This is a very useful piece about the timing of good economic news from Bill Scher: Despite near-record low unemployment, respectable Gross Domestic Product growth, wages outpacing inflation, and disposable personal income rising, Joe Biden’s job approval numbers have been stuck in the low 40s. Even more perplexing, approval for his handling of the economy is usually a tick worse than his overall job approval. In turn, several commentators are openly wondering: Why hasn’t Biden gotten credit for the improving economy? But the better question is: How long does it take for any president to get credit for an improving economy? We don’t have a pat answer because every president’s economic circumstances differ. But we have evidence to suggest that credit does not come quickly. Ronald Reagan experienced a sharp recession early in his first term, from July 1981 to November 1982, with the unemployment rate peaking at 10.8 percent a month after the recession officially ended.
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Another GOP train wreck is coming to town They just can’t help themselves: Members of the House Freedom Caucus are making it harder for leadership to avoid a government shutdown, announcing on Monday that they’ll oppose a stopgap funding bill unless it caves to their terms. The HFC is demanding more funding for border enforcement, cuts to the Department of Justice and FBI, and an end to “woke” policies at the Department of Defense. “We refuse to support any such measure that continues Democrats’ bloated COVID-era spending and simultaneously fails to force the Biden Administration to follow the law and fulfill its most basic responsibilities,” they said in a statement. “Any support for a ‘clean’ Continuing Resolution would be an affirmation of the current FY 2023 spending level grossly increased by the lame-duck December 2022 omnibus spending bill that we all vehemently opposed just seven months ago.” Congress is unlikely to complete its work on appropriations bills by the deadline on Sept. 30, with leadership calling for a continuing resolution to provide themselves with more time.
We still don’t know what’s going on with him. This is an interesting discussion about it: He knows it all…
Thickly but not well enough Amanda Marcotte comments on the Roger Stone video that “The Beat with Ari Melber” on MSNBC has been reporting on this week. The show ran excerpts of video of Stone shot by Danish filmmaker Christoffer Guldbrandsen for “A Storm Foretold.” The clips provide further proof that the Trump plot to overturn the election did not arise from a “sincere” belief that the election was “stolen.” Marcotte writes: The video captures Stone’s aggravation at finding he’s been barred from speaking at Trump’s January 6th “Stop the Steal” rally at the Ellipse in Washington D.C. “I don’t understand how they want us to lead the march but can’t even tell us where to go,” Stone whines, adding that he’s not speaking directly to Rudy Giuliani or the rest of Trump’s inner circle. He complains that it’s “very clear that I was never on their list.” “It’s just childish and it’s amateurish. That’s why they lost.
Lie-lie-lie-lie-lie-lie-lie So, okay, Donald Trump is not being booked the day of the GOP debate (AP): Former President Donald Trump says he will surrender to authorities in Georgia on Thursday to face charges in the case accusing him of illegally scheming to overturn his 2020 election loss in the state. “Can you believe it? I’ll be going to Atlanta, Georgia, on Thursday to be ARRESTED,” Trump wrote on his social media network Monday night, hours after his bond was set at $200,000. This will be Trump’s fourth arrest since April. When defendants arrive at the building, they typically pass through a security checkpoint before checking in for formal booking in the lobby. During the booking process, defendants are typically photographed and fingerprinted and asked to provide certain personal information. Since Trump’s bond has already been set, he will be released from custody once the booking process is complete. Unlike in other jurisdictions, in Fulton County, arraignments — where a defendant first appears in court — are generally set after a defendant completes the booking process and do not happen on the same day.
They’re doubling down: Just two days after the Georgia indictment, one of Trump’s most enthusiastic backers took the stage at a conference in Missouri to again spread election misinformation. Mike Lindell, the owner of MyPillow who is a vocal promoter of the myth that the 2020 presidential election was stolen, kicked off an event on purported election crimes with a video about fraud. It included footage from November 2020 that purported to show a Fulton County, Georgia, election worker pulling a briefcase of ballots from under a desk to surreptitiously add them to the tally. As evidence has since shown, the worker, Ruby Freeman, was simply doing her job — pulling out a standard government container full of real ballots that had to be counted. Three different counts of the Georgia vote, including one by hand, showed the ballots were tallied properly and the results were accurate. But Freeman and her daughter, who also worked in the elections office that night, were targeted by Trump and his allies and accused of helping throw the election to Biden, compared to drug dealers and deluged with threats. The women testified before the congressional Jan.
Aka “I know you are but what am I” The following discussion is hardly anything new to those of you who’ve been following the netroots, blogs, online left, what-have-you for the past couple of decades. There was once an obsessive focus in those groups on “messaging” and how to combat what seemed to be the right’s mastery of the form. Nobody talks about it much anymore but it’s still an issue and this article is a decent reminder of that: By almost any measure, the struggle for political dominance in the US seems deadlocked between Republicans and Democrats. At times, the two parties resemble a pair of punch-drunk boxers, slugging away at one another in a contest that neither can end. But there is one political battleground where Republicans triumph virtually every time — and control of this arena could determine who wins the White House in 2024. Republicans are masters of verbal jiu-jitsu. It’s a form of linguistic combat in which the practitioner takes a political phrase or concept popularized by their opponent and gradually turns into an unusable slur.
“a friendlier Nazi Germany” Amanda Moore went undercover in late 2020 as a far-right extremist. She attended the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) and Turning Point USA’s Student Action Summit. By August 2021, she was attending a Proud Boys riot in Portland with a neo-Nazi. The far-right threat, Moore felt, was “misunderstood by much of the press and far more dangerous than what was being reported.” What began as an idea for a podcast and a couple of blog posts became an 11-month journey into the heart of American darkness. The press underestimates the white-nationalist threat because these groups are careful to conceal their real agenda. They work as congressional campaign staffers and work to form congressional caucuses, all while “meeting with leaders of far-right political parties in Italy and Hungary” and heading up local Young Republican clubs. “Some have worked hard to scrub themselves from the Internet or to curate their online personas; others operate in the shadows, so that people do not even know to look for them,” Moore explains in The Nation.
He’s full of it: Vivek Ramaswamy is once again Just Asking Questions about what happened on 9/11. In an interview with the Atlantic, the GOP presidential candidate spontaneously turned to the subject during an exchange about whether Americans know the “truth about what really happened” during the January 6 assault on the Capitol. “I don’t know, but we can handle it,” said Ramaswamy. “Whatever it is, we can handle it. Government agents. How many government agents were in the field? Right?” He then pivoted to September 11, 2001, when terrorists hijacked four jetliners and crashed them into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania — killing close to 3,000 people. “I think it is legitimate to say how many police, how many federal agents, were on the planes that hit the Twin Towers,” he said. “Maybe the answer is zero. It probably is zero for all I know, right?” “I have no reason to think it was anything other than zero.
“Virtually all rainfall daily records have been broken” For future reference, on the east coast when it’s overcast and the air feels like warm bathwater, a hurricane is on its way. Hoping our friends kept dry on Sunday during Hilary’s visit to Palm Springs where the 911 system went down. It’s not as if tropical weather is a regular event there. (One mentioned doing some advance sandbagging.) Weather experts reported “virtually all rainfall daily records have been broken thus far” and warned of “catastrophic and life-threatening flooding.” Plenty of people seem to have insisted on driving flooded streets anyway. As an aside, a women in Greenville, S.C. once stepped out of her car after she stalled out in a foot of water in a low spot. She got sucked down a storm drain at the curb. They found her body in a river days later. It’s not something you forget. Don’t do that. Washington Post: The Los Angeles Unified School District schools are closed.