And that’s what they love about him.
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It must be bad news for Joe Biden Steve Benen at MSNBC reports: Expectations heading into this morning showed projections of about 200,000 new jobs having been added in the United States in March. As it turns out, according to the new report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the job market managed to do much better than that. CNBC reported: In addition to the top-line data, we also learned that wage growth continued to outpace inflation. As unemployment rate inched lower again, the jobless rate has now been below 4% for 26 consecutive months — a streak unseen in the United States since the 1960s. As for the politics, let’s circle back to previous coverage to put the data in perspective. Over the course of the first three years of Donald Trump’s presidency — when the Republican said the United States’ economy was the greatest in the history of the planet — the economy created roughly 6.35 million jobs, spanning all of 2017, 2018 and 2019. According to the latest tally, the U.S.
He might be. His fundraising is anemic and he’s acting panicked It’s hard to imagine that he’s not going to be re-elected in Texas but he is the most unlikable official in politics (and that’s saying something) so maybe even the Texans are sick of him: THE WALLS ARE closing in around Ted Cruz, and the Republican senator is lashing out. Cruz, who has served two terms as Texas junior senator, is facing a tough reelection challenge from former NFL player and current U.S. Rep. Colin Allred (D-Texas), who won Texas’ Democratic Senate primary in a landslide victory last month. On Wednesday, Cruz begged for donation on Fox News while complaining that Allred is out fundraising his 2018 challenger, former Texas Rep. Beto O’Rourke, by leaps and bounds. “The Democrats are coming after me, they are gonna spend more than $100 million this year, George Soros is already spending millions of dollars in the state of Texas,” Cruz told Sean Hannity. “My opponent a liberal Democrat named Colin Allred, is out raising Beto O’Rourke, my last opponent, 3 to 1.
Pygmy Slow Loris babies! Via Zooborns For the first time, the Smithsonian’s National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute (NZCBI) is celebrating the birth of two pygmy slow lorises, an endangered species. Small Mammal House keepers reported for duty the morning of March 21 and observed that 3-year-old mother Naga had given birth overnight and was caring for two infants. She and the babies’ 2-year-old father, Pabu, received a recommendation to breed from the Association of Zoos and Aquariums’ Species Survival Plan (SSP). These babies are the first offspring for both parents. Keepers have observed Naga carrying, grooming and nursing the babies, which appear to be healthy and strong. Animal care staff will determine the babies’ sexes at their first vet exam, which will take place in a few months.
A “multipronged assault” Last week, I questioned the sufficiency of the “comically long” list of MAGA “nightmare scenarios” the Biden campaign is planning for that could arise leading up to and in the aftermath of the November election. We witnessed live on Jan. 6 the lengths to which MAGA Republicans would go to maintain power. Even then it took many months of investigation to uncover the plotting Trump’s confederates did not put on public display. It’s likely that people without criminal minds are not devious enough to anticipate all the ways Insurrection 2.0 might unfold. This time, the prospect of jail time if he loses increases Trump’s incentives for instigating mayhem. As with stochastic terrorism, his followers don’t require explicit orders from the chief to know what he wants. From Daily Beast (via Yahoo Finance): Maria Bartiromo didn’t even bother to wait for the 2024 election to pass before suggesting it could be stolen.
The MAGA minority means to impose its will ICYMI, the effort in Nebraska to change the state’s electoral vote allocation to winner-take-all failed last night. It is more evidence that the GOP is pulling out all the stops in seeking ways to tip the presidential election in Donald Trump’s favor, even for a single electoral vote. But do not lose sight of other places (and other 2024 races) where the MAGA GOP is hoping to place heavy thumbs on the scales. Pay attention (Bolts): The Texas supreme court closed out 2023 by blocking an abortion during a medical emergency, forcing a woman to flee the state. Just days before Christmas, Wisconsin justices struck down the state’s GOP-drawn gerrymanders. So far this year, Montana’s supreme court has stepped in to protect voting rights, while a decision in Alabama threatened in vitro fertilization treatments. In each of these states, unlike at the federal level, voters chose who sits on the bench and which judges get to dictate such profound consequences. And the 2024 elections may now reshape who holds power on supreme courts across the country.
These people are just plain nuts SOLAR ECLIPSES, LIKE the upcoming one on April 8, are a well-documented scientific phenomenon. As early as 763 BCE, ancient Assyrians were charting the process by which the path of the moon temporarily obstructs the sun, and astronomers have continued to do so for thousands of years since. Our knowledge of eclipses predates our knowledge of gravity, algebra, and toilet paper. We are well aware of their existence, and we are well aware of what causes them. (I mean, I personally am not, but other people ostensibly are.) What the ancient Assyrians could not have possibly predicted, however, was the singular stupidity of the current incarnation of the American right. Unconvinced by thousands of years of scientific inquiry, as well as driven by a general sense of apocalyptic bloodlust, many on the right are trading conspiracy theories about the upcoming eclipse, ranging from the belief that it signals the End Times to the idea that the Biden administration is using it as an opportunity to shut down cell phone service or bring in the National Guard in an effort to make beautiful blond children who play sports transgender.
They are not meeting the moment Dan Froomkin is back from vacation and he’s not happy: The nation stands on the edge of a precipice, and our political media is so addicted to neutrality that it is casting both choices — survival or cataclysm — as equally plausible. It’s sickening. We are one election away from becoming a Christian nationalist state, losing our democracy as we know it, and putting the fate of our country in the hands of a corrupt madman filled with fever dreams of retribution. And yet political journalists seem to think this is just fine. Fun, even. I barely surfed the web while I was gone, but I did open a few emails here and there. And there was one I found particularly enlightening – in a very troubling way.
Is this really ok? I guess there’s no law against a private citizen having discussions with foreign leaders. But doing that while he’s running for president, is under indictment, has big financial problems and has proven he’s willing to sell out the country for personal gain (and was impeached for it)… well, it seems just a bit problematic: Former President Donald J. Trump spoke recently with Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler, Prince Mohammed bin Salman, their first publicly disclosed conversation since Mr. Trump left office in January 2021, according to two people briefed on the discussion who were not authorized to speak publicly about it. It was unclear what the two men discussed and whether it was their only conversation since Mr. Trump’s departure from the White House. Neither representatives for Mr. Trump nor an official of the Saudi government responded to requests for comment.
Speaking of Steve Bannon: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign chair and White House strategist, believed before the 2020 election and the January 6 attack on Congress that a “Maga movement” of Trump supporters “could rule for a hundred years”. “Outside the uniparty,” the Washington Post reporter Isaac Arnsdorf writes in a new book, referring to Bannon’s term for the political establishment, “as Bannon saw it, there was the progressive wing of the Democratic party, which he considered a relatively small slice of the electorate. And the rest, the vast majority of the country, was Maga. “Bannon believed the Maga movement, if it could break out of being suppressed and marginalised by the establishment, represented a dominant coalition that could rule for a hundred years.” Arnsdorf’s book, Finish What We Started: The Maga Movement’s Ground War to End Democracy, will be published next week. The Post published an excerpt on Thursday.