I could hardly believe I heard him right and had to listen to it twice. Not much is shocking these days but this is. The Speaker of the House is protecting the insurrectionists from the FBI. And he’s admitting it as if it is perfectly normal. This is so far beyond normal we’re living in another dimension now. We are broken.
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Krugman is on the case Let’s deal in reality for a moment shall we? Over the past six months, the personal consumption expenditure deflator excluding food and energy — I know that’s a mouthful, but it’s the Federal Reserve’s preferred measure of underlying inflation — has risen at an annual rate of only 2.5 percent, down from 5.7 percent in March 2022. The Fed’s inflation target is 2 percent, so we’re not quite there yet. And you shouldn’t expect the Fed to declare victory any time soon. As I can tell you from personal experience, anyone suggesting that inflation is more or less under control can expect an avalanche of hate mail and hostile commentary on social media. In fact, I believe that the vehemence with which some Americans insist that inflation is still running wild distorts coverage in conventional media, too, because journalists are deterred from saying anything positive. And the Fed has to be especially careful, because it would lose credibility if inflation went back up after sounding too optimistic. The truth, however, is that inflation is looking very much like yesterday’s problem.
Though I have been interested in ecological economics ever since I read The Limits to Growth (Meadows, Randers, and Meadows 1972), E.F. Schumacher (Schumacher 1973, 1979) and Hermann Daly (Daly 1974) in the early 1970s, and I have been a critic of Neoclassical economics for just as long, I didn’t start critiquing the Neoclassical approach … Continue reading "Capitalism, with friends like these, you don’t need enemies"
Apparently, the Washington Post has decided it needs to “move to the center” and I’m sure you know what that means. It’s pretty devastating for them to do this at this particular moment. If we ever needed clear-headed analysis it’s now and if there’s one thing we know, “centrism” (aka “both sides”) is never clear headed. They’ve been laying good people off and one of them is Paul Waldman, one of the best analysts they had. The good news is that he has a newsletter so his insights will still be accessible. (Thank god for blogging, eh?) Here’s one he posted today and I could not agree with it more. Any regular consumer of political news has been deluged with stories recently about traditionally Democratic voting groups who may be ready to defect from Joe Biden in 2024, especially Muslim Americans and young people. It’s mostly about recent events in Israel and Gaza, but the grievances driving this debate have included housing costs, student debt, and climate change.
What a motley crew The Atlantic has published a big series on “if Trump wins” and it’s full of interesting stuff, much of which I’ll discuss here over the next few days. l’ll start out with this one from McKay Coppins, on who Trump plans to put into his top spots. It won’t be like last time when he surrounded himself with people he thought came “right out of Central Casting.” Don’t expect it to happen again. The available supply of serious, qualified people willing to serve in a Trump administration has dwindled since 2017. After all, the so-called adults didn’t fare so well in their respective rooms. Some quit in frustration or disgrace; others were publicly fired by the president. Several have spent their post–White House lives fielding congressional subpoenas and getting indicted. And after seeing one Trump term up close, vanishingly few of them are interested in a sequel: This past summer, NBC News reported that just four of Trump’s 44 Cabinet secretaries had endorsed his current bid. Even if mainstream Republicans did want to work for him again, Trump is unlikely to want them.
Via: On Friday — after 57 days — “UN Women” finally got around to condemning Hamas’s use of rape as a weapon of terror against Israeli women. Noted the Jerusalem Post: The statement came only after a bipartisan group of lawmakers urged the UN to condemn Hamas’s October 7 attack. The UN’s long silence has, unfortunately, been mirrored by many of the groups who had been the most vocal about sexual assault and abuse in other contexts. Over at Slate, a group of progressive writers — including Dahlia Lithwick, Mimi Rocah, Jennifer Taub, Tamar Zepper, Joyce Vance, and Julie Zebrak called out their fellow feminists: Gaby Hinsliff made a similar point in the Guardian: “Whatever your view of the Israel-Hamas war, rape is rape. To trivialise it is to diminish ourselves.” Over the weekend, CNN’s Dana Bash had a tense confrontation with Progressive Caucus chair Pramila Jayapal on the question of Hamas’s sexual violence.
If you are a person who understands the trauma that October 7th caused to Israelis and Jews around the world, you should see the reality here. The ongoing carnage in Gaza cannot be defended and Israel is very close to losing the support of the rest of the world that currently supports it: US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said Israel risked “strategic defeat” in its war with Hamas if it fails to heed warnings about the mounting civilian death toll. “I have personally pushed Israeli leaders to avoid civilian casualties, and to shun irresponsible rhetoric, and to prevent violence by settlers in the West Bank,” Austin said in a speech to the Reagan National Defense Forum in Simi Valley, California, on Saturday. Austin’s comments come as top US officials have grown increasingly vocal in their warnings to Israel about the death toll in the Gaza Strip. Those warnings, previously confined to closed-door meetings, have been thrust into the open by mounting pressure from Israel’s Arab neighbors, human-rights activists and opinion at home — including the left of President Joe Biden’s Democratic Party.
I saw a man on the street interview this week in which an RFK Jr fan was going on about the “Kennedy legacy.” RFK Jr is a certified nut who was pulled into the race by ratfucker Steve Bannon. Let’s just hope he doesn’t get on the ballot anywhere important.
Welcome to the party, pals The Atlantic this morning delivers a full spread of articles announcing the imminent demise of the Late Great United States of America, all part of its “If Trump Wins” series. There is growing alarm about another Trump presidency and reason for it. But it’s not as if Robert Kagan’s, “A Trump dictatorship is increasingly inevitable. We should stop pretending.” just last week did not give many of us sleepless nights already. Conventional wisdom has finally caught up with what Ruth Ben-Ghiat (“Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present“) and Timothy Snyder (“On Tyranny“) have warned about for years. This Trump guy whom sane people treated as an ignorant, loudmouth jerk, and his red-hatted band of equally loudmouth sycophants and Beltway collaborators, are a genuine threat to the country’s existence. Have you heard? They ransacked the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. There’s video. Trump is out for revenge, writes David Frum. He will dump NATO, warns Anne Applebaum. His second term will be all loyalists, lapdogs and cronies, explains McKay Coppins.
What else is new? After all, he’s been saying Biden stole the 2020 election for 3 solid years With his latest tribute to the late great Pee Wee Herman, former president Donald Trump unveiled his latest “I know you are but what am I” campaign strategy over the weekend by attacking President Joe Biden as “the destroyer of American democracy.” The crowd loved it, as they love all things Trump. The Des Moines Register interviewed one rally goers who explained why: “Teens have rock stars that they follow like Taylor Swift. Grown-ups have Trump.” It doesn’t really matter what he says. Trump’s senior campaign adviser explained the real reason for this new campaign slogan: The Washington Post reported that a “senior Trump adviser” told them, “President Trump is turning the tables, We are not going to allow Joe Biden and the Democrats to gaslight the American public, and it’s clear from what LaCivita wrote that it’s yet another of their juvenile attempts to “own the libs.” I don’t think I saw any lefties heads exploding over this but many people did explode with laughter.