The Biden campaign is out with a stark new ad featuring a woman talking about traveling out of state to receive an abortion due to Texas’ strict abortion ban. It’s the latest in their push to put reproductive rights front and center in the 2024 race.
It will be playing:
-during the The Bachelor season premiere
-on HGTV, TLC, Bravo, Hallmark, Food Network & Oxygen
-during NFL championships – on digital
This is very good. But it’s just a start. They need to keep it up.
People don’t know what they don’t know. That’s tautological, but true. One reason I publish ForThe Win every two years (the 5th edition isn’t quite ready) is to give less-experienced Democratic county chairs in under-resourced counties a “cookbook” for assembling a countywide get-out-the-vote program in support of their candidates. State parties assume chairs have already learned the nuts and bolts by the seat of their pants. They instead provide sometimes overly thick manuals focused mainly on party administration. “Where’s the part about electing Democrats?” is my usual reaction.
In presidential years, people unfamiliar with local party operations start calling the headquarters here in West Cackalacky (or your Cackalacky). Some have basic election questions. Others want to discuss policy or something they just saw on the news. Angry others want to chew the ears of retiree volunteers who answer the phone as though local committees are part of the Collective with a subspace connection to decisions made in the West Wing. That’s not how this works. (There is no The Democratic Party.) But they don’t know what they don’t know. That’s why the White House comment line number is written in large letters on the wall beside the reception desk. (Comments: 202-456-1111.)
A refresher on that from 2019:
Most of what people think they know about party politics they pick up from watching the presidential contest every four years. First, because it’s the only time they are paying close attention. Second, because the news coverage is inescapable. But it leaves a false impression of how parties work day to day.
Men (it always seems to be men) call the Democratic office here every presidential cycle to ask about their favorite primary candidates. They want to know when [your candidate here] is coming to town. Explain you don’t know, and they get an attitude. You’ve confirmed Democrats are as much a waste of their time as they already believed. The voices suggest Jimbo Jones from “The Simpsons.”
“Well, this is the Democratic Party, isn’t it?”
Yes, but (I do not reply) I’m not the one who called the guy at the motor pool with his hands in a Humvee transmission to ask for the base commander’s itinerary. Callers’ grasp of force structure is a tad fuzzy.
To my knowledge, no Commander in Chief (or senior staff) has ever called down here to the motor pool for our advice on policy or for any other reason. Even for planning local campaign stops. Those calls go first to local elected and police officials. The local party committee is maybe fourth in line to get the news, and then with only a couple of days’ notice.
Also: The DNC is not the One Ring that rules them all. That it does is an internet rumor, an urban legend.
The race is on to see who burns out on Donald Trump first, Trump Himself or the rest of us. With his shuttling furiously between court apearances and campaign appearances, Trump can no longer tell his Nikkis from his Nancys. “I am your retribution” has turned into “IMMUNITY NOW, IMMUNITY TOMORROW, IMMUNITY FOREVER.” Although Trump is neither as smart nor as clever nor as intellectually agile as George Wallace, Jamelle Bouie nonetheless believes Wallace’s “legacy in national politics … is very clearly Trump.”
I need a break. Make that “break.”
The Russians are still bombing Ukraine. The Israelis are still bombing Gaza. Vladimir Putin is still directing the former and Benjamin Netanyahu, the latter.
Al Jazeera provides a rundown of events on Day 697 of the war on Ukraine:
- A fire broke out at a natural gas terminal in the Russian Baltic Sea port of Ust-Luga, the regional governor said early on Sunday. A high alert regime has been introduced in the Kingiseppsky district, which includes the port, and no casualties have been reported, according to the AFP news agency.
- Russia’s parliament will consider a law allowing for the confiscation of money, valuables, and other property from those deemed to spread “deliberately false information” about Moscow’s military actions, a senior lawmaker said on Saturday.
- Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on Saturday that he expected a number of new Western defence packages for Ukraine to be signed this and next month. “We are preparing new agreements with partners – strong bilateral agreements,” Zelenskyy said in his nightly video address.
- The wife of a Russian soldier delivered an emotional appeal for his return from Ukraine on Saturday at the election headquarters of President Vladimir Putin, a defiant gesture in a country where open criticism of the war is banned.
- The Ministry of Defence in the United Kingdom stated on Saturday that Ukraine sustains a military presence along the left bank of the Dnipro River and persists in fending off Russian assaults despite logistical challenges.
- Russia has lost 375,270 soldiers in Ukraine since the beginning of the war, including 750 over the past day, the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine claimed on Saturday. The number has not been independently verified.
“Meat grinder” (Business Insider):
Russian marines and paratroopers are refusing to launch certain types of assaults due to concerns over the huge losses other troops are suffering, a Ukrainian official said, the Kyiv Post reported.
Nataliya Humenyuk, a press secretary for the Armed Forces of Ukraine’s Joint Command South, said that the soldiers considered “themselves ‘elite troops'” and did not “want to go into frontal assaults” that former felons and reservists typically carry out, the outlet reported.
Throughout the Russian invasion, Russia has become increasingly reliant on high-risk frontal assaults involving waves of attacks that probe Ukrainian positions and seize small portions of territory at the cost of substantial casualties.
The leader of the mercenary Wagner Group, Yevgeny Prigozhin, who died in a plane crash last August after leading a failed mutiny in June, described the tactic as a “meat grinder.”
And in Gaza on Day 107 of that war, another milestone (Associated Press):
RAFAH, Gaza Strip — The Palestinian death toll from the war between Israel and Hamas has soared past 25,000, the Health Ministry in the Gaza Strip said Sunday, while the Israeli government appeared far from achieving its goals of crushing the militant group and freeing more than 100 hostages.
The level of death, destruction and displacement from the war already is without precedent in the decades-old Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Yet Israeli officials say the fighting is likely to continue for several more months.
During the Cold War, nuclear disamament protesters condemned the arms race as an effort to create enough surplus weapons to make the rubble bounce. Netanyahu is doing that in Gaza with conventional arms (many of them ours). And not just rubble, but bodies.
The war has displaced some 85% of Gaza’s residents from their homes, with hundreds of thousands packing into U.N.-run shelters and tent camps in the southern part of the tiny coastal enclave. U.N. officials say a quarter of the population of 2.3 million is starving as only a trickle of humanitarian aid reaches them because of the fighting and Israeli restrictions.
Netanyahu has vowed to keep up the offensive until Israel achieves “complete victory” over Hamas and returns all the remaining hostages. But even some top Israeli officials have begun to acknowledge that those goals might be mutually exclusive.
Netanyahu is a horror (Reuters):
TEL AVIV, Jan 20 (Reuters) – Thousands of Israelis gathered in Tel Aviv on Saturday to protest against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, accusing the veteran leader of mishandling the nation’s security and calling for a new election.
Anti-government protests that shook the nation for much of 2023 ceased after the attacks by Hamas in southern Israel on Oct. 7. Political rifts were set aside as Israelis rallied behind the military and the families of those killed or taken hostage.
But with the devastating war in Gaza in its fourth month and opinion polls showing lagging support for Netanyahu, calls for leadership changes are growing stronger, though there is no indication that his position is under any imminent threat.
This was reflected in Saturday night’s turnout in a central Tel Aviv square where many of last year’s protests took place.
While the crowd was much smaller than those seen last year, it still comprised several thousand people, with many banging on drums, yelling their dismay and waving Israeli flags.
“Reprehensible” (Al Jazeera):
“This is the first time we are seeing this protest happen in the north,” said Al Jazeera’s Stefanie Dekker, reporting from Haifa on Saturday.
“It’s a protest with Israeli Jews and Palestinian Israelis, and it is significant because of the two coming together.
“The message here is to end the war and that they can only live peacefully side by side with a political solution for the Palestinians,” she said.
Omri Evron, a member of the Communist Party of Israel, who helped organise the anti-war protest, spoke to Al Jazeera about the message the protesters were hoping to convey.
“The killing of thousands and thousands of Palestinians, the vast majority of whom are innocent civilians, is not only reprehensible, it does not serve the security of the people of Israel. It does not bring us security, it only ensures the next massacre, the next cycle of violence,” he said.
Netanyahu isn’t budging (BBC):
Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has again rejected the idea of creating a Palestinian state.
His comments came hours after a phone call with US President Joe Biden after which the US leader indicated Mr Netanyahu may still accept the idea.
Mr Netanyahu’s remarks appeared to deepen a public divide with the US.
The US believes a Palestinian state alongside Israel – known as a “two-state solution” – is vital for long-term stability.
But the White House acknowledged this week the US and Israeli governments “clearly see things differently”.
UPDATE: For clarification, added “Trump is” that I omitted in first paragraph, last sentence. (h/t LL)
History never repeats (I tell myself before I go to sleep)
– Split Enz
Thankfully, I was between gulps of coffee when I espied this tidbit on X (re-posted by Digby)…otherwise I would have done an involuntary spit take all over my Cocoa Puffs:
“Wait a minute…that has to be a parody account,” I thought to myself. But nope, that is from the actual Bill Kristol, neoconservative writer and commentator. He was (in his words) “provoked” into sharing that observation after “reading a couple articles about Davos.”
I suspect it’s not just the shenanigans this past week at the World Economic Forum that prompted this magical trip to the other side of the wardrobe, but the all-too-real *possibility* of history repeating itself this November (do I need to spell it out?). I pray (as fervently as an agnostic can) that “it” doesn’t happen again…but in our heart of hearts, you and I both know that it could.
With that in mind, I thought I’d revisit a “top 10 list” I originally posted on the eve of Inauguration Day 2017, which contains bellwethers that may need to be heeded once again. With my childlike grasp of investment strategies, the best tip I can give is: go long on Hope.
(The following was originally published on Hullabaloo on January 14, 2017)
“To assess the ‘personality’ of the corporate ‘person’ a checklist is employed, using diagnostic criteria of the World Health Organization and the standard diagnostic tool of psychiatrists and psychologists. The operational principles of the corporation give it a highly anti-social ‘personality’: it is self-interested, inherently amoral, callous and deceitful; it breaches social and legal standards to get its way; it does not suffer from guilt, yet it can mimic the human qualities of empathy, caring and altruism.”
– from the official website for the film, The Corporation
I don’t know about you, but my jaw is getting pretty sore from repeatedly dropping to the floor with each successive cabinet nomination by our incoming CEO-in-chief of the United States of Blind Trust. It seems that candidate Trump, who ran on an oft-bleated promise to “drain the swamp” in Washington D.C. bears little resemblance to President-elect Trump, who is currently hell-bent on loading the place up with even more alligators.
When I heard the name “Rex Tillerson” bandied about as Trump’s pick for Secretary of State, it rang a bell. I knew he was the former head of Exxon, so it wasn’t that. Then I remembered. Mr. Tillerson was one of the “stars” of a documentary I reviewed several years back, called Greedy Lying Bastards (conversely, if I hear the words “greedy lying bastards,” bandied about, “Trump’s cabinet picks” is the first phrase that comes to mind).
So with that in mind, and in keeping with my occasional unifying theme, “Hollywood saw this coming”, I was inspired to comb my review archives of the last 10 years to see if any bellwethers were emerging that may have been dropping hints that the planets were aligning in such a manner as to set up a path to the White House for an orange TV clown (the “self-interested, inherently amoral, callous and deceitful” kind of orange TV clown).
All 10 of these films were released within the last 10 years. I’ll let you be the judge:
The Big Short – Want the good news first? Writer-director Adam McKay and co-scripter Charles Randolph’s adaptation of Michael Lewis’ eponymous 2010 non-fiction book is an outstanding comedy-drama; an incisive parsing of what led to the crash of the global financial system in 2008. The bad news is…it made me pissed off about it all over again.
Yes, it’s a bitter pill to swallow, this ever-maddening tale of how we stood by, blissfully unaware, as unchecked colonies of greedy, lying Wall Street investment bankers were eventually able to morph into the parasitic gestalt monster journalist Matt Taibbi famously compared to a “…great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.” Good times! (Full review)
Capitalism: A Love Story – Back in 2009, Digby and I did a double post on this film, which was Michael Moore’s reaction to the 2008 crash. Here’s how I viewed his intent:
So how did we arrive to this sorry state of our Union, where the number of banks being robbed by desperate people is running neck and neck with the number of desperate banks ostensibly robbing We The People? What paved the way for the near-total collapse of our financial system and its subsequent government bailout, which Moore provocatively refers to as nothing less than a “financial coup d’etat”? The enabler, Moore suggests, may very well be our sacred capitalist system itself-and proceeds to build a case (in his inimitable fashion) that results in his most engaging and thought-provoking film since Roger and Me […] at the end of the day I didn’t really find his message to be so much “down with capitalism” as it is “up with people”.
Digby gleaned something else from the film that did a flyover on me at the time:
But this movie, as Dennis notes, isn’t really about saviors or criminals, although it features some of both. It’s a call for citizens to focus their minds on what’s actually gone wrong and take to the streets or man the barricades or do whatever defines political engagement in this day and age and demand that the people who brought us to this place are identified and that the system is reformed. Indeed, I would guess that if it didn’t feature the stuff about capitalism being evil he could have shown this to audiences of all political stripes and most of the latent teabaggers would have given him a standing ovation.
If the film manages to focus the citizenry on the most important story of our time then it will be tremendously important. If it gets lost in a cacophony of commie bashing and primitive tribalism then it will probably not be recognized for what it is until sometime later. As with all of his films, he’s ahead of the zeitgeist, so I am hopeful that this epic call to leftwing populist engagement is at the very least a hopeful sign of things to come.
She called it. “Someone” did tap into that populist sentiment; but sadly, it wasn’t the Left. (Full review)
The Corporation – While it’s not news to any thinking person that corporate greed and manipulation affects everyone’s life on this planet, co-directors Mark Achbar and Jennifer Abbott deliver the message in a unique and engrossing fashion. By applying a psychological profile to the rudiments of corporate think, Achbar and Abbott build a solid case; proving that if the “corporation” were corporeal, then “he” would be Norman Bates.
Mixing archival footage with observations from some of the expected talking heads (Michael Moore, Noam Chomsky, etc.) the unexpected (CEOs actually sympathetic with the filmmakers’ point of view) along with the colorful (like a “corporate spy”), the film offers perspective not only from the watchdogs, but from the belly of the beast itself. Be warned: there are enough exposes trotted out here to keep conspiracy theorists, environmentalists and human rights activists tossing and turning in bed for nights on end.
The Forecaster – There’s a conspiracy nut axiom that “everything is rigged”. Turns out it’s not just paranoia…it’s a fact. At least that’s according to this absorbing documentary from German filmmaker Marcus Vetter, profiling economic “forecaster” Martin Armstrong. In the late 70s, Armstrong formulated a predictive algorithm (“The Economic Confidence Model”) that proved so accurate at prophesying global financial crashes and armed conflicts, that a shadowy cabal of everyone from his Wall Street competitors to the CIA made Wile E. Coyote-worthy attempts for years to get their hands on that formula.
And once Armstrong told the CIA to “fuck off”, he put himself on a path that culminated in serving a 12-year prison sentence for what the FBI called a “3 billion dollar Ponzi scheme”. Funny thing, no evidence was ever produced, nor was any judgement passed (most of the time he served was for “civil contempt”…for not giving up that coveted formula, which the FBI eventually snagged when they seized his assets). Another funny thing…Armstrong’s formula solidly backs up his contention that it’s the world’s governments running the biggest Ponzi schemes…again and again, all throughout history.
And something tells me that we ain’t seen nuthin’ yet…
Greedy Lying Bastards – I know it’s cliché to quote Joseph Goebbels, but: “If you repeat a lie often enough, it becomes the truth.” That’s the theme of Craig Rosebraugh’s 2013 documentary. As one interviewee offers: “On one side you have all the facts. On the other side, you have none. But the folks without the facts are far more effective at convincing the public that this is not a problem, than scientists are about convincing them that we need to do something about this.” What is the debate in question here? Global warming.
Using simple but damning flow charts, Rosebraugh follows the money and connects dots between high-profile deniers (“career skeptics…in the business of selling doubt”) and their special interest sugar daddies. Shills range from media pundits (with no background in hard science) to members of Congress, presidential candidates and Supreme Court justices. Think tanks and other organizations are exposed as mouthpieces for Big Money.
Sadly, the villains outnumber the heroes-which is not reassuring. What does reassure are suggested action steps in the film’s coda…which might come in handy after January 20th. (Full review)
Inside Job – I have good news and bad news about documentary filmmaker Charles Ferguson’s incisive parsing of what led to the crash of the global financial system in 2008. The good news is that I believe I finally grok what “derivatives” and “toxic loans” are. The bad news is…that doesn’t make me feel any better about how fucked we are.
Ferguson starts where the seeds were sown-rampant financial deregulation during the Reagan administration (“morning in America”-remember?). The film illustrates, point by point, how every subsequent administration, Democratic and Republican alike, did their “part” to enable the 2008 crisis- through political cronyism and legislative manipulation. The result of this decades long circle jerk involving Wall Street, the mortgage industry, Congress, the White House and lobbyists (with Ivy League professors as pivot men) is what we are still living with today…and I suspect it is about to get unimaginably worse. (Full review)
The International – Get this. In the Bizarro World of Tom Tykwer’s conspiracy thriller, people don’t rob banks…. banks rob people. That’s crazy! And if you think that’s weird, check this out: at one point in the film, one of the characters puts forth the proposition that true power belongs to he who controls the debt. Are you swallowing this malarkey? The filmmakers even go so far as to suggest that some Third World military coups are seeded by powerful financial groups and directed from shadowy corporate boardrooms…
What a fantasy! (Not.)
The international bank in question is under investigation by an Interpol agent (Clive Owen), who is following a trail of shady arms deals all over Europe and the Near East that appear to be linked to the organization. Whenever anyone gets close to exposing the truth about the bank’s Machiavellian schemes, they die under mysterious circumstances. Once the agent teams up with an American D.A. (Naomi Watts), much more complexity ensues, with tastefully-attired assassins lurking behind every silver-tongued bank exec.
The timing of the film’s release (in 2010) was interesting, in light of the then-current banking crisis and plethora of financial scandals. Screenwriter Eric Singer (no relation to the KISS drummer) based certain elements of the story on the real-life B.C.C.I. scandal. (Full review)
The Queen of Versailles — In Lauren Greenfield’s 2012 doc, billionaire David Siegel shares an anecdote about his 52-story luxury timeshare complex in Vegas. In 2010, Donald Trump called him and said, “Congratulations on your new tower! I’ve got one problem with it. When I stay in my penthouse suite, I look out the window and all I see is ‘WESTGATE’. Could you turn your sign down a little bit?” (how he must have suffered).
While Greenfield’s portrait of Siegal, his wife Jackie, their eight kids, nanny, cook, maids, chauffeur and (unknown) quantity of yippy, prolifically turd-laying teacup dogs is chock full of wacky “you couldn’t make this shit up” reality TV moments, there is an elephant in the room…the family’s unfinished Orlando, Florida mansion, the infamous “largest home in America”, a 90,000 square foot behemoth inspired by the palace at Versailles. Drama arises when the bank threatens to foreclose on it, along with the PH Towers Westgate. So does the family end up living in cardboard boxes? I’m not telling.
However, there is a more chilling message, buried near the end of the film. When Siegel boasts he was “personally responsible” for the election of George W. Bush in 2000, the director asks him to elaborate. “I’d rather not say,” he replies, “…because it may not necessarily have been legal.” Any further thoughts? “Had I not stuck my big nose into it, there probably would not have been an Iraqi War, and maybe we would have been better off…I don’t know.” Gosh, imagine a billionaire having the power to “buy” the POTUS of their choice. Worse yet, imagine a similarly odious billionaire becoming the POTUS. Oh. (Full review)
Welcome to New York — While it is not a “action thriller” per se, Abel Ferrara’s film is likewise “ripped from the headlines”, involves an evil banker, and agog with backroom deals and secret handshakes. More specifically, the film is based on the Dominique Strauss-Kahn scandal. In case you need a refresher, he was the fine fellow who was accused and indicted for an alleged sexual assault and attempted rape of a maid employed by the ritzy NYC hotel he was staying at during a 2011 business trip. The case was dismissed after the maid’s credibility was brought into question (Strauss-Kahn later admitted in a TV interview that a liaison did occur, but denied any criminal wrongdoing).
I’m sure that the fact that Strauss-Kahn was head of the International Monetary Fund at the time (and a front-runner in France’s 2012 presidential race) had absolutely nothing to do with him traipsing out from the sordid affair smelling like a rose (2024 sidebar: Umm…)
It is interesting watching the hulking Gerard Depardieu wrestle with the motivations (and what passes as the “conscience”) of his Dostoevskian character. It doesn’t make this creep any more sympathetic, but it is a fearless late-career performance, as naked (literally and emotionally) as Marlon Brando was playing a similarly loathsome study in Last Tango in Paris. Jacqueline Bisset gives a good supporting turn as the long-suffering wife. (Full review)
The Yes Men Fix the World – Anti-corporate activist/pranksters Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno (aka “The Yes Men”) and co-director Kurt Engfehr come out swinging, vowing to do a take-down of a powerful nemesis…an Idea. If money makes the world go ‘round, then this particular Idea is the one that oils the crank on the money-go-round, regardless of the human cost. It is the free market cosmology of economist Milton Friedman, which the Yes Men posit as the root of much evil in the world.
Once this springboard is established, the fun begins. Perhaps “fun” isn’t the right term, but there are hijinks afoot, and you’ll find yourself chuckling through most of the film (when you’re not crying). However, the filmmakers have a loftier goal than mining laughs: corporate accountability; and ideally, atonement. “Corporate accountability” is an oxymoron, but one has to admire the dogged determination (and boundless creativity) of the Yes Men and their co-conspirators, despite the odds. It’s a call to activism that is as timely as ever. (Full review)
Previous posts with related themes:
More reviews at Den of Cinema
— Dennis Hartley
In case you were wondering who the guy is who’s pushing this scandal about Fani Willis having an affair with her co-prosecutor, it’s this guy. (Article from 2016)
Donald Trump’s “election protection” effort will be run by Mike Roman, a Republican operative best known for promoting a video of apparent voter intimidation by the New Black Panthers outside a polling place in 2008.
Roman is to oversee poll-watching efforts as Trump undertakes an unprecedented effort by a major party nominee by calling into question the legitimacy of the popular vote weeks before election day.
The Republican nominee has insisted, without evidence, that dead people and undocumented immigrants are voting in the United States.
Trump has long claimed that the 2016 election is rigged but has amplified his claims of voter fraud in recent days. On Monday he tweeted: “Of course there is large scale voter fraud happening on and before election day. Why do Republican leaders deny what is going on? So naive!” In particular Trump claimed in an interview with Fox News that voter fraud was rampant in cities including Philadelphia, St Louis and Chicago after long warning vaguely about fraud in “certain communities”.
Multiple sources have confirmed to the Guardian that Roman, who also previously ran the Koch network’s now defunct internal intelligence agency, will oversee the Trump campaign’s efforts to monitor polling places for any signs of voter fraud.
Roman is best known for his role in promoting a video that showed two members of the New Black Panthers – a fringe group that claims descent from the 1960s radicals – standing outside a Philadelphia polling place dressed in uniforms, with one carrying a nightstick. Police are called and the two men leave.
A justice department investigation into the incident – filed in the weeks before George W Bush left office – became a political football that divided career lawyers within the justice department. The incident was repeatedly cited as evidence of Democrats setting out to harm the election process.
The case was eventually dropped but not before it became a conservative cause célèbre. As Rick Hasen, a election law professor at the University of California, Irvine, said: “It was one of the most retold stories on Fox News and the right for years and took on almost mythical status as evidence of thuggery by Democrats to harm the voting process.”
It’s important to always remember that Trump didn’t invent this election fraud BS. The Republicans have been pushing this crap for decades. He’s just the first to make a profit at it.
Roman worked in the White House and was was indicted in the Georgia case which is how he’s involved in this Fanni Willis scandal.
Roman is facing seven charges in connection with the DA office’s investigation into alleged interference in Georgia’s 2020 presidential election, including a violation of the Georgia RICO Act, conspiracy to impersonate a public officer, conspiracy to commit forgery in the first degree, and conspiracy to commit false statements and writing.
I think we know what kind person this is, don’t we? He’s a racist ratfucker and political assassin. The perfect Trump staffer.
There are exceptions:
It should be good news for Biden. Generally presidents benefit from good economic “vibes.” But who knows? He’s old so they may just hate him no matter the reality.
It appears Americans are finally feeling better about the economy.
Consumer sentiment, a window into the nation’s financial mood, jumped 13 percent in January to its highest level since mid-2021, reflecting optimism that inflation is easing and incomes are rising, according to a closely watched survey by the University of Michigan. Since November, consumer sentiment has risen 29 percent, marking the largest two-month increase in more than 30 years.
Gas prices, often a key driver of sentiment, have fallen 40 percent since June 2022, to just over $3 a gallon. Weekly jobless claims are at their lowest level in more than a year. Sales of cars, clothing and sporting goods all picked up during the holidays, as consumers felt confident enough to keep spending.
Meanwhile, the stock market is surging to new records, with the S&P 500 closing at an all-time high on Friday.
Many are hopeful, too, that interest rates have peaked and the Federal Reserve may begin to cut them this year, which would make it cheaper to borrow for a range of items, including cars and homes.
“We’re seeing a continuation of the surge in sentiment we saw at the end of last year,” said Joanne W. Hsu, an economist at the University of Michigan and director of its consumer surveys. “If anyone was wondering, ‘Was December a fluke?,’ it is absolutely clear now that it wasn’t. This is a sign that consumers are feeling better. Their confidence has come back.”
That jump is fueling hope that the U.S. economy — and Americans’ perception of it — may be turning a corner after months of inflation-related unease. Rising sentiment among both Democrats and Republicans comes at a critical moment for the Biden administration, which has struggled to convince voters that its economic policies are making their lives better ahead of November’s presidential election.
“At a cerebral level, voters may still say Biden mismanaged the economy,” said Tobin Marcus, head of U.S. policy and politics at Wolfe Research and an economic policy staffer to Vice President Joe Biden during the Obama administration. “But the dissipation of their really intense personal dissatisfaction with the economy still really helps at the level of the political context.”
They may feel that Joe Biden mismanaged the economy because the Republicans waged a ,multi-decade propaganda campaign, stemming from Jimmy Carter’s unfortunate term, to convince people that Republicans are good on the economy and Democrats are bad. The opposite is true.
Biden is even doing better than St. Ronnie Reagan in his first 3 years recovering from massive economic disruption:
Biden’s inflation rate, by the way is now
Philip Bump did a necessary deep-dive into James Comer’s mendacity about those transcripts. It’s truly astonishing that they are able to get away with this:
One of the arguments offered by attorneys for President Biden’s son Hunter when responding to a subpoena from the House Oversight Committee for a closed-door deposition was that the committee had shown a pattern of cherry-picking what would be presented to the public.
This is unquestionably true. Over and over and over and over and over, committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) has made debunked and unsubstantiated public statements that cast the president and/or his son as dishonest or has rushed to release unsubstantiated claims or information that similarly collapse under scrutiny. The first year of his investigation into the Bidens made extremely little progress as a result — except where it matters, in the right-wing media universe.
Clearly, though, this has not gone unnoticed by those enmeshed in Comer’s sprawling investigation. There was that letter from Hunter Biden’s lawyer Abbe Lowell in November. And then, this week, a letter from an attorney for Kevin Morris, a wealthy friend of Hunter Biden who helped pay off the president’s son’s tax liability.
Morris appeared for a closed-door deposition on Thursday. His attorney, Bryan Sullivan, claims in the letter that he asked at the outset that his client’s testimony not be cherry-picked or misrepresented. Instead, he said, he received only a promise that Morris would “be treated fairly.”
“You did not treat Mr. Morris fairly and engaged in your standard practice of partially and inaccurately leaking a witness’s statements,” Morris writes in the letter obtained by The Washington Post. “Not two hours after we left Mr. Morris’ transcribed interview, you issued a press statement with cherry‐picked, out of context and totally misleading descriptions of what Mr. Morris said.”
It is very important to point out that this may simply be Sullivan’s effort to frame the moment as positively as possible for his client. We should not assume that the examples in his letter — which we’ll consider in a moment — are themselves necessarily accurate.
To his point, though, this could be ameliorated by the House Oversight panel releasing a transcript of the testimony. This is not an instantaneous process, certainly; it took three days for the testimony of Hunter Biden’s former business partner Devon Archer to be released last year. But there’s also no rush to try to frame Morris’s testimony, no demand to make public what he said. Well, there is one source of demand: the right’s appetite for any morsel of information that seems to implicate the president or his son in wrongdoing. That’s a demand for which Comer offers an endless supply.
There’s something else to consider about Sullivan’s response. Even if it is an attempt to cast his client in a more favorable light by pointing to Comer’s track record of cherry-picking, it reinforces that this cherry-picking is a liability for Comer. That he has this track record of trying to construct as damning a case as possible instead of trying to fairly represent witness testimony as broadly informative about the investigation itself.
Sullivan alleged multiple misrepresentations — again, the transcript can help tell us who is more accurately describing what occurred. Comer’s press release:
-inaccurately described why Morris made the loan to Hunter Biden,
-used scare-quotes around “loan” to suggest that the payment (vetted by attorneys, Sullivan argued) was not a loan at all,
-overstated Morris’s past support for Democratic candidates, andsuggested that this money had somehow provided Morris access to the president.
“Mr. Morris testified that he has only had cursory communications with President Biden at public events like Mr. Biden’s daughter’s wedding,” Sullivan wrote, “and said basic courtesy things as ‘hello’ and ‘how are you’ and President Biden making comments about Mr. Morris’ unkempt hair style that lasted a few minutes.”
The scare-quotes around “loan,” we should note, are probably meant to suggest that Morris didn’t expect to be repaid (though, per Sullivan, Morris testified under oath that he did). It’s also a word that has gained new importance for Comer in the past few months.
[…]
We may perhaps see if this is another example of Comer cherry-picking or framing claims that help his case or if, instead, it’s an example of how his doing so frequently in the past allows critics to disparage how he’s conducting the probe.
Neither is what one might seek in an objective investigator.
You can read the whole thing at the gift link above. It’s important to understand what they are doing but most of the media doesn’t bother to spell it out. It all becomes “where there’s smoke there’s fire” to many in the public. It destroys people and it needs to be batted back when we get the opportunity.
Somewhere over the last day or so someone remarked that the Masters of the Universe meeting in Davos, Switzerland seem utterly unremarkable. That is, judging by the lack of fresh ideas floating around the ultra-rich conclave. On what to do about fanatical populism spreading across the globe, they’ve got worries but otherwise nothin’, according to Nahal Toosi, Politico’s senior foreign affairs correspondent:
In conversation after conversation here, I detected resignation and helplessness among business executives when it came to their counterparts in government. There’s a desperate desire to see the world’s political leaders appeal more to moderates instead of capitalizing on extremes, but there’s also recognition that the political market doesn’t easily reward the people in the middle.
C-suite types fear the polarization will only deepen as half of the global population, in more than 60 countries, votes in 2024 — everywhere from South Africa to the United States. For them, financial consequences can be stark, especially if the results of an election threaten shipping lanes or when campaign rhetoric leads to violence in a place they’ve invested.
“The biggest concern is instability,” the CEO of a private equity fund told me.
That would be financial instability, naturally. We’ve seen social instability before.
Oh, great googa-looga, can’t you hear me talking to you
Just a ball of confusion
Oh yeah, that’s what the world is today
Woo, hey
But even as they long for moderate forces to rise above the extremes, there appears to be little sense of how the business community can help make that happen. I kept asking for specific solutions that companies could offer to reduce societal polarization, but I received no concrete responses.
Election, elections everywhere this year, but the biggest concern is the prospect of Americans returning Donald Trump to the White House in 2025 to finish the job he started in 2017. And to finish off NATO.
Corporate leaders are reading closely about the Republican frontrunner’s views on tariffs and other economic practices, which are far more isolationist than even the relatively cautious Joe Biden. Whichever way the United States is heading will affect the policies of other governments, leading business executives to ask some very basic questions.
“It’s something as simple as this: Many businesses we have operate across borders. Is a country for or against free trade?” the private equity fund CEO said.
Consumers’ fate seemed less a concern than producers’ bottom lines, although the two are intimately interwoven.
The coats are oversized, and so are the egos.
And so, in some cases, is the sense of self-pity. In this rarefied environment, I was told that it doesn’t help to be a billionaire, millionaire or merely very rich when it comes to the political environment these days.
After all, actors on both the far left and far right of the political spectrum have anger toward the rich gathered here in Davos, often blaming them for the world’s ills.
“The right says everyone is under threat. The left says the capitalist system is exploitative,” the consumer goods company CEO said.
Biden administration spokesmen Secretary of State Antony Blinken and national security adviser Jake Sullivan stuck to safe talking points. Businessmen worry that if the Biden administration is gone in 2025, the Inflation Reduction Act will go with it, and their long-term contracts and ROI. One private equity CEO tells Toosi, “very few people have priced in the risk of Trump coming back” into their models.
At the World Economic Forum, they worry about lining their pockets while in Gaza people cannot fill their stomachs, or their children’s. And the executives wonder why “the far right and the ultra left see them as an enemy.” So far removed, allies they are not:
The US claims it is working “relentlessly” to get humanitarian aid into Gaza amid UN warnings that the territory’s 2.2 million people are “highly food insecure and at risk of famine”.
Antony Blinken, speaking at Davos this week, called the situation in Gaza “gut-wrenching”. But the US secretary of state was unable to secure any major new gains on increasing the amount of assistance entering the territory during his recent visit to Israel, even as leaders of international organizations advocate for urgent access.
“People in Gaza risk dying of hunger just miles from trucks filled with food,” Cindy McCain, executive director of the WFP, said in a statement.
Let me hear ya, let me hear ya, let me hear ya
Sayin’, ball of confusion
That’s what the world is today, hey, hey
Let me hear ya, let me hear ya, let me hear ya, let me hear ya, let me hear ya
Ball of confusion
An online acquaintance once belonged to the Democracy Alliance, a gaggle of liberal millionaire/billionaires formed in 2005 as a lefty counterpart to the Koch donor network. Yes, they’ve done some things to advance the cause, as Michael Tomasky notes below. But conservative moneybags are long-term political investors willing to sink hundreds of millions in media outlets to bend the country’s will over time to theirs. Rich liberals tend to eschew deferring gratification in favor of near-term electoral wins. They want trophies they they can show off to friends the way congressman pose for photos in front of new destroyers. IIRC, my friend left Democracy Alliance in frustration over that, and later the country.
Michael Tomasky opines on David Smith’s purchase of The Baltimore Sun at The New Republic:
But this column isn’t about the Sun and Smith. In fact, I applaud Smith and Sinclair in one, and only one, respect. They get it. They understand how important media ownership is. They are hardly alone among right-wing megawealthy types. Of course there’s Rupert Murdoch, but there are more. There’s the late Reverend Sun Myung Moon, who, after he got rich from his Unification Church, sprouted media properties, most notably The Washington Times, still owned by the church’s News World Communications (once upon a quaint old time, it was shocking that the conservative newspaper in the nation’s capital was started by a cult). And Philip Anschutz, whose Clarity Media Group started the tabloid newspaper The Washington Examiner in 2005. These days, the list includes Elon Musk with X/Twitter, Peter Thiel and Senator J.D. Vance with Rumble (a right-wing YouTube alternative), Ye with his attempted purchase of the now-defunct Parler, and, of course, Donald Trump, with Truth Social. They all understand what Viktor Orbán told the Conservative Political Action Conference in 2022: “Have your own media.” Shows like Tucker Carlson’s old Fox show, the Hungarian strongman said, “should be broadcast day and night.”
I’ve been watching this develop for decades. The right-wing media was a thing long ago, but it was still easily drowned out by the mainstream media. If the mainstream media was a beach ball, the right-wing media was a table tennis ball.
Today? The mainstream media, with cuts like those endured by the Sun, is maybe a volleyball, and the right-wing media is a basketball—a little bigger. And it’s on its way to beach-ball-hood. The right-wing media is now the agenda-setting media in this country, and it’s only getting bigger and more influential every year.
And how have the country’s politically engaged liberal billionaires responded to this? By doing roughly nothing.
The right plays a long game. Read “Democracy in Chains.”
Nonprofit media such as ProPublica do impressive work, but as nonprofits IRS rules require they be nonpartisan at a time when money-losing media outlets owned by right-wing ideologues labor under no such limits. The right’s media machine is loud and proud. We once called it The Mighty Wurlitzer.
The Democracy Alliance was started to grow a countervailing progressive infrastructure, Tomasky explains:
It helped seed the Center for American Progress, designed as liberalism’s answer to the Heritage Foundation. It helped grow groups like the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. On the media front, it funded Media Matters for America, the broad left’s leading media watchdog outfit.
But there is one job liberal benefactors have refused to take on (with a few exceptions, starting with the owner of this very magazine). The cost has been enormous. And by the way—this story isn’t over. By a long shot. I’m certain David Smith wants to buy more struggling newspapers and turn them into MAGA sheets. And there are surely mini-Sinclairs in formation. Prager University’s right-wing misinformation videos are gaining a foothold in some public schools. Right-wing outlets have zero interest in sharing the “media space” with the mainstream media. They want to crush it.
[…]
What will the result be 20 years from now? Will we be raising a generation of children in two-thirds of the country who believe that fossil fuels are great and trees cause pollution, that slavery wasn’t the cause of the Civil War, that tax cuts always raise revenue, and that the “Democrat” Party stole the 2020 election? Yes, we will. And it will happen because too many people on the liberal side refused to grasp what Murdoch, Anschutz, Smith, and Viktor Orbán see so clearly. Have your own media.
Digby founded Hullabaloo. Josh Marshall has Talking Point Memo. Markos and Co. still have Daily Kos. None of us own daily newspapers or TV channels or have the means for buying any. Air America (March 2004) began as a broadcast alternative to right-wing talk that dominates radio across red states. Funding was always tenuous. Competing for broadcast space against conservative networks with more powerful stations, it lasted barely six years before folding. * Conservative ideologues don’t expect their partisan ventures to make money. And they offset their losses by purchasing networks of stations that do.
The left cannot give up the Enlightenment notion that the truth will set us free, that truths are self-evident, as the Declaration says. Give people the facts and, as rational beings, they’ll reach the same conclusions as ours. Uh-huh. Or the notion that people [grinds teeth] should vote their best interests as the left defines them. Or that our self-evident ideas sell themselves. They don’t. There’s an entire industry named for a street in Manhattan that spends billions to market consumer products. Democrats resist spending to sell their ideas.
*Some friends and I once produced and ran progressive 30-second radio commercials in our rural-ish market for diddly-squat just to demonstrate that that could be done for small money. Just because we couldn’t compete with the Limbaughs minute for minute and hour for hour was no reason to forfeit the airwaves to them.