Finally Friday Reads: There are Disasters and then there are Man-made Disasters

“There ya go, that explains it! Trump is in serious decline.” John Buss, @repeat1968

Good Day, Sky Dancers!

This week has been rather mind-blowing for me. First, I watched Former Congresswoman Liz Cheney stand beside Vice President Kamala Harris and heartily endorse her.  The number of top Republicans going out of their way to stop DonOld is really heartening. The utter destruction left in the path of Hurricane Helene was beyond the warzone feeling I saw when I finally got to return home to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. I can only imagine what’s in store for us in the future if we don’t speed up policy and action on Climate Change.  Then, there’s the kind of shock only practitioners of the Dismal Science could feel. “U.S. Hiring Accelerated in September, Blowing Past Expectations” is a headline in today’s Wall Street Journal. Our economy is so good we’ve booted the once-assumed takeover of the title of the largest economy in the world by China. It has been moved farther into the future if ever.

The U.S. labor market strengthened in the weeks before Election Day, as job growth accelerated in September and the unemployment rate ticked lower.

Employers added 254,000 jobs last month, the Labor Department said Friday. That was significantly more than the 150,000 economists expected, and marked the largest monthly increase since March. The unemployment rate slipped to 4.1%.

Friday’s bumper payrolls report is likely to close the door on another half-percentage-point rate cut by the Federal Reserve at its next meeting in November. It should keep officials on track to lower rates by a quarter point.

The Fed is trying to engineer what is called a soft landing, in which inflation moves down without major deterioration in the labor market. Though Friday is just one data point, it suggests that the U.S. is headed in that direction.

“It puts another set of wheels under the plane in terms of assuring a soft landing,” said Gregory Daco, chief economist at EY-Parthenon.

Friday’s report also signaled that hiring this summer wasn’t as weak as initially thought. Revised figures show employers added 72,000 more jobs in July and August combined than earlier reported.

The latest snapshot of the labor market’s health comes just a month before the U.S. presidential election, where the economy and inflation are key issues for voters. The strong jobs report could help Vice President Kamala Harris. In polls, she trails former President Donald Trump on the economy.

Stocks ticked higher. During much of the inflationary post-Covid-19 boom, stocks often quaked temporarily at stronger-than-expected economic data, because traders took such shocks as a sign that the Fed would tighten monetary policy more aggressively. Investors’ positive reaction Friday showed that they view good news as good news again—even if futures contracts tied to the federal-funds rate suggest traders are now expecting a slower pace of Fed easing.

Employers added jobs at bars and restaurants and construction, as well as in sectors that are less sensitive to the economy’s ups and downs like government, education and healthcare.

There were a few weak spots. Employers modestly cut head count in manufacturing, transportation and warehousing, and temporary help services.

Analysts also said that although September’s jobs report was unexpectedly strong, other economic data point to a slightly less robust hiring picture. Labor Department data released earlier this week showed that the share of workers quitting their jobs each month fell to its lowest rate in more than four years in August, a sign people are more hesitant about leaving their current roles for new ones.

Liz Cheney described the Republican Party as being the MAGA Party. Those left in the MAGA party are living in lies, bigotry, and a world of active sabotage of the truth and of the country. In one of the most callous moves I’ve seen in Congress, Speaker Johnson refuses to call the House back into session to provide the funding needed for FEMA.  He wants it to wait until November 12.  He’s wandering around Florida today.

U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson said Thursday that a congressional emergency spending decision in response to Hurricane Helene “will probably correspond when Congress is expected to return to session.”

Congress will be on recess for more than a month, and is set to return to session on Nov. 12. Johnson seemed to rule out a return before then, although President Joe Biden indicated this week that he may ask Congress to convene before the break’s scheduled end.

“Right before we left on Wednesday, a week ago, Congress appropriated $20 billion to FEMA to cover the immediate aftermath of the storm,” Johnson said in Steinhatchee Thursday. “Of course, we knew it was headed into the coast at that time, so FEMA has the funding that needs to respond immediately. We’re glad to see them on the ground here.”

Johnson said damage assessments must be complete before Congress can update the disaster budget.

“It will take some time to tabulate this storm — it’s one of the biggest in our history,” Johnson said. “So, a lot of that work’s being done immediately, and I think the timing of that will probably correspond when Congress is expected to return to session right after the election, and so we’ll be on that.”

Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said the Federal Emergency Management Agency lacks enough funding to last through hurricane season, which ends Nov. 30.

Johnson appeared with Florida U.S. Reps. Kat Cammack and Neal Dunn at Roy’s Restaurant, which was ravaged by Helene.

The speaker of the House said that funding further disaster response will be bipartisan.

“There’ll be an appropriate amount requested to Congress, and we’ll have to dig deep and find a way to do that,” he said.

Johnson assured that Congress “will do what’s necessary to make sure that Americans are taken care of.”

What’s most impressive is to see just precisely who 175 Republicans are that voted against the aid.  And, yes, it’s basically to make the Biden/Harris Administration look bad so DonOld can rant and make people forget his lousy response to disasters when he occupied the White House.  This is from Newsweek. “Full List of Republicans Who Voted Against FEMA Funding Before Helene Hit,” written by Khaleda Rahman.

As Hurricane Helene careened toward Florida’s Panhandle, numerous Republicans voted against extending funding for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).

Last week, Congress approved $20 billion for FEMA’s disaster relief fund as part of a stopgap spending bill to fund the government through December 20. But the measure left out billions of dollars in requested supplemental disaster funding.

The Senate approved the measure by a 78-18 vote on September 25 after it passed the House in a 341-82 vote. Republicans supplied the no votes in both chambers.

Some of the Republicans who voted against the bill represent states that have been hard hit by Helene, including Florida Representative Matt Gaetz.

Helene hit Florida as a Category 4 storm last Thursday, before plowing through several other states in the Southeast. The devastation could cost up to $160 billion, according to an estimate by AccuWeather.

Some Republicans railed against FEMA funding being allocated for assisting migrants after Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas told reporters on Wednesday that FEMA will run out of money before the hurricane season is over. The agency is facing a multibillion-dollar deficit, even after imposing new spending restrictions.

The New Republic has released a “Transcript: Trump’s Unhinged Handling of Disasters Revealed By Insider. An interview with Olivia Troye, a top homeland security official in the Trump administration, about how badly Trump politicized disaster response as president—as seen from the inside.”  Former Republican Women are not holding back on what a disaster DonOld was. This is from Greg Sargent’s podcast, The Daily Blast.

Sargent: OK, let’s start here. The other day after Trump started pushing that lie that disaster relief is being denied to Republicans, you did a tweet that got some attention. It said this, “As a Homeland Security Advisor in the Trump White House, I witnessed firsthand how Donald Trump politicized disaster relief, leaving devastated Americans waiting for help. Leaders across the country & government were calling my office, desperate for action as Trump failed them in moments of crisis.” Can you expand on that for us?

Troye: I have a lot of memories of working in the Trump White House where there are numerous situations where the government apparatus that does the whole disaster relief declaration process would come to a halt because the disaster declaration that needed to be signed by the president was sitting on Donald Trump’s desk. It was frustrating, as you can imagine, because we as national security officials serve for the greater good of the country. Our job is to help Americans, especially someone like me, who’s in the Homeland Security role working and advising the vice president. Our jobs are to work in response to a crisis as fast as possible and manage this. There were numerous instances where I had the head of government agencies calling me saying, Can you maybe get the vice president to weigh in on this because it’s still sitting on [Trump’s] desk and he hasn’t approved it yet.

Sargent: You were working for the vice president at the time. Can you characterize your official position?

Troye: Sure. I was Mike Pence’s Homeland Security and Counterterrorism Advisor. In that role, I covered any crisis, global breaking news event that was related to whether it was global terrorism. On the Homeland space, I covered anything that was mass shootings, disaster relief like natural disasters like flooding, tornadoes, hurricanes. Anything that was a crisis domestically here that was related to the security and safety of Americans fall under me.

Not only do the MAGA Republicans want the country to fail and our country to fall to Tinpot dictator wannabe Donald, but they seriously want to see more death and destruction by tanking one of the most necessary and enormous FEMA responses ever. This is from NBC News.  “Hurricane Helene live updates: At least 215 dead as some communities struggle to get basic supplies. People are still searching for loved ones and many residents remain isolated because of widespread damage.”

White House spokesman Andrew Bates pushed back on what he called “lies” shared by some Republican figures regarding the Hurricane Helene response.

In a new memo shared today, Bates said: “Some Republican leaders — and their partners in right wing media — are using Hurricane Helene to lie and divide us.”

“Their latest missive: baselessly claiming that FEMA is out of money to respond to Hurricane Helene — because of an existing program that supports cities and towns that are sheltering migrants. … This is FALSE,” Bates wrote.

“No disaster relief funding at all was used to support migrants housing and services. None. At. All,” he continued.

Trump echoed that false theory at a rally in Michigan yesterday, saying, “They stole the FEMA money, just like they stole it from a bank so they could give it to illegal immigrants that they want to have vote for them this season.”

Bates clarified that funding for communities to support migrants is appropriated by Congress to U.S. Customs and Border Protection and is merely administered by FEMA, and the funding isn’t related to FEMA’s response and recovery efforts.

“FEMA has the funds it needs for immediate response and recovery efforts for Hurricane Helene. In fact, FEMA has been able to provide over $45 million in direct financial assistance to individuals and families affected by Hurricane Helene, including over $17 million to those recovering and rebuilding in North Carolina,” Bates added.

I also wanted to point out that Republicans are still plotting ways to overturn the election. In the middle of all of this, is the sentencing of Tina Peters. Watch this on CNN where Jim Acosta shows the incredible number of voters that still believe Trump won the 2024.  Check this sentencing hearing.  This Judge rocks.

She was convicted in August for the Computer Breach associated with the My Pillow Goon.  This is the AP story that details that.

Former Colorado clerk Tina Peters, the first local election official to be charged with a security breach after the 2020 election as unfounded conspiracy theories swirled, was found guilty by a jury on most charges Monday.

Peters, a one-time hero to election deniers, was accused of using someone else’s security badge to give an expert affiliated with My Pillow chief executive Mike Lindell access to the Mesa County election system and deceiving other officials about that person’s identity.

Lindell is a prominent promoter of false claims that voting machines were manipulated to steal the election from Donald Trump. His online broadcasting site has been showing a livestream of Peters’ trial and sending out daily email updates, sometimes asking for prayers for Peters and including statements from her.

Prosecutors said Peters was seeking fame and became “fixated” on voting problems after becoming involved with those who had questioned the accuracy of the 2020 presidential election results.

The breach Peters was charged of orchestrating heightened concerns over potential insider threats, in which rogue election workers sympathetic to partisan lies could use their access and knowledge to launch an attack from within.

It would be nice to think that future evil-doers would take the hint and fear a 9 year-sentence, but MAGA weirdos are nuts.  So, this is an interesting tidbit from Springfield, Ohio. “Someone Was Arrested For Killing Geese In Springfield — But It Wasn’t A Haitian. Brian Comer, a 64-year-old white man, was accused of illegally hunting geese at a golf course on the day Trump amplified racist lies about Haitian immigrants in the city.” Where’s fucking lying, J Dank Vance, now?

A 64-year-old white man in Springfield, Ohio, was accused of illegally hunting geese at a golf course pond as former President Donald Trump and his running mate, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, were spreading racist lies that Haitian immigrants in the area were eating geese and people’s pets.

Brian Comer was charged with a misdemeanor in connection with the Sept. 10 incident. According to an arrest affidavit obtained by HuffPost, a golfer at Rocky Lakes Golf Course in Springfield reported seeing a Canada goose floating in a pond and Comer using a shotgun to shoot another bird.

Comer didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment from HuffPost, but court records show he entered a guilty plea. A court spokesperson told HuffPost he paid $200 to cover a fine and court fees.

Journalist Steven Monacelli first posted about the arrest on Thursday on X, formerly Twitter.

This headline from The Guardian is frightening. “Two men have re-engineered the US electoral system in favor of Republicans. If the right strews

Two men recognized and exploited the anti-democratic loopholes within America’s rickety democracy in order to deliver Republicans victories that they could never win at the ballot box.

Now their willfully minoritarian creations threaten the very essence of a representative democracy: if Donald Trump, rightwing courts, gerrymandered state legislatures and an extreme Republican caucus in the US House of Representatives create constitutional chaos over the certification of this presidential election, two men cleared the path.

The single-minded determination of Leonard Leo built a conservative supermajority on the US supreme court and stacked lower and state courts with Republican ideologues that have pushed the nation to the right via the least accountable branch of government.

Chris Jankowski masterminded the partisan gerrymanders that tilted state legislatures and congressional delegations across the south and the purple midwest toward extreme Republicans, ended Barack Obama’s second term before it started, and rendered elections in Wisconsin and North Carolina all but meaningless over the last decade and a half.

Leo and Jankowski understood, separately, that the courts and state legislatures were undervalued and often undefended targets for a deliberate strategy aimed at capturing important levers of power that sometimes float under the radar. They could be Moneyball-ed, to borrow the term Michael Lewis used in his book about how the Oakland A’s made an end-run around large-market teams by understanding value that their opponents overlooked.

What Leo and Jankowski built separately would soon reinforce the other’s creation (with, of course, crucial assists from chief justice John Roberts), tightening the knots around meaningful elections, pushing policy to the extreme right and making it nearly impossible for voters to do anything about it.

Leo’s relentless focus on turning the judiciary Republican, first identifying and fast-tracking conservative jurists through his various roles at the Federalist Society, then coordinating the often eight-figure efforts to secure their confirmation on the US supreme court, helped conservatives to unpopular court-imposed victories on voting rights, abortion restrictions, gun access and gutting the regulatory state that would not have been won through the political process.

As I revealed in my book Ratf**ked: Why Your Vote Doesn’t Count, Jankowski pioneered Redmap, short for the Redistricting Majority Project. That 2010 strategy, coordinated when he worked at the Republican State Leadership Committee (RSLC), flipped state legislative chambers in Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Alabama, North Carolina, Wisconsin, Indiana, Tennessee and several other states just ahead of the decennial redistricting. Then, with complete control of those processes, as well in Florida, Georgia, Texas and elsewhere, the RSLC helped draw some of the most extreme partisan gerrymanders in history, locking in huge Republican advantages in state legislatures and congressional delegations.

The supreme court’s decision in Citizens Unitedhelped make possible the $30m that funded Redmap. Redmap’s lines then proved so stout that they could hold back electoral waves. In 2012, the Republican party would easily hold the US House of Representatives even as they won 1.4m fewer votes nationwide; Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Michigan and Wisconsin all went for Obama statewide, but the Republicans got 64 of those states’ 94 congressional seats.

Meanwhile, as Republicans drew themselves giant edges in the US House and state chambers, and packed Democrats into fewer seats they won with bigger majorities, low-turnout, base-driven Republican primaries became the key races to win, producing a new generation of lawmakers fixated on solutions for “voter fraud”.

This grim result is a US supreme court that has been captured by conservatives, which has delivered a decade of anti-democracy decisions that have advantaged the Republican party in elections, as well as an audacious plan to gerrymander Republicans into power in state legislatures nationwide and helped produce ever-more-extreme caucuses eager to adapt draconian voter restrictions in the name of stopping fraud that they cannot prove exist. The Roberts court has blessed this as well.

You better believe all these anti-democracy folks are just waiting to get Vance into the Oval Office.  Trump is chaos, but Vance is single-minded, and there’s a method to his meanness.  Then there is foreign interference in this election, too.  The Hill reports that  “Democrats suspect Netanyahu attempting to tilt Trump-Harris race.”  This is written by Alexander Bolten.  ( And, of course, all the end-time fundies are wild about all-out war in that area.)

Democrats increasingly suspect Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is trying to interfere in U.S. domestic politics by ignoring President Biden’s calls to negotiate a peace deal in Gaza and by confronting Hezbollah and Iran weeks before the U.S. election.

The rapidly escalating confrontation between Israel, Hezbollah and Hezbollah’s ally, Iran, has undercut Biden’s efforts to achieve peace through diplomacy.

The growing threat of a broader conflict has opened the door for former President Trump to argue that the world is “spiraling out of control” on Biden’s watch.

Biden’s polling numbers with Muslim Americans continue to deteriorate amid the mounting violence in the region, which poses a serious political liability to Vice President Harris in Michigan, a must-win state for Democrats.

Trump traveled to Michigan on Thursday to speak at a rally in Saginaw.

Meanwhile, Netanyahu’s relationship with even the most pro-Israel Democrats has becoming increasingly confrontational.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) made headlines in March when he called Netanyahu a “major obstacle” to peace and urged Israel to hold new elections. Around that time, Biden called Israel’s offensive in Gaza “over the top.”

“I certainly worry that Prime Minister Netanyahu is watching the American election as he makes decisions about his military campaigns in the north and in Gaza,” Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, told CNN’s Erin Burnett in a Tuesday interview.

I  continue to write these long blog reads these days.  Every day reveals more weirdness and criminal activity. I would like to note that this was a headline. “Fox News host: Trump ‘resorted to crimes’ to hold on to power.”  That also was one of the shocking events that happened this week.

Fox News host Neil Cavuto said Wednesday that a newly unsealed filing in the federal Jan. 6 case revealed former President Trump “resorted to crimes” to stay in office.

“It was in this newly unsealed court paper we’re learning that former President Trump resorted to crimes to cling to power after the 2020 election. We don’t know much more than that,” Cavuto said Wednesday on Fox News.

“A lot of this stuff was going to be coming out anyway. We’re going to be getting the latest on that, and a legal look at what is being revealed here and whether it’s giving us any new information, anything we don’t know. The timing of this, of course, is little more than about five weeks before the general election,” he added.

I see more October surprises on the horizon.

What’s on your reading and blogging list today?