families fled in panic after hearing gunshots that injured two police officers duing a fireworks display. The officers were treated and released.

Spectators were so jumpy in Orlando that a panic ensued when people thought there were gunshots Monday night.

The smell of gunpowder? The sight of blood? The sounds of panic and sirens? By God, they’re enough to give some American males an erection. Freedom, baby. We’ve celebrated freedom this way over 300 times so far this year. Over 22,000 Americans have died by firearms this year alone, just over half by suicide and the rest by homicide or other deaths by gun.

It’s all-American anymore. It’s everywhere America anymore. It’s what Republican politicians running in 2022 promise to guarantee.

Gary Wills wrote in the New York Times Review of Books after the 2012 Sandy Hook massacre:

That horror cannot be blamed just on one unhinged person. It was the sacrifice we as a culture made, and continually make, to our demonic god. We guarantee that crazed man after crazed man will have a flood of killing power readily supplied him. We have to make that offering, out of devotion to our Moloch, our god. The gun is our Moloch. We sacrifice children to him daily—sometimes, as at Sandy Hook, by directly throwing them into the fire-hose of bullets from our protected private killing machines …

If the tragedies were not so real, Stanley Kubrick and Terry Southern might have turned our national madness into a farce. Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) once described a kind of nihilistic nuclear defense posture. Now we live it out every day.

The Onion re-posts the same tweet after every mass shooting. How many times so far? I don’t have the time or emotional bandwidth to count.

Is there a mental health clinic where an entire country can check itself in for 48 hours of observation?

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Request a copy of For The Win, 4th Edition, my free, countywide get-out-the-vote planning guide for county committees at ForTheWin.us.

If He Did It

Published by digby on July 4, 2022

It doesn’t matter if you think breaking the law is the right thing to do

In fact, the whole concept of civil disobedience is that if you willingly break a law you think is unjust or will give attention to a higher cause, you know you will suffer the consequences of breaking that law. People go to jail to make such points. But that’s not what Trump did after the 2020 election. He broke the law and expects to get away with it because he insists he was in the right. That’s not how any of this works.

Here are George Conway and Randal Eliason in the Washington Post with an excellent illustration of the point:

The evidence of Trump’s corrupt intent was already pretty strong. The Jan. 6 committee earlier presented extensive evidence of his pressure on state officials to alter election results, his scheme to corrupt the Justice Department and enlist it in his efforts, and his relentless pushing of the “big lie” despite repeatedly being told — by his own people — that there was no election fraud.

But Hutchinson’s testimony might well have put the case over the top. She tied Trump directly to the assault on the Capitol itself — the violent culmination of weeks of acts aimed at obstructing the peaceful transition of power. Now, he can no longer plausibly claim — if he ever could — that this was just a peaceful protest gone bad.

Some argue that prosecutors could face difficulty proving criminal intent if it appears that Trump sincerely believed he had won the election. But that argument is misguided. Even if Trump believed, however implausibly, that there really had been massive voter fraud, that would establish only his motive for acting, not his intent. But a righteous motive is not a defense. Put simply, criminal acts motivated by an honest belief in the justness of one’s cause are still criminal acts.

Consider the case against O.J. Simpson — not the murder case but the one that ultimately put him in jail: for armed robbery in a Las Vegas hotel room. Simpson believed a memorabilia dealer had stolen personal items from him. So he and his co-conspirators took the items back at gunpoint.

But Simpson’s motive — his belief that the items were rightfully his — didn’t help him, and he ended up serving nine years in prison. What mattered was that he intended to, and physically did, take the items back by force, using a deadly weapon.

By the same token, even if Trump truly believed there had been election fraud — indeed, even if there had been election fraud that affected the outcome — he wasn’t entitled to unleash a mob on the Capitol, or to intimidate his vice president or Congress into violating their legal duties, or to have phony electoral certificates sent to Washington. His irrational belief that the election outcome was wrong would not negate his criminal intent.

As with Simpson’s claimed righteous state of mind, Trump’s alleged belief that “frankly, we did win this election” won’t help him, either. If Trump is shown beyond a reasonable doubt to have intended to overturn the election by illegal means — by fraud or corruption or force — he has a guilty state of mind. If Hutchinson’s testimony stands up — and it’s entirely consistent with many things we already know — any claim that Trump lacked criminal intent would be laughed out of court.

Just because he’s unfit, you shouldn’t acquit.

Collateral Damage

Published by digby on July 4, 2022

They say the carnage on American streets is the price we must pay for freedom

The 308th mass shooting took place today in Highland Park Illinois at a 4th of July parade. Six dead, dozens wounded and the gunman, described as a white male 18-20 years old is still at large as I write this. He used what they describe as a “high powered rifle” From the sound of the shots, it’s clear that it was a semi-automatic. Surprise.

Why are we living with this?

A Better Mask for Health Care Workers

Published by digby on July 4, 2022

Why are we just now hearing about this?

I’m stunned. It turns out that health care workers should have been given a different, low cost, durable mask instead of the N-95s but it just never happened:

In the early 1990s, long before P.P.E., N95 and asymptomatic transmission became household terms, federal health officials issued guidelines for how medical workers should protect themselves from tuberculosis during a resurgence of the highly infectious respiratory disease.

Their recommendation, elastomeric respirators, an industrial-grade face mask familiar to car painters and construction workers, would in the decades that followed become the gold standard for infection-control specialists focused on the dangers of airborne pathogens.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention promoted them during the SARS outbreak of 2003 and the swine flu pandemic of 2009. A few studies since then have suggested that reusable elastomeric respirators should be essential gear for frontline medical workers during a respiratory pandemic, which experts predicted would quickly deplete supplies of N95s, the disposable filtration masks largely made in China.

But when the coronavirus swept the globe and China cut off exports of N95s, elastomeric respirators were nowhere to be found in a vast majority of hospitals and health clinics in the United States. Although impossible to know for sure, some experts believe the dire mask shortage early on contributed to the wave of infections that killed more than 3,600 health workers.

The pandemic has generated a bevy of painful lessons about the importance of preparing for public health emergencies. From the Trump administration’s tepid early response to the C.D.C.’s bungled coronavirus testing rollout and its mixed messaging on masking, quarantining and the reopening of schools, the federal government has been roundly criticized for mishandling a health crisis that has left one million Americans dead and dented public faith in a once-hallowed institution.

Three years into the pandemic, elastomeric respirators remain a rarity at American health care facilities. The C.D.C. has done little to promote the masks, and all but a handful of the dozen or so domestic companies that rushed to manufacture them over the past two years have stopped making the masks or have folded because demand never took off.

Most cost between $15 and $40 each, and the filters, which should be replaced at least once a year, run about $5 each. Made of soft silicone, the masks are comfortable to wear, according to health care worker surveys, and they have a shelf life of a decade or more.

“It’s frustrating and frightening because a mask like this can make the difference between life and death, but no one knows about them,” said Claudio Dente, whose company, Dentec Safety, recently stopped making elastomeric respirators that were specifically redesigned at the request of federal regulators for health care workers.

I don’t know what to say. Suppose the government had invoked the Defense Protection Act right away to manufacture more of these right at the beginning? Then Health Care workers would have had the better masks (they filter out 99% of all particles) and the N95s could have been given to the public. (Obviously, the public isn’t going to use these.) Lives would have been saved.

I feel as if there’s something we don’t know about all this. But as the article shows, they used to recommend these masks but for some reason they didn’t do that with COVID. And why aren’t they being used and stockpiled in health care systems today?

Execution Assembly Line

Published by digby on July 4, 2022

Oklahoma Death Factory

One execution per month until 2025:

Oklahoma plans to execute 25 prisoners in the next 29 months after ending a moratorium spurred by botched lethal injections and legal battles over how it kills death row inmates.

The Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals on Friday set the execution dates for six prisoners in response to a request by Oklahoma Attorney General John O’Connor (R) in mid-June. The court later added dates for an additional 19 prisoners for a total representing more than half of the state’s 44-person death row population.

After a federal judge in Oklahoma ruled in early June that the state’s three-drug lethal-injection protocol was constitutional, O’Connor made his request, saying in filings that the prisoners had exhausted their criminal appeals. O’Connor argued for imminent execution dates as a matter of justice for the family members of those who were killed. In a statement, O’Connor noted that the earliest kill by a prisoner on Oklahoma’s death row was committed in 1993.

The first execution is scheduled for Aug. 25, with subsequent executions scheduled for about once every four weeks through 2024. In Oklahoma, prisoners are automatically granted a clemency hearing within 21 days of their scheduled execution, at which point the state’s pardon and parole board can recommend the governor grant a prisoner a reprieve from death row.

The scheduled flurry of executions is expected to draw Oklahoma back into familiar territory: the center of the nation’s death penalty debate.

The first drug Oklahoma administers in its lethal-injection protocol, the sedative midazolam, has prompted legal challenges by prisoners arguing that it fails to reliably render them unconscious, raising the likelihood of an execution that would be considered “cruel and unusual” under the Eighth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

The state suspended executions in 2015 after the botched lethal injections of Charles Warner and Clayton Lockett in which a still-conscious Warner cried out, “my body is on fire.” Lockett writhed for 43 minutes before dying of a heart attack.

Several of the Oklahoma prisoners scheduled for execution have strong innocence claims, histories of intellectual disability that should disqualify them for the death penalty or whose cases have claims of racial bias, their lawyers say.

This is not a civilized country, Part Infinity

Among them is Richard Glossip, whose 2015 case against the state’s lethal injection protocol went before the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled in the state’s favor. His assertion of innocence has not only made him one of the more high-profile death row cases in the United States but has also won him support from Republican lawmakers in the state who object to his execution, scheduled for September.

Glossip’s attorney on Friday filed a motion for post-conviction relief, a type of appeal that cites new evidence that was not available during his original 1998 trial. Last month, the law firm Reed Smith released an independent investigation on Glossip’s case commissioned by a committee of lawmakers led by Texas House Rep. Kevin McDugle (R). Itfound “grave” concerns with Glossip’s conviction, including allegations that Oklahoma City police, at the direction of prosecutors, intentionally destroyed evidence favorable to Glossip.

“The facts and evidence that we now know in this case prove Richard Glossip is an innocent man,” Glossip’s attorney Don Knight said in a statement Friday. “We urge the State of Oklahoma to grant this request for post-conviction relief based on the abundance of new evidence that has never before been evaluated by a judge or jury.”

Glossip was sentenced to death in 1998 after being convicted of a murder-for-hire scheme against Barry Van Treese, a motel owner who was Glossip’s boss.

Glossip, who has received several last-minute reprieves, including a near-botched execution in 2016, prompted the state to shutter its death chamber for five years. A grand jury investigation that year found “inexcusable failures” in the state’s death-penalty protocol.

My God.

This man got the death penalty based upon testimony by the man who actually pulled the trigger and who got life in exchange for it. How does that make any sense at all?

Moreover, it appears Glossip is innocent. Of course, that’s not considered a good reason to grant clemency in this barbaric country.

But good news. They’ve done some training so now they can kill more efficiently:

In a 2020 court hearing, lawyers for the state said the Oklahoma Department of Corrections had addressed lapses with training for executions “to ensure what happened in the past won’t happen again.”

The following year, the state carried out its first execution since 2015. According to witnesses, the prisoner, John Marion Grant, went into full-body convulsions and vomited before dying.

They’re still learning …

This is just another data point proving that we are a sick, sick culture.

A little bit of good news

Published by digby on July 4, 2022

Is inflation relief on the way?

A slide in all manner of raw-materials prices—corn, wheat, copper and more—is stirring hopes that a significant source of inflationary pressure might be starting to ease.

Natural-gas prices shot up more than 60% before falling back to close the quarter 3.9% lower. U.S. crude slipped from highs above $120 a barrel to end around $106. Wheat, corn and soybeans all wound up cheaper than they were at the end of March. Cotton unraveled, losing more than a third of its price since early May. Benchmark prices for building materials copper and lumber dropped 22% and 31%, respectively, while a basket of industrial metals that trade in London had its worst quarter since the 2008 financial crisis.

Many raw materials remain historically high-price, to be sure. And there are matters of supply and demand behind the declines, from a fire at a Texas gas-export terminal to better crop-growing weather. Yet some investors are starting to view the reversals as a sign that the Federal Reserve’s efforts to slow the economy are reducing demand.

“Moderating commodity prices are clear evidence that inflation is cooling,” said Louis Navellier, chief investment officer at Reno, Nev., money manager Navellier & Associates.  

Traders and analysts say that some of the decline in commodity prices can be traced to the retreat of investors who piled into markets for fuel, metals and crops to hedge against inflation. JPMorgan Chase & Co. commodity strategist Tracey Allen said about $15 billion moved out of commodity futures markets during the week ended June 24. It was the fourth straight week of outflows and brought to about $125 billion the total that has been pulled from commodities this year, a seasonal record that tops even the exodus in 2020 as economies closed. 

“I don’t know if the policies of the Fed have slowed the economy, but that’s what money managers are betting on,” said Craig Turner, commodities broker at StoneX Group Inc. 

Much of the climb in prices was due to supply constraints following pandemic lockdowns, weather events last year that reduced harvests and sapped fuel reserves, and war in Europe. Those pressures have eased, though supply shocks are still jolting prices.

Unfortunately, I doubt this will have much effect on the election in the fall. It takes months for people to recognize positive economic changes. But it’s good news in any case. The consequences of shutting down the whole world in 2020 will be felt for some time to come but they won’t last forever.