I wonder if we can turn this shit around before we completely crash and burn.
Oct 9, 2024
A Little Science
Hurricanes are fueled by warm water. Warmer ocean water means more powerful storms, that don't dissipate as much or as quickly once they make landfall, plus they move slower, plus they can pick up even more water from a warmer atmosphere - so they dump more rain, and wash your ass away.
Hey, MAGA - stop voting for people who're purposefully ignoring the main cause of the storms that are getting you killed, and then cutting off the aid you need to recover.
Today's TweeXt
Trump tried the podcast move, and it didn't go quite the way he needed it to go.
HAHAHA! Donald Trump got LAUGHED AT when he said “I’m basically a truthful person” on a podcast. Trump is a pathological liar and makes up stuff all day every day. He’s a total fraud! pic.twitter.com/iZzdsnMzrO
— Harry Sisson (@harryjsisson) October 9, 2024
Today's Belle
Comparing economic plans.
- With Yacht-Buyer tax cuts, and tariffs, and whatever other magical thing he pulls out of Kevin Roberts's ass, the average amount he'd add to the debt is $7.5T
- It could be as low as $1.5T
- Or as high as $15.2T
The Harris Plan:
- Middle class tax cuts, tax hike on >$450K, small business help, home-buyer help, etc, the average average amount she'd add to the debt is $3.5T
- It could be as low as $0
- Or as high as $8.1T
Here's the ProPublica piece she mentioned (from Jan 2021):
The “King of Debt” promised to reduce the national debt — then his tax cuts made it surge. Add in the pandemic, and he oversaw the third-biggest deficit increase of any president.
One of President Donald Trump’s lesser known but profoundly damaging legacies will be the explosive rise in the national debt that occurred on his watch. The financial burden that he’s inflicted on our government will wreak havoc for decades, saddling our kids and grandkids with debt.
The national debt has risen by almost $7.8 trillion during Trump’s time in office. That’s nearly twice as much as what Americans owe on student loans, car loans, credit cards and every other type of debt other than mortgages, combined, according to data from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. It amounts to about $23,500 in new federal debt for every person in the country.
The growth in the annual deficit under Trump ranks as the third-biggest increase, relative to the size of the economy, of any U.S. presidential administration, according to a calculation by a leading Washington budget maven, Eugene Steuerle, co-founder of the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center. And unlike George W. Bush and Abraham Lincoln, who oversaw the larger relative increases in deficits, Trump did not launch two foreign conflicts or have to pay for a civil war.
Economists agree that we needed massive deficit spending during the COVID-19 crisis to ward off an economic cataclysm, but federal finances under Trump had become dire even before the pandemic. That happened even though the economy was booming and unemployment was at historically low levels. By the Trump administration’s own description, the pre-pandemic national debt level was already a “crisis” and a “grave threat.”
The combination of Trump’s 2017 tax cut and the lack of any serious spending restraint helped both the deficit and the debt soar. So when the once-in-a-lifetime viral disaster slammed our country and we threw more than $3 trillion into COVID-19-related stimulus, there was no longer any margin for error.
Our national debt has reached immense levels relative to our economy, nearly as high as it was at the end of World War II. But unlike 75 years ago, the massive financial overhang from Medicare and Social Security will make it dramatically more difficult to dig ourselves out of the debt ditch.
Falling deeper into the red is the opposite of what Trump, the self-styled “King of Debt,” said would happen if he became president. In a March 31, 2016, interview with Bob Woodward and Robert Costa of The Washington Post, Trump said he could pay down the national debt, then about $19 trillion, “over a period of eight years” by renegotiating trade deals and spurring economic growth.
After he took office, Trump predicted that economic growth created by the 2017 tax cut, combined with the proceeds from the tariffs he imposed on a wide range of goods from numerous countries, would help eliminate the budget deficit and let the U.S. begin to pay down its debt. On July 27, 2018, he told Sean Hannity of Fox News: “We have $21 trillion in debt. When this [the 2017 tax cut] really kicks in, we’ll start paying off that debt like it’s water.”
Nine days later, he tweeted, “Because of Tariffs we will be able to start paying down large amounts of the $21 trillion in debt that has been accumulated, much by the Obama Administration.”
That’s not how it played out. When Trump took office in January 2017, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office was projecting that federal budget deficits would be 2% to 3% of our gross domestic product during Trump’s term. Instead, the deficit reached nearly 4% of gross domestic product in 2018 and 4.6% in 2019.
There were multiple culprits. Trump’s tax cuts, especially the sharp reduction in the corporate tax rate to 21% from 35%, took a big bite out of federal revenue. The CBO estimated in 2018 that the tax cut would increase deficits by about $1.9 trillion over 11 years.
Meanwhile, Trump’s claim that increased revenue from the tariffs would help eliminate (or at least reduce) our national debt hasn’t panned out. In 2018, Trump’s administration began hiking tariffs on aluminum, steel and many other products, launching what became a global trade war with China, the European Union and other countries.
The tariffs did bring in additional revenue. In fiscal 2019, they netted about $71 billion, up about $36 billion from President Barack Obama’s last year in office. But although $36 billion is a lot of money, it’s less than 1/750th of the national debt. That $36 billion could have covered a bit more than three weeks of interest on the national debt — that is, had Trump not unilaterally decided to send a chunk of the tariff revenue to farmers affected by his trade wars. Businesses that struggled as a result of the tariffs also paid fewer taxes, offsetting some of the increased tariff revenue.
By early 2019, the national debt had climbed to $22 trillion. Trump’s budget proposal for 2020 called it a “grave threat to our economic and societal prosperity” and asserted that the U.S. was experiencing a “national debt crisis.” However, that same budget proposal included substantial growth in the national debt.
By the end of 2019, the debt had risen to $23.2 trillion and more federal officials were sounding the alarm. “Not since World War II has the country seen deficits during times of low unemployment that are as large as those that we project — nor, in the past century, has it experienced large deficits for as long as we project,” Phillip Swagel, director of the CBO, said in January 2020.
Weeks later, COVID-19 erupted and made the financial situation far worse. As of Dec. 31, 2020, the national debt had jumped to $27.75 trillion, up 39% from $19.95 trillion when Trump was sworn in. The government ended its 2020 fiscal year with the portion of the national debt owed to investors, the metric favored by the CBO, at around 100% of GDP. The CBO had predicted less than a year earlier that it would take until 2030 to reach that approximate level of debt. Including the trillions owed to various governmental trust funds, the total debt is now about 130% of GDP.
Normally, this is where we’d give you Trump’s version of events. But we couldn’t get anyone to give us Trump’s side. Judd Deere, a White House spokesman, referred us to the Office of Management and Budget, which is a branch of the White House.
OMB didn’t respond to our requests. The Treasury directed us to comments made by OMB director Russell Vought in October, in which he predicted that as the pandemic eases and economic growth rebounds, the “fiscal picture” will improve. The OMB blamed legislators for deficits when Trump submitted his proposed 2021 budget: “Unfortunately, the Congress continues to reject any efforts to restrain spending. Instead, they have greatly contributed to the continued ballooning of Federal debt and deficits, putting the Nation’s fiscal future at risk.”
Still, the deficit growth under Trump has been historic. Steuerle, of the Tax Policy Center, has done a comparison of every American president using a metric called the “primary deficit.” It’s defined as the deficit minus interest costs, because interest is the only budget expense that presidents and Congress can’t control unless they want to do the unthinkable and default on the debt. Steuerle examined the records of 45 presidents to see how the primary deficit had shrunk or grown relative to the size of the economy between the first and final years of each president’s administration.
Trump had the third-biggest primary deficit growth, 5.2% of GDP, behind only George W. Bush (11.7%) and Abraham Lincoln (9.4%). Bush, of course, not only passed a big tax cut, as Trump has, but also launched two wars, which greatly inflated the defense budget. Lincoln had to pay for the Civil War. By contrast, Trump’s wars have been almost entirely of the political variety.
Our national debt is now at its highest level relative to our economy since the end of World War II. After the war ended, the extraordinary military expenses disappeared, a postwar recovery began and the debt began to fall rapidly relative to the size of the economy.
But that’s not going to happen this time. When World War II ended 75 years ago, Social Security was in its infancy and Medicare didn’t exist. Today, many of our biggest and most rapidly growing expenses, especially Social Security and Medicare, are baked into the budget because of our nation’s aging population. These outlays are slated to rise sharply. Steuerle recently calculated that Social Security, health care and interest costs are projected to absorb 122% of the total growth in federal revenues from 2019 to 2030.
What’s more, our investment in the future — things like research and development, education, infrastructure, workforce training and such — is declining as a proportion of the budget. OMB data shows that in 1970, mandatory spending (such as Social Security and Medicare, but not including interest on the debt) and investment each made up around 30% of total federal spending. But as of 2019, the most recent available year, mandatory spending had doubled to around 61% of total federal spending while investment fell by more than half, to around 12.5%.
In addition to forcing us to reduce the proportion of the budget spent on the future to help pay for the past, there’s a second reason that huge and growing budget deficits matter: interest costs.
Bigger debt ultimately means bigger interest costs, even in an era when the Federal Reserve has forced down Treasury rates to ultralow levels. The government’s interest cost (including interest paid to government trust funds) was around $523 billion in the 2020 fiscal year. That outstrips all spending on education, employment training, research and social services, Treasury data shows.
Interest costs are way below where they’d be if the Fed hadn’t forced rates down to try to stimulate the economy and mitigate the impact of the pandemic. One-year Treasury securities cost taxpayers a minuscule 0.10% in interest at year-end, down from 1.59% at the end of 2019. The 10-year Treasury rate was 0.93%, down from 1.92%.
In late December, the Fed reported boosting its Treasury holdings by more than $2 trillion from a year earlier. The increase is primarily in longer-term securities. That has kept the federal government from having to raise trillions of dollars in the capital markets, and therefore has kept longer-term interest rates way below where they would otherwise be.
But unless something changes, even the Fed’s promise to keep interest rates near current levels for several years won’t fend off future problems. Most of the government’s borrowing to fund pandemic relief has been shorter-term borrowing that will have to be refinanced in the coming years. If rates rise, so will the government’s interest expense.
Even with rates where they are, interest on the debt is already going to be the fastest-growing budget category this decade, according to the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, which tracks the issue. Annual net interest costs are projected to double in 10 years and grow so large beyond 2030 that interest will become a driving factor in annual deficit growth, according to Peterson estimates.
Listen to what CBO Director Swagel had to say on the subject in a report to congressional Republicans in December: “Although the current low interest rates indicate that the debt is manageable for now and that the United States is not facing an immediate fiscal crisis, in which interest rates abruptly escalated or other disruptions occurred, the risk and potential budgetary consequences of such a crisis become greater over time.”
To deter violence, research suggests the best strategy is not harsh punishment for threats but a different tactic, one based on decades of interviews with mass shooters, political assassins and people who survived attacks: threat assessments.
Trump was asked about this risk during a virtual discussion with the Economic Club of New York last October. “If we have another stimulus bill out of Congress, are you worried that the entire amount of federal debt will be too large for us to pay off in a sensible way?” asked David Rubenstein, a private equity executive.
Trump answered by falsely claiming that the U.S. was starting to pay off the national debt before the pandemic, and he claimed that future economic growth would let it do so. “I think you’re going to see tremendous growth, David, and the growth is going to get it done,” Trump said.
Two months later, when Congress finally approved $900 billion of economic stimulus that is being financed with debt, Trump challenged Congress to spend — and borrow — even more. Then he went golfing.
Press Poodles
A few points:
- It ran for one day at WaPo
- Where the fuck was this, Bob?
- You've done this before - what were you waiting for this time?
5 key revelations from Bob Woodward’s new book
Trump, Putin, Biden, Netanyahu and other world leaders in secretive, off-the-cuff moments revealed in “War.”
Bob Woodward’s “War,” set to be released next week, is the author and Washington Post associate editor’s fourth book since Donald Trump’s upset victory in 2016.
The new book opens the aperture to reveal how a years-long political contest between Trump and President Joe Biden — and now Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee — has unfolded against the backdrop of cascading global crisis, from the coronavirus pandemic, to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, to the escalating conflict between Israel and Iran-backed proxies in the Middle East. At the book’s end, Woodward concludes that Biden, mistakes notwithstanding, has exhibited “steady and purposeful leadership,” while Trump has displayed recklessness and self-interest making him, in Woodward’s estimation, “unfit to lead the country.”
That determination is based on a series of key revelations. Below are some of the book’s main findings. Meanwhile, the Trump campaign issued a statement attacking the book and saying, “None of these made-up stories by Bob Woodward are true.”
1. Trump sent American-made coronavirus tests to Putin
When Trump was president in 2020, he sent coveted tests for the disease to Russian President Vladimir Putin during a crippling shortage in the United States and around the world.
As the book explains, Putin was petrified of contracting the deadly illness. He accepted the supplies but cautioned Trump not to reveal that he had shared them, concerned for the political fallout that the U.S. president would suffer.
“Please don’t tell anybody you sent these to me,” Putin said to Trump, according to Woodward.
Woodward reports that Trump’s reply was: “I don’t care. Fine.”
“War” also suggests that Trump and Putin may have spoken as many as seven times since Trump left the White House in 2021. On one occasion, this year, Trump sent an unnamed aide away from his office at his Mar-a-Lago Club so he could conduct a private phone call with Putin, according to the book.
A campaign official, Jason Miller, was evasive when Woodward asked him about the contact, eventually offering, “I have not heard that they’re talking, so I’d push back on that.”
2. Biden’s profanity-laced outbursts about Putin and Netanyahu
“War” portrays Biden as a careful and deliberate commander in chief, but combustible in private about intractable foreign leaders — especially Putin and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Biden called Putin the “epitome of evil” and remarked to his advisers, about his Russian counterpart, “That f---ing Putin.”
The intelligence community believed racial animus — namely the idea that Ukrainians were a lesser people than the Russians — was a significant factor in Putin’s designs on Ukraine, as “War” explains. The book quotes Avril Haines, the director of national intelligence, saying of Putin, “He is one of the most racist leaders that we have.”
Biden’s anger toward Netanyahu boiled over in the spring of 2024, Woodward reports, as Biden concluded that the Israeli prime minister’s interest was not actually in defeating Hamas but in protecting himself. “That son of a b----, Bibi Netanyahu, he’s a bad guy. He’s a bad f---ing guy!” Biden reportedly told advisers.
3. Harris’s two-track approach with Netanyahu
Harris delivered high-profile remarks after a July face-to-face meeting with Netanyahu, shortly after she became the presumptive Democratic nominee for president. She seemed to separate herself from Biden’s approach to Israel’s war in Gaza by speaking forcefully about the costs of the military campaign and pledging to “not be silent” about Palestinian suffering.
Her public tone surprised, and infuriated, Netanyahu because it marked a contrast with her more amicable approach during the private conversation the two had shared, Woodward reports. The book quotes the Israeli ambassador in Washington, Michael Herzog, saying: “She wants to be tough in public. But she wasn’t as tough privately.”
The episode is one of several in the book about Harris, who appears as a loyal No. 2 to Biden but hardly influential in major foreign policy decisions.
4. Frantic de-escalation in the face of possible Russian nuclear use
Woodward details some of the stunning intelligence capabilities that allowed Washington to foresee Russian plans for an all-out war against Ukraine in early 2022, including a human source inside the Kremlin.
This insight, however, got the Biden administration only so far as it sought to foreclose Russia’s nuclear option. In the fall of 2022, that option seemed like a live one, as U.S. intelligence agencies reported that Putin was seriously weighing use of a tactical nuclear weapon — at one point, assessing the likelihood at 50 percent.
An especially frantic quest to bring Moscow back from the brink came in October of that year, when Russia appeared to be laying the groundwork for escalation by accusing Ukraine of preparing to detonate a dirty bomb. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin flatly denied Russia’s accusations in a phone call with the Kremlin’s defense minister, Sergei Shoigu. Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national security adviser, instructed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s team to summon the International Atomic Energy Agency to absolve themselves immediately. And Biden called out Russia’s apparent scheme publicly while privately leaning on Chinese President Xi Jinping to emphasize to Putin the dire consequences of nuclear use.
5. The pervasive influence of the Saudi crown prince
Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, known by his initials MBS, is not a major figure in the book but looms large at critical junctures, with key assessments of him delivered by Democrats and Republicans alike.
Mohammed, currently the prime minister of Saudi Arabia, matters greatly as the de facto ruler of the Arab world’s wealthiest country. He cultivated close ties to Trump, who made Riyadh his first foreign stop as president. So, too, he has been crucial to matters of significant interest to Biden, especially oil supplies and the prospects of normalized relations with Israel.
Woodward summarized Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s perception of the crown prince this way: “MBS was nothing more than a spoiled child.”
One of the Saudi royal’s important interlocutors has been Sen. Lindsey Graham (S.C.). The Republican senator kept Biden’s aides apprised of Mohammed’s perspective on the possible normalization of relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel, according to Woodward, and also kept the gulf leader in communication with Trump. During a March visit to Saudi Arabia recounted in the book, Graham proposes to the crown prince that they call the Republican presidential candidate. Mohammed proceeds to conduct the conversation over speakerphone.
On an earlier trip, Graham had asked the crown prince to contact Sullivan, so the senator could inform them both about a discussion with Netanyahu.
“Hey, I’m here with Lindsey,” the Saudi royal reportedly announced to Sullivan over the phone.
Mr Olbermann would like a word.
And The Grift Goes On
Other than the usual crap about tearing down the institutions of The American Experiment, there's another reason Trump needs you to believe FEMA sucks and isn't doing what's needed.
It's right there. Right out in the open.
Oct 8, 2024
Turned Another'n
Fed up with MAGA bullshit, a former FL GOP Chair goes public for Harris.
Former Florida GOP chair backs Harris after Helene ‘trolling’
The former head of the Florida Republican Party said he’s supporting Vice President Harris after “trolling” from other Republicans over the federal government’s response to Hurricane Helene.
Al Cárdenas said in his appearance Monday on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” that natural disasters have “always been a bipartisan issue.”
“Both Democrats and Republicans have worked together to assist the people in harm’s way,” Cárdenas added. “Well, you know, the White House asked Congress to pass a bill to — a supplemental bill — to really help people with these disasters, because we may be running outta cash. All of a sudden, the trolling, the Trump operatives and everybody else started saying, ‘Well, they’re giving that money to illegal immigrants.’ Not true.”
Republicans, including former President Trump have gone after the federal response to Hurricane Helene. Last week, at a rally in Saginaw, Mich., the former president said the response “is going even worse” than Hurricane Katrina.
“A certain president, I will not name him, destroyed his reputation with Katrina,” Trump said of former President George W. Bush. “And this is going even worse. She’s doing even worse than he did.”
Cárdenas said in his appearance on “Morning Joe” that he believes “Harris and [Tim] Walz may not necessarily be my ideal ticket, but they’re not gonna put America in harm’s way.”
“And so I made an easy decision for me,” the former Sunshine State GOP head said.
By signing up, I agree to the Terms of Use, have reviewed the Privacy Policy, and to receive personalized offers and communications via email, on-site notifications, and targeted advertising using my email address from The Hill, Nexstar Media Inc., and its affiliates
It’s not surprising that Cárdenas would back Harris as he has been a critic of Trump in the past, once saying in a post on the social platform X back in 2018 that the president is “a despicable divider; the worse social poison to afflict our country in decades” in response to a campaign ad from Trump on immigration.
“This ad, and your full approval of it, will condemn you and your bigoted legacy forever in the annals of America’s history books,” Cárdenas continued in the post.
The Hill has reached out to the Republican National Committee and the Trump campaign.
The former head of the Florida Republican Party said he’s supporting Vice President Harris after “trolling” from other Republicans over the federal government’s response to Hurricane Helene.
Al Cárdenas said in his appearance Monday on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” that natural disasters have “always been a bipartisan issue.”
“Both Democrats and Republicans have worked together to assist the people in harm’s way,” Cárdenas added. “Well, you know, the White House asked Congress to pass a bill to — a supplemental bill — to really help people with these disasters, because we may be running outta cash. All of a sudden, the trolling, the Trump operatives and everybody else started saying, ‘Well, they’re giving that money to illegal immigrants.’ Not true.”
Republicans, including former President Trump have gone after the federal response to Hurricane Helene. Last week, at a rally in Saginaw, Mich., the former president said the response “is going even worse” than Hurricane Katrina.
“A certain president, I will not name him, destroyed his reputation with Katrina,” Trump said of former President George W. Bush. “And this is going even worse. She’s doing even worse than he did.”
Cárdenas said in his appearance on “Morning Joe” that he believes “Harris and [Tim] Walz may not necessarily be my ideal ticket, but they’re not gonna put America in harm’s way.”
“And so I made an easy decision for me,” the former Sunshine State GOP head said.
By signing up, I agree to the Terms of Use, have reviewed the Privacy Policy, and to receive personalized offers and communications via email, on-site notifications, and targeted advertising using my email address from The Hill, Nexstar Media Inc., and its affiliates
It’s not surprising that Cárdenas would back Harris as he has been a critic of Trump in the past, once saying in a post on the social platform X back in 2018 that the president is “a despicable divider; the worse social poison to afflict our country in decades” in response to a campaign ad from Trump on immigration.
“This ad, and your full approval of it, will condemn you and your bigoted legacy forever in the annals of America’s history books,” Cárdenas continued in the post.
The Hill has reached out to the Republican National Committee and the Trump campaign.
Ukraine Is The Key
Help Ukraine beat Putin
Which weakens Iran
Which weakens Hamas and the Houthis
Which removes a fair part of Netanyahu's rationale for holding power
Which eases tensions across the board in the middle east
All of which tells Xi he'd better watch his ass.
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