Oct 7, 2023
Steve Shives
Ever notice how the "anti-PC" folks are very interested in policing your language, as they require adherence to their own brand of PC? Just a thought.
That Nice Blond Lady
... is a fucking Nazi.
I don't know specifically that you're a dog-ass Nazi dickhead, ma'am. But I do know there's a whole fuck load of dog-ass Nazi dickheads who're sure you're one their own.
The Bidening Continues
And of course the Press Poodle (Catherine Rampell) has to throw a little shade and remind us that presidents don't really, directly, all-that-much, maybe-it's something-else, get the credit for good economic news - even when it's astonishingly good news, and makes the doom-n-gloom gang look like total dopes. She just can't bring herself to say straight out that after decades of fucked up Republican policy decisions, Biden and the Dems are proving government can work, and have positive effects on the lives of regular everyday Americans.
At least she didn't leave the usual shitty aftertaste of "Yeah but it's prob'ly not good news for the Democrats in the long run".
Fuck 'em - take the W, Mikey.
Opinion
3 milestones from a stunning jobs report
The U.S. economy added nearly twice as many jobs in September as economists had forecast, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. And that’s before you consider how much job growth was revised upward in July and August. All in all, it was an astonishingly good report.
Three milestones in particular are worth celebrating:
1. Raise a glass
When covid hit, the shuttering of businesses around the country and reluctance of consumers to dine out eliminated about half the jobs across the industry. That is, between February and April 2020, about 6 million restaurant and bar jobs vanished.
Even as the economy reopened, these employers struggled to hire back workers. Some longtime food services workers had decided to leave the business altogether, trading up to better-paying or more humane positions. Some jumped from employer to employer amid the bidding war for staff. Declines in immigration — owing to pandemic-era policies and the Trump administration’s broader sabotage of immigration processing — hurt the industry as well, since foreign-born workers make up about a fifth of the sector’s jobs.
But bars and restaurants have steadily been recovering, and as of last month, employment levels were finally back to where then were in February 2020. It probably helps that more people are joining the labor force and immigration has largely normalized.
2. A boon for public-sector workers
Public-sector employment also took a hit early in the pandemic. The sector overall has finally recovered all the jobs lost, though that milestone is entirely driven by growth in the federal government.
State and local governments are still deeply in the hole. Hence all those headlines about shortages of teachers, bus drivers, cops, corrections officers, etc.
To be clear, state and local governments have lots of vacancies but are struggling to fill them. This is the result of a collection of factors. The sector’s disproportionately older workforce is aging into retirement, for instance. Amid high inflation, wages in the private sector have risen much faster than those in the public sector (which already paid less for many equivalent roles). Some government jobs (public health, education, elections, policing) have also grown much more stressful in recent years.
3. They can do it
Despite all those warnings about a “she-cession” setting working women back a generation, working women seem to be doing better than ever. After some stagnation in women’s employment early in the 21st century, women ages 25 to 54 are more likely to be working today than at any previous time in history. This is thanks partly to demographic changes, partly to changing social norms and partly to changing working conditions.
The same milestone is not true of men. Prime-age men’s labor force participation is back to where it was pre-pandemic, but longer-term, it’s been trending downward.
So: Does President Biden deserve credit for these remarkable numbers?
In his remarks Friday afternoon, he certainly claimed as much, saying, “It’s Bidenomics, growing the economy from the middle-out, bottom-up, not the top down.” In truth, presidents have very limited control over economic conditions, but since he gets blamed for the bad things no matter what, it’s hard to chastise him for taking credit for the good ones.
To the extent “Bidenomics” is primarily about manufacturing and industrial policy, though, its fingerprints are not terribly visible in data so far.
When Biden spoke in celebration of the robust hiring numbers, manufacturing was the one and only sector he called out by name. The same was true last month. But the recent hiring numbers show very little growth in the sector, even before taking into account the work stoppages related to the United Auto Workers’ strike. (If the strike had begun earlier in the month, the report might well have shown job losses rather than gains in the sector.) And over a longer-term horizon, manufacturing job growth since the pandemic began has been weaker than that in the rest of the economy. Other metrics suggest the sector has been contracting for the past 11 consecutive months.
But on the other hand: Claims that Biden is somehow discouraging Americans writ large from working, or otherwise hamstringing employers, are nowhere evident in the data. Employers are hiring, and Americans are ready to work.
The U.S. economy added nearly twice as many jobs in September as economists had forecast, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. And that’s before you consider how much job growth was revised upward in July and August. All in all, it was an astonishingly good report.
Three milestones in particular are worth celebrating:
1. Raise a glass
When covid hit, the shuttering of businesses around the country and reluctance of consumers to dine out eliminated about half the jobs across the industry. That is, between February and April 2020, about 6 million restaurant and bar jobs vanished.
Even as the economy reopened, these employers struggled to hire back workers. Some longtime food services workers had decided to leave the business altogether, trading up to better-paying or more humane positions. Some jumped from employer to employer amid the bidding war for staff. Declines in immigration — owing to pandemic-era policies and the Trump administration’s broader sabotage of immigration processing — hurt the industry as well, since foreign-born workers make up about a fifth of the sector’s jobs.
But bars and restaurants have steadily been recovering, and as of last month, employment levels were finally back to where then were in February 2020. It probably helps that more people are joining the labor force and immigration has largely normalized.
2. A boon for public-sector workers
Public-sector employment also took a hit early in the pandemic. The sector overall has finally recovered all the jobs lost, though that milestone is entirely driven by growth in the federal government.
State and local governments are still deeply in the hole. Hence all those headlines about shortages of teachers, bus drivers, cops, corrections officers, etc.
To be clear, state and local governments have lots of vacancies but are struggling to fill them. This is the result of a collection of factors. The sector’s disproportionately older workforce is aging into retirement, for instance. Amid high inflation, wages in the private sector have risen much faster than those in the public sector (which already paid less for many equivalent roles). Some government jobs (public health, education, elections, policing) have also grown much more stressful in recent years.
3. They can do it
The same milestone is not true of men. Prime-age men’s labor force participation is back to where it was pre-pandemic, but longer-term, it’s been trending downward.
So: Does President Biden deserve credit for these remarkable numbers?
In his remarks Friday afternoon, he certainly claimed as much, saying, “It’s Bidenomics, growing the economy from the middle-out, bottom-up, not the top down.” In truth, presidents have very limited control over economic conditions, but since he gets blamed for the bad things no matter what, it’s hard to chastise him for taking credit for the good ones.
To the extent “Bidenomics” is primarily about manufacturing and industrial policy, though, its fingerprints are not terribly visible in data so far.
When Biden spoke in celebration of the robust hiring numbers, manufacturing was the one and only sector he called out by name. The same was true last month. But the recent hiring numbers show very little growth in the sector, even before taking into account the work stoppages related to the United Auto Workers’ strike. (If the strike had begun earlier in the month, the report might well have shown job losses rather than gains in the sector.) And over a longer-term horizon, manufacturing job growth since the pandemic began has been weaker than that in the rest of the economy. Other metrics suggest the sector has been contracting for the past 11 consecutive months.
But on the other hand: Claims that Biden is somehow discouraging Americans writ large from working, or otherwise hamstringing employers, are nowhere evident in the data. Employers are hiring, and Americans are ready to work.
Oct 6, 2023
Today's Obit
Dick Butkus, December 9, 1942 - October 5, 2023
I got to see him play one time, in a preseason game in 1971 at Mile High Stadium. He was coming off knee surgery, and I remember thinking he didn't look very sharp. He was only in for a few series that night, and he'd be out of the game in another 2 years.
Butkus was a hero for me, he's one of the main reasons I fell in love with football, and a big reason I've always been kinda partial to the Bears.
More Worser
I realize he may actually have a case to make for him being able to blab anything he wants to blab, to anyone he wants to blab it to - while he's POTUS.
But I need somebody to explain to me why this prick is walkin' around free right now.
Soon after leaving office, the former president shared sensitive information about American submarines with a billionaire member of Mar-a-Lago, according to people familiar with the matter.
Shortly after he left office, former President Donald J. Trump shared apparently classified information about American nuclear submarines with an Australian businessman during an evening of conversation at Mar-a-Lago, his private club and residence in Florida, according to two people familiar with the matter.
The businessman, Anthony Pratt, a billionaire member of Mar-a-Lago who runs one of the world’s largest cardboard companies, went on to share the sensitive details about the submarines with several others, the people said. Mr. Trump’s disclosures, they said, potentially endangered the U.S. nuclear fleet.
Federal prosecutors working for the special counsel, Jack Smith, learned about Mr. Trump’s disclosures of the secrets to Mr. Pratt, which were first revealed by ABC News, and interviewed him as part of their investigation into the former president’s handling of classified documents, the people said.
According to another person familiar with the matter, Mr. Pratt is now among more than 80 people whom prosecutors have identified as possible witnesses who could testify against Mr. Trump at the classified documents trial, which is scheduled to start in May in Federal District Court in Fort Pierce, Fla.
Mr. Pratt’s name does not appear in the indictment accusing Mr. Trump of illegally holding on to nearly three dozen classified documents after he left office and then conspiring with two of his aides at Mar-a-Lago to obstruct the government’s attempts to get them back.
But the account that Mr. Trump discussed some of the country’s most sensitive nuclear secrets with him in a cavalier fashion could help prosecutors establish that the former president had a long habit of recklessly handling classified information.
And the existence of the testimony about the conversation underscores how much additional information the special prosecutor’s office may have amassed out of the public’s view.
During his talk with Mr. Pratt, Mr. Trump revealed at least two pieces of critical information about the U.S. submarines’ tactical capacities, according to the people familiar with the matter. Those included how many nuclear warheads the vessels carried and how close they could get to their Russian counterparts without being detected.
It does not appear that Mr. Trump showed Mr. Pratt any of the classified documents that he had been keeping at Mar-a-Lago. In August last year, the F.B.I. carried out a court-approved search warrant at the property and hauled away more than 100 documents containing national security secrets, including some that bore the country’s most sensitive classification markings.
Mr. Trump had earlier returned hundreds of other documents he had taken with him from the White House, some in response to a subpoena.
A spokesman for Mr. Trump did not immediately respond to a request for comment. A spokesman for Mr. Smith declined to comment. Representatives for Mr. Pratt did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Even though Mr. Pratt has been interviewed by prosecutors, the people familiar with the matter said, it remained unclear whether Mr. Trump was merely blustering or exaggerating in his conversation with him.
Joe Hockey, a former Australian ambassador to the United States, sought to play down Mr. Trump’s disclosures to Mr. Pratt in a phone interview on Thursday.
“If that’s all that was discussed, we already know all that,” Mr. Hockey said. “We have had Australians serving with Americans on U.S. submarines for years, and we share the same technology and the same weapons as the U.S. Navy.”
Still, Mr. Trump has been known to share classified information verbally on other occasions. During an Oval Office meeting in 2017 shortly after he fired the F.B.I. director James B. Comey, Mr. Trump revealed sensitive classified intelligence to two Russian officials, according to people briefed on the matter.
Well into his presidency, he also posted on X, formerly known as Twitter, a classified photo of an Iranian launch site.
The indictment in the documents case also accused Mr. Trump of showing a classified battle plan to attack Iran to a group of visitors to his club in Bedminster, N.J. Prosecutors claim that a recording of the meeting with the visitors depicts Mr. Trump as describing the document he brandished as “secret.”
Mr. Trump has not had access to more updated U.S. intelligence since leaving the presidency; President Biden cut off the briefings that former presidents traditionally get when Mr. Trump left office in the wake of Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn the election and the attack on the Capitol by a pro-Trump mob on Jan. 6, 2021.
“I just think that there is no need for him to have the intelligence briefings,” Mr. Biden said at the time.
“What value is giving him an intelligence briefing?” he said. “What impact does he have at all, other than the fact he might slip and say something?”
Mr. Trump’s interactions with Mr. Pratt appear to fit a pattern of the former president’s collapsing his public office and its secrets into his private interests.
Mr. Pratt cultivated a relationship with Mr. Trump once he became president. He joined Mar-a-Lago in 2017, then was invited to a state dinner and had Mr. Trump join him at one of his company’s plants in Ohio.
Spark It Up
He won't stop on his own. He won't be stopped by the people around him - or the ones who may only be tangential to his "positions", but who see an opportunity to benefit from the shit he's doing.
Since forever, this shit ends in one of only two ways
- The normal people get their heads outa their asses and push the Overton Window back to where it belongs before it's too late
- Smoke and ash and blood and misery
Today's Beau
Republicans are leaning hard into this authoritarian strong man shit, so if they can torpedo Ukraine, then Putin looks good, and Republicans get to crow about how "right" they've been on social media, which gets them more and bigger donations, and more and bigger power.
These assholes watch a movie where the morality proposition is clearly stated and easy to understand, and then get their panties all knotted up when Jimmy Stewart and John Wayne throw in together to knock off Liberty Valance.
Today's Brian
- Key point 1: Don't sell these idiots short when it comes to doing the dumbest thing possible.
- Key point 2: We're almost half way thru the Congressional term, and Republicans can't figure out who they want for Speaker.
- Key point 3: Don't dismiss the probability that this is just more of the intentional chaos and dysfunction they love to hit us with as they try to tear it all down.
Oct 5, 2023
Today's Occam's Razor
When the whole world is calling you a crook,
one thing you have to stop and consider is that
maybe you're a fucking crook.
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