Some more good news. Are people starting to hear it? The Federal Reserve’s go-to inflation gauge held at 2.5% in July, Commerce Department data showed Friday. That’s better than anticipated and shows progress — but still underscores the bumpy process for inflation’s descent. Friday’s report also reaffirmed that the backbone of the US economy — the consumer — is still holding strong, although their piggy banks are getting lighter. Spending was up by 0.5%, or 0.4% when adjusted for inflation, landing above expectations for the month when car dealerships were back in gear after a massive software outage in June and when Amazon puts on its annual Prime Day sales event. The Personal Consumption Expenditures price index, which the Fed uses for its 2% target rate, was 2.5% for the year ended in July, unchanged from June. On a monthly basis, prices increased 0.2% versus 0.1% the prior month. The latest inflation reading, which served as further confirmation that the pace of price hikes is sustainably cooling, comes just weeks before the Fed is expected to start easing monetary policy and cutting interest rates.
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What? I honestly don’t know what to say about the NY Times anymore. It just gets worse and worse. There are obviously some great reporters there and they do some incredible work. But this kind of stuff is just killing their credibility. America’s gaping shortage of affordable housing has rocketed to the top of voter worry lists and to the forefront of campaign promises, as both the Democratic nominee, Kamala Harris, and the Republican candidate, Donald J. Trump, promise to fix the problem if they are elected. Their two visions of how to solve America’s affordable housing shortage have little in common, and Ms. Harris’s plan is far more detailed. But they do share one quality: Both have drawn skepticism from outside economists. NY Times Pitchbot couldn’t have said it better. In fact, only one of them is an actual policy while the other one is a xenophobic wet dream disguised as one. To even compare them is absurd, Ms. Harris is promising a cocktail of tax cuts meant to spur home construction — which several economists said could help create supply.
You probably have to be Jewish to appreciate the full and bitter irony of this sentence: Nearly 11 months into a devastating war, a serious new challenge has emerged in Gaza: polio. Growing up, there were two uncontested heroes in the Jewish-American pantheon: Sandy Koufax and Jonas Salk. If you were really in the know, you’d add a third: Albert Sabin. Salk invented the polio vaccine, Sabin invented the oral polio vaccine. Now Israel has contributed an entirely new entry to the history of polio. It almost reads like a fable from Jewish literature. Except it’s not.
Trump actually posted this on Truth Social: He’s said and done a LOT of disgusting things in his short political career. But this may be the worst. He and his republive minions are out there every day on social media pushing the lie that Harris slept her way to the top. I know I don’t really have to say this but it’s important. She had a relationship with Willie Brown, the Speaker of the state assembly for about a year in the mid 90s when she was a prosecutor in Alameda County. He recommended her for a job on the unemployment appeals board.( I don’t think that’s quite the stepping stone to power people what you to believe.) Then she went to work for the San Francisco DA’s office and the San Francisco City Attorney, ran for San Francisco DA and she won. Twice. After that she ran for Attorney General of California and she also won twice. After that she ran for the Senate and won and then ran for VP and won. She has been an elected official for over 2 decades. Unless she gave blow jobs to millions of voters, she did not sleep her way to the top. It’s absurd. There’s more here. Ugh.
I was on the The Nicole Sandler Show show as RFK Jr.’s brain worm. I was going to add photos of the people and articles that I was referring too, because as bizarre at all these stories sound, I WAS NOT MAKING THEM UP! I decided to just list the articles below in case anyone wants to know more details. These are Real Headlines Written by Actual Humans about RFK Jr. in a new segment I’m calling RFK Jr.’s Brain Worm News. (The graphic is from an actual article on brain worms from ABC News, Australia that said, “headlines about brain worms can be alarming.” but adds, “..here are ways you can minimize your risks of being infected with one.” ) When I talked about how Dave, RFK Jr’s brain worm, would be advising Trump on loyalty and cabinet positions I was talking about John McEntee, Trump’s body man during the 2016 campaign is currently working on HR for the Trump campaign.
The more Trump and Vance run from weird, the more they own it No, the Republicans’ vice-presidential nominee is not weird. Not weird at all: JD Vance, the Republican vice-presidential candidate and US senator from Ohio, attacked teachers who do not have children in newly resurfaced remarks from 2021. In the resurfaced clip, Vance, who was speaking at a forum held by the Center for Christian Virtue, attacks “leaders on the left” and Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, for not having children. “So many of the leaders of the left, and I hate to be so personal about this, but they’re people without kids trying to brainwash the minds of our children, that really disorients me and disturbs me,” Vance can be heard saying in the clip. “Randi Weingarten, who’s the head of the most powerful teachers’ union in the country, she doesn’t have a single child. If she wants to brainwash and destroy the minds of children, she should have some of her own and leave ours the hell alone.” Weingarten is gay, married, and a stepmother to two daughters. Oh, and Vance?
Josh Marshall on the Arlington scandal is really good. He makes the important point that the whole thing was designed as a campaign stunt to make Harris look bad for supposedly failing to honor the dead. We all know how that worked out: Three days ago, the Trump campaign held a campaign event at Arlington National Cemetery. The idea was to lay a wreath honoring the 13 members of the U.S. military who were killed during the evacuation of Kabul in 2021 and film a political ad. They would distribute the video and attack Vice President Harris and President Biden for not “showing up” for their campaign event, which they sought to portray was an established memorial. As soon as the video circulated, military policy experts I know said right off the bat they were shocked that the campaign had been allowed to hold a campaign event on the grounds of the cemetery and circulate video of it. It isn’t just unseemly. It’s against the law. How were they allowed to do that? That turned out to be a good and prescient question.
And he called them “haters.”
Notice he didn’t actually say he would vote for it but either way you can see what quicksand this is for him. He went out to speak to his rally goers shortly thereafter and complained about the “horrible” interview he just had to give. Anti-abortion zealot Lila Rose is backing Trump into a corner. She spoke to Politico: For years, the anti-abortion activist Lila Rose has pushed the GOP to curtail access to abortion. But now, as Donald Trump and his running mate JD Vance conspicuously soften their abortion message ahead of the November election, Rose — who leads the prominent anti-abortion group Live Action — is embracing a more radical strategy: Urging her followers not to vote for Trump unless he changes course. You’ve been arguing online that Trump and Vance’s position on abortion has made it “impossible” for anti-abortion voters to support them. What was the breaking point for you? [My] direct quote is that “they’re making it impossible” for us. This is an active thing.
The Gallup poll shows that voter enthusiasm is higher than it’s been since 2008. (That was a very good year for Democrats, by the way.) Guess why? It’s the Democrats. Democrats’ current level of enthusiasm is one percentage point shy of the group’s high in Gallup’s trend since 2000. That was the 79% measured in February 2008, when Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton were engaged in a spirited battle for the party’s presidential nomination. Enthusiasm subsided later that year, but by the end of the campaign, consistently more than seven in 10 said they were more enthusiastic than usual about voting. Democratic enthusiasm was also elevated during the 2004 and 2020 presidential campaigns. I’d rather be the Democrats than the Republicans….