Nikki Haley may not have a snowball’s chance in hell of winning the Republican nomination but she’s decided she’s not going to go quietly. She’s not only needling Trump constantly about his mental fitness, she’s taken on the RNC for their servile move to prematurely declare Trump the “presumptive nominee.” In her town halls in South Carolina she’s become downright feisty: I suspect it’s the laughing at him that bothers him the most although I doubt it’s the first time a woman has done so. You have to wonder what might have been if Haley and the others had gone after Trump this way from the beginning. I always assumed he would win the nomination but they didn’t have to make it so easy for him. Who knows, if they had jumped on him hard in those days after the 2022 loss when many in the party were saying they were getting tired of losing and blaming his disastrous endorsements, maybe one of them could have made a real run for it. In the end, trying so hard not to alienate him and his followers didn’t work anyway.
Uncategorized
So he can say “I alone can fix it.” The Republicans have a problem. They had hoped to rope in Independents and GOP moderates by insisting that the economy is so bad that America simply must elect a Republican to fix it. it’s worked in the past at times but the reality is that Democrats tend to fix the economy after Republicans break it and in this case it’s not looking like it’s going to be a winning electoral issue for them;. So they’re banking on the border, one of their perennial scaremongering tactics to get them over the line this time. Trump is saying it out loud: This bill is actually a very Republican friendly bill without any concessions to the Democrats which will make it a no-go among many of them. And we know they want the issue for the election. But as Greg Sargent points out, there is more to it than that: I think it’s no accident that Trump and MAGA are trying to sink this deal even as Trump and Miller are loudly advertising plans for an extraordinarily cruel and draconian second-term crackdown.
Trump says America is failing and the economy is crashing. He couldn’t be more wrong: The European economy, hobbled by unfamiliar weakness in Germany, is barely growing. China is struggling to recapture its sizzle. And Japan continues to disappoint. But in the United States, it’s a different story. Here, despite lingering consumer angst over inflation, the surprisingly strong economy is outperforming all of its major trading partners. Since 2020, the United States has powered through a once-in-a-century pandemic, the highest inflation in 40 years and fallout from two foreign wars. Now, after posting faster annual growth last year than in 2022, the U.S. economy is quashing fears of a recession while offering lessons for future crisis-fighting. “The U.S. has really come out of this into a place of strength and is moving forward like covid never happened,” said Claudia Sahm, a former Federal Reserve economist who now runs an eponymous consulting firm.
I know I’ve been doing a crap job of sharing updates or juicy blog posts. Sorry! Here are some varied updates. And hopefully I’ll pen a proper commentary shortly. I’m (hopefully) going to come back later this week with more thoughts on the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) and what it takes to support young […]
Lincoln: “repulse them, or they will subjugate us” “The past is never dead. It’s not even past,” Faulkner wrote in 1951. “Old times there are not forgotten,” wrote Daniel Decatur Emmett in “Dixie” a century earlier in 1859. “History doesn’t repeat itself but it often rhymes,” wrote somebody, but not likely Mark Twain. We’ll come back to harbingers of re-appearing tyranny in a minute. Republicans in Missouri want to bring back “old time” dueling: Sen. Nick Schroer (R-St. Charles County) is listed on the proposal, notes Fox 2 St.
This is a test, folks. We are going to see if the MAGA propaganda machine is strong enough to overcome reality for a majority of the people. Trump is saying out loud that he wants the border issue to enhance his election chances. There is no mistaking it. Meanwhile, some Republican members of the congress are saying that it’s a good deal and they should take it. That’s a very risky comment for him apparently: Here’s what Trump is ordering: Republican front-runner Donald Trump said he wants to be held responsible for blocking a bipartisan border security billin the works in the Senateas President Biden seeks emergency authority to rein in a record surge of unauthorized border crossings. “As the leader of our party, there is zero chance I will support this horrible open borders betrayal of America,” Trump told a rowdy crowd of supporters at a rally in Las Vegas on Saturday, ahead of the state’s presidential caucus on Feb. 8. “I’ll fight it all the way. A lot of the senators are trying to say, respectfully, they’re blaming it on me. I say, that’s okay. Please blame it on me.
He believes he is the second coming. He really does. You’d think he would have been able to win the election.
The world’s best recovery and a silent revolution In an economics column headlined, “Falling inflation, rising growth give U.S. the world’s best recovery,” David Lynch (no, not that one) writes in the Washington Post: Here, despite lingering consumer angst over inflation, the surprisingly strong economy is outperforming all of its major trading partners. Since 2020, the United States has powered through a once-in-a-century pandemic, the highest inflation in 40 years and fallout from two foreign wars. Now, after posting faster annual growth last year than in 2022, the U.S. economy is quashing fears of a new recession while offering lessons for future crisis-fighting. “The U.S. has really come out of this into a place of strength and is moving forward like covid never happened,” said Claudia Sahm, a former Federal Reserve economist who now runs an eponymous consulting firm. “We earned this; it wasn’t just a fluke.” It was no accident: On Friday, President Biden hailed fresh government data showing that annual inflation over the second half of 2023 fell back to the Federal Reserve’s 2 percent target.
Say it ain’t so! The Daily Beast with a scoop: Always read the footnotes. That’s where former federal judge Barbara Jones, the court-appointed special monitor in Donald Trump’s New York business fraud case, just planted a financial bombshell that legal experts say suggests Trump lied knowingly and repeatedly on his federal financial disclosures about a major loan that never existed—and may have evaded taxes on $48 million in income. The detail came in a letter Jones filed on Friday to update New York Judge Arthur F. Engoron, first reported by The Messenger, on her efforts to get a full and clear accounting of the Trump Organization’s assets. The letter claims, yet again, that Trump and his company have filed statements containing inconsistencies and errors, but have been “cooperative” in the review process. But Jones tucked a major revelation into footnote 6, writing that a massive chunk of debt Trump has claimed to owe one of his own companies for years apparently does not exist, and never did.
It’s not looking good for the little Palin wannabe Lauren Boebert introduced herself to the new district she moved to to have an easier re-election and it didn’t go very well: Representative Lauren Boebert did not receive the warm welcome she was hoping for after switching Colorado districts, with her rivals accusing her of being a “carpetbagger” during the first primary debate. Boebert, who currently represents the Centennial State’s 3rd district, announced in December that she would run for election in the 4th district in 2024, instead. The decision comes after she was reelected in 2022 by such a narrow margin that the election nearly went to a recount. Her public image has taken a massive battering in recent months, as well. The far-right congresswoman attempted to defend her decision during the debate Thursday night, saying she made the switch because she wanted a “fresh start” for her family. “I am here to earn your vote. This is not a coronation,” she said.