Crime, including serious violent incidents like murder and rape, dropped nationally from 2022 to 2023, according to new data released by the FBI on Monday.
Violent crime was down about 3% from 2022 to 2023 and property crime took a similar drop of 2.4%, the FBI reported in its annual “Summary of Crime in the Nation.” The most serious crimes went down significantly: Murder and non-negligent manslaughter were down an estimated 11.6% — the largest single year decline in two decades — while rape decreased by an estimated 9.4%.
Preliminary numbers showed that 2024 crime numbers were also dropping for the early part of this year, continuing a trend of crime easing as America has come out of the pandemic.
The Economic Data from the U.S. is impressive. This is from The Real Economic Blog. “American outperformance in the post-pandemic global economy.” This analysis is by Joseph Brusuelas. American Economists can no longer claim to be practitioners of the dismal science during the Biden administration. Everything is going much better than expected.
One of the more underdiscussed economic developments following the shocks of the pandemic has been the United States’ outperformance compared to its peers.
This success can be traced to bold monetary and fiscal policies put in place that have hardened supply chains, bolstered energy independence and started to rebuild the nation’s infrastructure.
Since 2020 real U.S. GDP has increased 9.4% compared with:
Canada 4.9%
Italy 4.7%
EU 4%
France 3.8%
Japan 3.1%
UK 2.3%
Germany 0.3%
Perhaps more important, the U.S. is approaching what I think is a productivity boom.
If one asks how the U.S. can grow so fast even as hiring slows, the answer is productivity. With productivity increasing at 2.7% year over year, the American economy is experiencing its best gains in that area since the boom from 1995 to 2004.
That is why wages are rising above inflation, corporate earnings and profits are increasing and the U.S. continues to outperform its peers.
It’s all a result of smart decisions after the pandemic that increased supplies across the economy and encouraged long-term investments that integrate sophisticated technology into the production process.
President Joe Biden on Thursday called the Federal Reserve’s rate cut the day before an “important signal” from the Fed to Americans that inflation is cooling, but he cautioned that it “doesn’t mean the work is done” to improve the economy.
In remarks on Thursday at the Economic Club of Washington, D.C., Biden said, “Yesterday was an important day for the country.”
“Two and a half years after the Federal Reserve began raising interest rates, it announced that it began lowering interest rates,” Biden said. “I think it’s good news for consumers, and that means the cost of buying a home, a car, and so much more would be going down. And it’s good news in my view, for the overall economy.”
The president in his remarks discussed how far the U.S. has come since the COVID-19 pandemic, including supply chain issues, high costs of food and goods, and baby formula shortages. He also checked through all of his legislative achievements such as the American Rescue Plan, Inflation Reduction Act, Chips and Science Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.
“At its peak, as you all know, inflation was 9.1% in the United States. Today it’s much closer to 2%,” Biden said. “It doesn’t mean our work is done. Far from it. Far from it, no one should confused why I’m here. I’m not here to take a victory lap. I’m not here to say, ‘A job well done.’ I’m not here to say ‘We don’t have a hell of a lot more work to do.’ We do have more work to do.”
“Secret Service stepping up its game on the campaign trail.” John Buss, @repeat1968
If you search the legacy media, you can find a few stories about the normalcy and improvements the Biden/Harris administration has provided our country. Ronald Reagan’s economic stewardship has been mischaracterized for years and these stories are still hanging around. I think the treatment that the press gave Reagan prepared us for the total media meltdown on Trump Coverage. Max Boot has a new book that will hopefully demonstrate it’s mostly myth,. Boot, you may recall, was a Republican Operative at the time. This is the Washington Post‘s review of his Reagan biography “Reagan: His Life and Legend.” Geoffrey Kabaservice wrote the review, and the lede states, “How Important was Reagan? Max Boot’s biography deflates the Gipper’s legacy.”
This splendid new account of the 40th president’s life shows that Reagan’s influence doesn’t loom so large 35 years after he left the White House.
Reagan’s conservatism, in Boot’s telling, was little more than a farrago of erroneous statistics, spurious quotations and incendiary claims about an ever-present communist conspiracy — many of them derived from his reading of tracts from the lunatic-right John Birch Society. Boot suggests that Reagan didn’t care about factual accuracy because he “was convinced his larger moral point was correct and that was all that mattered.” Yet Boot notes with some irritation that throughout Reagan’s career, “reporters seldom held him to account for his falsehoods,” and that on the rare occasions when they did, “they found that most readers did not care.”
To some extent such criticisms bounced off Reagan simply because reporters and the public liked him. His mastery of symbolism, largely derived from his Hollywood experience, also meant he never suffered politically for the contradictions between, for example, the traditional values he preached and his dysfunctional family life. (Reagan’s two children with his previous wife, the actress Jane Wyman, and his two children with Nancy were alienated from their emotionally detached parents as well as each other and engaged in a range of self-destructive behaviors.) As Boot perceptively observes, “The trappings of family, displayed in photographs and videos, conveyed the right image even if they were disassociated from the underlying reality.”
Reagan’s presidency likewise was more symbol than substance. Boot goes so far as to say that Reagan was “an oddly passive chief executive,” “a disengaged president who had little interest in, or aptitude for, running the federal government.”
In Boot’s telling, few of Reagan’s apparent successes owed much to Reagan himself. Several significant bipartisan bills were passed during his presidency, including a comprehensive tax overhaul and Defense Department restructuring, but “he did not take an active role in crafting any of them.” The most important economic policymaker was not the president but Paul Volcker, the chairman of the quasi-independent Federal Reserve Board — though Boot does credit Reagan for showing “considerable courage and perspicacity” in backing Volcker despite the economic costs of his anti-inflationary policies. In any case, “there was nothing particularly impressive or unusual about the Reagan economic record,” given that, according to the statistics Boot cites, annual growth in the gross domestic product during his presidency was about the same as what it had been under Richard Nixon and below the rates during the presidencies of Bill Clinton, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson
The worst headlines still fill today’s papers and are always about you-know-who or the candidates running with MAGA status. North Carolina Gubernatorial candidate Mark Robinson is the latest in the MAGA lineage of someone who shouldn’t hold public office. The CNN headline is “Nearly all of Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson’s campaign staff quits after CNN report.” But the big question is, why did they go to work for him before? It’s not like he just turned into a deplorable overnight! As usual, CNN goes with normalizing MAGA behavior even when each story about them is more abnormal than the last.
Days after a CNN report about racist and sexual comments posted on a pornography forum, all but a few of Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson’s campaign team quit their jobs on Sunday.
A campaign news release said that four top staffers have left the campaign: Conrad Pogorzelski, general consultant and senior advisor who’s worked for Robinson since his initial 2020 lieutenant governor campaign; Chris Rodriguez, campaign manager; Heather Whillier, finance director; and Jason Rizk, deputy campaign manager.
But WUNC has confirmed that other staffers have quit as well, leaving Robinson with just three people working on his campaign — two campaign spokesmen and a bodyguard. The list of departures also include longtime director of operations Patrick Riley and political directors John Kontoulas and Jackson Lohrer.
Sunday’s news release says that new staff hires will be announced “in the coming days.” But hiring a new campaign team less than two months from Election Day will be tough for a campaign rocked by scandal.
The lengthy CNN report, published Thursday afternoon, highlights comments posted to an online pornography forum called “Nude Africa” from an user calling themselves Mark Robinson with many of his personal biographical details and an email address associated with the man who’s now the Republican nominee for governor.
The report includes a long list of sexually explicit and racist comments posted to the site between 2008 and 2012, long before Robinson entered politics as a candidate for lieutenant governor in 2020. The commenter describes himself as a “Black Nazi,” calls for the reinstatement of slavery, says he enjoys watching transgender pornography and describes a time he spied on women taking showers in a locker room.
Robinson has denied that he wrote the posts, but other Republicans have been distancing themselves from the GOP nominee for governor in recent days. President Donald Trump made no mention of Robinson during a Saturday rally in Wilmington, even as the GOP nominee for attorney general, Congressman Dan Bishop, spoke to the crowd.
Yesterday, we learned that Barron Trump—according to an insider—allegedly “slapped the sh*t” out of his nanny years ago. But apparently Barron’s behavior is far worse than that.
After one poster—who nannied for a kid who went to the same New York school as Barron after every DC school allegedly refused to take him—started dishing the dirt on the young psycho-in-training, even more stories started to come out about the youngest Trump.
“The more y’all annoy me, the more Imma keep telling the Trumps business,” original poster @WonderKing82, aka Mr. Weeks, promised Trump supporters in his replies. And boy, did he deliver. Soon after telling the story about the nanny, a few other damning details came to light, mostly about Barron’s treatment of small animals.
For Barron, the bad behavior allegedly didn’t stop with animals. He also directed his abuse at other classmates, according to Mr. Weeks.
The part about the inappropriate touching and investigation is especially disturbing. And for the people in the comments claiming that these are somehow signs of autism, that’s not only incredibly untrue, it’s irresponsible and harmful for individuals who are actually autistic. Folks on the autism spectrum don’t tend to harm animals or classmates, and it’s a little bit ridiculous that this has to be said out loud.
There are even people in the replies trying to find a way to blame Barron’s behavior on Hillary Clinton. Good luck with that!
Whatever the truth is about Barron Trump, you can be sure it will eventually come to light. For now, we’re going to keep a close eye on these disturbing, utterly believable claims.
Congressional leaders announced an agreement Sunday on a short-term spending bill that will fund federal agencies for about three months, averting a possible partial government shutdown when the new budget year begins Oct. 1 and pushing final decisions until after the November election.
Temporary spending bills generally fund agencies at current levels, but an additional $231 million was included to bolster the Secret Service after the two assassination attempts against Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, and additional money was added to aid with the presidential transition, among other things.
Lawmakers have struggled to get to this point as the current budget year winds to a close at month’s end. At the urging of the most conservative members of his conference, House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., had linked temporary funding with a mandate that would have compelled states to require proof of citizenship when people register to vote.
But Johnson abandoned that approach to reach an agreement, even as Trump insisted there should not be a stop-gap measure without the voting requirement.
Bipartisan negotiations began in earnest shortly after that, with leadership agreeing to extend funding into mid-December. That gives the current Congress the ability to fashion a full-year spending bill after the Nov. 5 election, rather than push that responsibility to the next Congress and president.
In a letter to Republican colleagues, Johnson said the budget measure would be “very narrow, bare-bones” and include “only the extensions that are absolutely necessary.”
“While this is not the solution any of us prefer, it is the most prudent path forward under the present circumstances,” Johnson wrote. “As history has taught and current polling affirms, shutting the government down less than 40 days from a fateful election would be an act of political malpractice.”
As I said, the film leaves the impression that Lev was arrested to protect Trump during impeachment by silencing the key witness.
But that’s not why Lev went to prison (as a news clip in the movie tacitly admits).
Lev and Igor Fruman (along with David Correia and Andrey Kukushkin) were first charged on October 9, 2019, via indictment that was (according to then US Attorney for SDNY Geoffrey Berman’s memoir) drafted quickly overnight in advance of Lev and Igor’s trip to meet Dmitry Firtash in Vienna. From Berman’s memoir, I’m not 100% sure whether he pushed it because he genuinely feared they were about to flee the country, felt he had to do so before Barr intervened … or for more nefarious reasons.
The charges were:
Conspiring to make a bunch of political donations in the name of Global Energy Producers
Lying to the Federal Election Commission
Falsifying a document to the FEC
Laundering donations from Russian Andrey Muraviev to pay pro-cannabis politicians
As Bondy described, the indictment implied that Lev and Igor’s political contributions to Pete Sessions were tied to an attempt to fire Marie Yovanovitch. But that was not charged as FARA.
On September 17, 2020, the indictment was superseded. Lev and Correia’s longterm Fraud Guarantee fraud was added and the charges tied to Muraviev (who was secretly indicted that same day) were bumped up. The paragraph describing a payment to Sessions took out the reference to an Ambassador, describing it instead as to “further their political goals.” There were still no FARA charges though.
Ultimately, Lev was convicted at trial in October 2021 of the GEP and Muraviev donations, and in March 2022, pled guilty to the fraud guarantee charges. He was never charged with FARA violations.
Bondy’s insinuation that SDNY took out the foreign agent aspect to protect Rudy is wholly inconsistent with the warrants (linked below) targeting Lev and Rudy unsealed last year.
They show that the investigation into Lev, which started based on a Campaign Legal Center complaint, initially focused on campaign finance crimes. In August 2019 — after the firing of Marie Yovanovitch but before the disclosure of the Perfect Phone Call — SDNY began to turn to Foreign Agent suspicions (though one of two warrants obtained in August 2019 was not executed). After the arrest, SDNY more aggressively turned to developing the Foreign Agent prong of the investigation. On November 4, 2019, SDNY obtained warrants targeting Rudy (which were not released last year). On December 10, 2019, the Foreign Agent prong continued.
That’s when Bill Barr intervened to kill that prong of the investigation, certainly as it pertained to Rudy, as I’ll lay out below.
After that point, SDNY focused on the Fraud Guarantee fraud.
It’s not that Lev went to prison for this but Rudy did not. On the contrary, Barr worked hard to ensure no one could go to prison on such charges.
While Barr was doing that, SDNY appears to have put that investigation on ice and attempted, without success, to resuscitate once Barr was out of office.
A central reason for this is the deep polarization in American politics, particularly around Trump himself. In 2016 and 2020, he earned a bit under 50 percent of the vote, about where he is in most recent polls. The shift from Biden to Harris helped firm up the Democratic electorate, which may be crucially important in who actually turns out to vote — but the race generally went from a narrow national Trump lead to a narrow Harris one. The 2024 race continues to be largely a referendum on Trump, much as the 2020 race was.
There has been one notable difference this year, though. While Trump’s 2016 campaign was unabashedly indifferent to policy specifics and his 2020 campaign centered on his incumbency, his 2024 effort has often — largely through the energies of his boosters — been presented as a campaign centered on the policies he seeks to implement.
It’s an unexpected argument, but a common one. You will often hear that Trump has an advantage on policy; that, if the campaign set aside all of the fluff of personal emotion, Trump would prevail simply by virtue of the popularity of his positions. That his support is rooted in what he stands for, not who he is.
Juan Williams dives in further at The Hill. “Trump is at 48 percent. How could this be possible but for widespread racism?”
Who are these people who look the other way when their candidate tells a bold lie about Black immigrants eating a mostly white Ohio town’s cats and dogs?
How can it be that not a soul among the 48 percent cares that Trump’s vice-presidential pick, JD Vance, says it is okay to “create” racist lies about immigrants eating pets “so the American media actually pays attention”?
How can 48 percent of voters back a candidate who says immigrants coming from “infested” places are “poisoning the blood of our country?”
Is it just snowflakes who notice when one of Trump’s close allies says, “The White House will smell like curry” if Vice President Kamala Harris, the daughter of an Indian immigrant, wins the presidency?
Do these voters also prefer to sail past Trump once calling a Black woman and former aide a “dog”? And he called Alvin Bragg, the Black Manhattan district attorney who successfully prosecuted him for business fraud, an “animal.”
Maybe Trump’s 48 percent don’t excuse his racism so much as get the message. They are inside a Republican Party that is 82 percent white. Most of those white Republicans are in small towns and rural areas.
Harris said Trump can’t be trusted to serve as president after “engaging in…hateful rhetoric that, as usual, is designed to divide us as a country…to have people pointing fingers at each other.”
In this year’s campaign, one of Trump’s regular dog-whistles at his rallies is his false claim that big cities, full of racial minorities and immigrants, are scary places full of crime and failure. Last week he flatly lied at a rally when he said a parent who leaves a child alone on the New York subway has “about a 75 percent chance that [they’ll] never see [their] child again. What the hell has happened here?”
Trump’s use of racism to stir up his white supporters was called out by writer Fran Lebowitz back in 2018. Trump, she wrote, has “allowed people to express their racism and bigotry in a way that they haven’t been able to in quite a while and they really love him for that…It’s a shocking thing to realize people love their hatred more than they care about their own actual lives.”
Ashley Parker writes this at The Washington Post. “Donald Trump’s imaginary and frightening world. His extreme caricatures serve as a way to paint an alarming picture of America under the Biden-Harris administration.”
In Donald Trump’s imaginary world, Americans can’t venture out to buy a loaf of bread without getting shot, mugged or raped. Immigrants in a small Ohio town eat their neighbors’ cats and dogs. World War III and economic collapse are just around the corner. And kids head off to school only to return at day’s end having undergone gender reassignment surgery.
The former president’s imaginary world is a dark, dystopian place, described by Trump in his rallies, interviews, social media posts and debate appearances to paint an alarming picture of America under the Biden-Harris administration.
It is a distorted, warped and, at times, absurdist portrait of a nation where the insurrectionists who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, to deadly effect were merely peaceful protesters, and where unlucky boaters are faced with the unappealing choice between electrocution or a shark attack. His extreme caricatures also serve as another way for Trump to traffic in lies and misinformation, using an alternate reality of his own making to create an often terrifying — and, he seems to hope — politically devastating landscape for his political opponents.
Trump, for instance, regularly claims that Democrats favor abortions up until the day of birth — and, in some cases, even after birth.
Speaking at the Sept. 10 presidential debate with Vice President Kamala Harris in Philadelphia, Trump falsely claimed that Harris’s running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, has said “abortion in the ninth month is absolutely fine.”
“He also says, ‘execution after birth’ — execution, no longer abortion because the baby is born — is okay,” Trump continued.
In fact, Walz has not said this, The Washington Post Fact Checker found, and “execution after birth” — or infanticide — is illegal in all states. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in 2021, nearly all abortions — 93.5 percent — occur at or before 13 weeks, and fewer than 1 percent were performed after 21 weeks. World War III, too, is another all-but-certainty should Trump not be elected in November, the former president frequently claims. In July, before a meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at his private Mar-a-Lago Club, Trump told reporters that only his electoral victory could stave off another global conflagration.
“If we win, it’ll be very simple. It’s all going to work out and very quickly,” Trump said. “If we don’t, you’re going to end up with major wars in the Middle East and maybe a Third World War. You are closer to a Third World War right now than at any time since the Second World War. You’ve never been so close, because we have incompetent people running our country.”
Seeing this dark stuff, or as Dubya put it back at his inauguration, “some weird shit,” we can only ask ourselves what causes people to swallow this hook, line, and sinker. Is this what makes you feel better about yourself? I keep wondering if it’s their brand of religion, their lack of education, or just their Iron Age tribalistic hate of any “other than them.” I had to even call it weird because, to me, the word evil is far more descriptive. It’s certainly no way to run a country. And, it’s not the way to have fun.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
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Happy Groundhog Day to those who celebrate. John Buss, @repeat1969
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
When I get around friends these days, the topic of conversation isn’t so much about Mardi Gras Parades or the usual stuff in their lives. It’s about how challenging it is to deal with anyone they know in the Kool-Aid Cult or simply trying to watch the day’s news. Open any list of today’s news items, and it will return you to bed. I’ve had conversations with everyone, from a friend since sixth grade to folks I’ve just met in front of my house. Just gazing at any social media site makes me wonder what Star Trek Timeline I landed in. Is it possible I will also bump into the evil Spock?
But you don’t have to ask me.
Ask Elmo. Why Is Elmo a Topic on the Evening and Morning News Shows? He showed up on social media asking how everyone felt, and they told him. This is from CNN and AJ Willingham. The Screen Capture from yesterday got 5.4 million views. I retweeted it. I wasn’t alone. “Elmo asked people online how they were doing. He got an earful.” The Elmo beat is mainstream now.
When Elmo posted a kind-hearted check-in this week on X, formally known as Twitter, he may have assumed he’d be shielded by these social mores. But he comes from “Sesame Street,” which is no place for lies.
“Elmo is just checking in!” he wrote. “How is everybody doing?”
Thousands of replies and a few interventions from his “Sesame Street” pals later, and it was pretty clear: The people are not doing well, Elmo!
It’s not surprising. The world is experiencing a grinding war in Ukraine, potential famine in Gaza and a seemingly endless drumbeat of mass shootings in the US. Many young Americans are struggling with anxiety and depression as the country faces a well-documented mental health crisis. And in many places we’re in the middle of a cold, dark winter.
The tenor of the responses to Elmo reflect much of that — and some welcome dark humor in unburdening ourselves to a fuzzy puppet. Elmo’s query also led to some heartwarming conversations about emotional health and the importance of checking in with friends.
We are not OK, thanks
“Elmo each day the abyss we stare into grows a unique horror. one that was previously unfathomable in nature. our inevitable doom which once accelerated in years, or months, now accelerates in hours, even minutes. however I did have a good grapefruit earlier, thank you for asking.”
“Every morning, I cannot wait to go back to sleep. Every Monday, I cannot wait for Friday to come. Every single day and every single week for life.”
After a few hours of people trauma dumping on the Muppet, the official “Sesame Street” account called time with a follow-up post directing people to — yes, really — mental health resources.
I didn’t add anything to the list, but I sure could’ve. We have an excellent economy, and the response of many major corporations is to price gouge us after four years of Trump, three years of COVID-19, and all the war news that’s never fit to print but must be. I was not okay as a kid watching the Vietnam War unfold on my parent’s black and white console TV or watching a bunch of Southern Cops use fire hoses on Black children my age on the same TV. At least it wasn’t 24/7, but we got newspaper delivery twice daily and the weekly news magazines. Still, seeing Donnie Dotard on TV and hearing that voice is worse. It’s like a peep show into the psycho ward at the Super Max prison for the criminally insane.
President Biden, whose approval rating has suffered amid high inflation, is beginning to pressure large grocery chains to slash food prices for American consumers, accusing the stores of reaping excess profits and ripping off shoppers.
“There are still too many corporations in America ripping people off: price gouging, junk fees, greedflation, shrinkflation,” Mr. Biden said last week in South Carolina. Aides say those comments are a preview of more pressure to come against grocery chains and other companies that are maintaining higher-than-usual profit margins after a period of rapid price growth.
Mr. Biden’s public offensive reflects the political reality that, while inflation is moderating, voters are angry about how much they are paying at the grocery store, and that is weighing on Mr. Biden’s approval rating ahead of the 2024 election.
Economic research suggests the cost of eggs, milk and other staples — which consumers buy far more frequently than big-ticket items like furniture or electronics — play an outsize role in shaping Americans’ views of inflation. Those prices jumped more than 11 percent in 2022 and 5 percent last year, amid a post-pandemic inflation surge that was the nation’s fastest burst of price increases in four decades.
Nothing is more traumatizing than watching a feeble dotard former guy and his absolutely deluded and mean followers sickeningly scream about their assumed grievances. It’s absolutely mood-killing. The economy is doing phenomenally. The Biden Administration has done everything that Economists know about running a good economy, and it’s going gangbusters in terms of employment and growth. Again, price-gouging is an issue, but only Congress can enact a law to curb that, and they won’t do anything that would make Biden look good. I mean seriously. They’ll kill us over selling out the Orange Snot Blossom. Biden spent 2023 shaming them in speeches, but that only goes so far.
But still, wow, the economy rocks. Just ask Hillary. The link is from Steve Benen at MSNBC. New report points to blockbuster U.S. job growth as 2024 begins. “By every metric, the latest jobs report points to a robust U.S. job market. The political implications have the potential to be dramatic.” The word ‘potential’ is essential. Will Fox News viewers ever see the results of Bidenomics?
Expectations heading into this morning showed projections of about 185,000 new jobs having been added in the United States in January. 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:
Job growth posted a surprise increase in January, demonstrating again that the U.S. labor market is solid and poised to support broader economic growth. Nonfarm payrolls expanded by 353,000 for the month, much better than the Dow Jones estimate for 185,000, the Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Friday. The unemployment rate held at 3.7%, against the estimate for 3.8%.
What’s more, while January’s jobs report showed employers adding 353,000 positions last month, we also learned that wage growth continued to outpace inflation, and the unemployment rate remained at 3.7%. In fact, the jobless rate has been below 4% for 24 consecutive months — a streak unseen in the United States since the 1960s.
Also note, the jobs report that comes every year in early February is especially notable because it includes revisions for all of the previous year. With this in mind, we now know that 3.05 million jobs were created in 2023 — well above the previous 2.7 million estimate.
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. economy has created roughly 15.1 million jobs since January 2021 — more than double the combined total of Trump’s first three years.
In recent months, Republicans have responded to developments like these by pretending not to notice them. No one should be surprised if GOP officials keep the trend going today.
Biden and Nikki Haley are not holding back on attacking Donnie Dotard. Most of the funds raised by his supporters go to take care of his massive legal troubles. The Washington Post reported yesterday that “Trump spent more than $55 million in donor money on legal fees last year, filings show.” Given that Nikki now has a large donor base filled with Republican billionaires, his uneducated SDE base is really on the hook for it.
Former presidentDonald Trump is cruising toward the Republican presidential nomination after victories in Iowa and New Hampshire, but he is diverting enormous sums of donor money to his mounting legal fees as he faces multiple lawsuits and 91 felony charges across four criminal cases.
The new figures for his legal spending were outlined in campaign disclosures filed with the Federal Election Commission on Wednesday night. Trump’s advisers have said the money that is being spent on legal expenses is not only for Trump’s defense, but also for the lawyer fees for some of his advisers and associates. Here are a few early takeaways from the new filings:
Two of Trump’s committees, Save America leadership PAC and the Make America Great Again PAC, spent $55.6 million on legal bills in 2023, including $29.9 million in the second half of the year, according to the new reports released Wednesday.
President JOE BIDEN has a reputation for salty language behind closed doors. But it nearly slipped out in public during his speech at Valley Forge last month to mark the third anniversary of the Jan. 6 insurrection. Animated and angry, he derided DONALD TRUMP and his followers for drawing glee from political violence.
“At his rally, he jokes about an intruder, whipped up by the Big Trump Lie, taking a hammer to Paul Pelosi’s skull,” Biden said.
“And he thinks that’s funny,” the president continued. “He laughed about it. What a sick …”
Biden let his voice trail off as the crowd cheered and chuckled.
In private, he doesn’t stop short.
The president has described Trump to longtime friends and close aides as a “sick fuck” who delights in others’ misfortunes, according to three people who have heard the president use the profane description. According to one of the people who has spoken with the president, Biden recently said of Trump:
My thoughts exactly, Mr. President. “”What a fucking asshole the guy is.”
But you don’t have to take my or his word for it. Here are some recent examples reported in the news. This is from CNN. “Roberta Kaplan says Trump threw papers across table at Mar-a-Lago deposition because his legal team agreed to feed her lunch.” It gets worse.
Attorney Roberta Kaplan said former President Donald Trump threw papers across a table and stormed off during adeposition at Mar-a-Lago after learning that his legal team had agreed to provide her lunch.
Kaplan, who has represented clients in high-profile cases against Trump, including E. Jean Carroll, said on an episode of the “George Conway Explains it All (to Sarah Longwell)” podcast recorded Thursday that she rejected the former president’s request that they work through a lunch break because he believed the deposition was “a waste of my time.”
“And then you could kind of see the wheel spinning in his brain. You could really almost see it,” Kaplan told Republican strategist Sarah Longwell and conservative attorney George Conway, a longtime Trump critic. “And he said, ‘Well, you’re here in Mar-a-Lago. What do you think you’re going to do for lunch? Where are you going to get lunch?’”
Kaplan said she told him that his attorneys had “graciously offered to provide” her team with lunch — a common civil practice between opposing legal teams.
“At which point there was a huge pile of documents, exhibits, sitting in front of him, and he took the pile and he just threw it across the table. And stormed out of the room,” Kaplan shared, adding that Trump specifically yelled at his lawyer Alina Habba for providing them lunch.
“He really yelled at Alina for that. He was so mad at Alina,” she said.
Kaplan continued: “He came back in and he said, ‘Well, how’d you like the lunch?’ And I said, ‘Well, sir, I had a banana. You know, I can never really eat when I’m taking testimony.’ And he said, ‘Well, I told you,’ — it was kind of charming. He said, ‘I told you, I told them to make you really bad sandwiches, but they can’t help themselves here. We have the best sandwiches.’”
His misogyny was worse in a prior case that Kaplan was handling.
Kaplan was deposing Trump at Mar-Lago in a lawsuit alleging the former president was involved with a fraudulent marketing company. A federal judge dismissed the suit last month.
In a separate anecdote, Kaplan detailed the end of the deposition when she was set to leave, saying that Trump told her: “See you next Tuesday” – a phrase that is often used as a derogatory euphemism directed at women.
“We come in the room and I say, ‘I’m done asking questions’ and immediately I hear from the other side, ‘Off the record. Off the record. Off the record.’ So they must have planned it. And he looks at me from across the table and he says, ‘See you next Tuesday,’” she recounted.
See you next Tuesday is derived from a combination of the letters c and u, which when pronounced aloud sound like “see you,” and the first letters of the words next and Tuesday. This forms an acronym rebus that, when taken together, stands for cunt. The phrase is sometimes typed out as c u next Tuesday.
So, here’s some more Donnie Dotard and friends-related links if you are so inclined.
Today I’m highlighting the work of Scottish artist Agnes Miller Parker. She is best known for her wood engravings of animals, often used as book illustrations. She was also a woman’s right activist. “The Uncivilized Cat” was an illustration for the book “Love’s Creation,” by Marie Stopes, published in 1928, the year women won the right to vote in the UK. The the image is filled with symbols of women’s liberation. Read about them at this link.
We are still waiting for the expected indictment of Donald Trump in the January 6 case. Special Counsel Jack Smith is till conducting grand jury interviews in the investigation, so maybe it won’t happen right away–or maybe it will come next week. Meanwhile, there is some Trump legal news.
The federal judge overseeing former President Donald J. Trump’s prosecution on charges of illegally retaining dozens of classified documents set a trial date on Friday for May 2024, taking a middle position between the government’s request to go to trial in December and Mr. Trump’s desire to push the proceeding until after the 2024 election.
In her order, Judge Aileen M. Cannon said the trial was to be held in her home courthouse in Fort Pierce, Fla., a coastal city two and a half hours north of Miami that will draw its jury pool from several counties that Mr. Trump won handily in his two previous presidential campaigns.
Judge Cannon also laid out a calendar of hearings, throughout the remainder of this year and into next year, including those concerning the handling of the classified material at the heart of the case.
The scheduling order came after a contentious hearing on Tuesday at the federal courthouse in Fort Pierce where prosecutors working for the special counsel, Jack Smith, and lawyers for Mr. Trump sparred over when to hold the trial.
The timing of the proceeding is more important in this case than in most criminal matters because Mr. Trump is now the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination and his legal obligations to be in court will intersect with his campaign schedule.
The date Judge Cannon chose to start the trial — May 20, 2024 — falls after the bulk of the primary contests. But it is less than two months before the start of the Republican National Convention in July and the formal start of the general election season.
Mr. Trump’s advisers have been blunt that winning the presidency is how he hopes to beat the legal charges he is facing, and he has adopted a strategy of delaying the trial, which is expected to take several weeks, for as long as possible.
When the trial date for Donald Trump’s Manhattan hush money case was set for March — during the GOP presidential primary schedule — the former president and leading 2024 Republican candidate shook his head.
The Republican Party as a whole might have that reaction to Trump’s latest trial date.
U.S. District Judge Aileen M. Cannon on Friday set Trump’s Florida classified documents case to begin on May 20, 2024. Cannon wound up more or less splitting the difference between the government’s request to begin in December and Trump’s lawyers’ preference to begin after the 2024 election.
The date could still be pushed back, especially given that Cannon has labeled the case “complex.” But it means we’re currently looking at this for a schedule of Trump’s upcoming trials:
Oct. 2: New York civil fraud trial
Jan. 15: Second E. Jean Carroll civil defamation trial
March 25: Manhattan hush-money trial
May 20: Federal classified documents trial in Florida
That’s a lot of legal issues to face in the heart of a campaign, keeping Trump or at least his lawyers in court for a huge chunk of time he’s supposed to be on the trail. But Trump’s most serious bit of legal jeopardy — at least for now, with potential Jan. 6-related indictments looming federally and in Georgia — won’t fully play out until the end of the primary season.
Nomination contests are often effectively wrapped up by March or April at the latest, with the final contests held in June but generally not consequential to the outcome. Republican National Committee rules effectively require every state to hold its contest by May 31, meaning a two-week classified documents trial would place the meat of the proceedings beyond the window for any GOP voters making their decisions.
Donald Trump received some no good, extremely bad legal news on Friday, when The Guardianreported that Fani Willis, the Fulton County district attorney criminally investigating his attempt to overturn the 2020 election in Georgia has “developed evidence to charge a sprawling racketeering indictment next month,” according to people familiar with the matter. Obviously, being charged with racketeering would be exactly as bad as it sounds—and yet somehow, that wasn’t even the worst news the ex-president received today.
Instead, it was likely the decision by Aileen Cannon—a federal judge Trump himself appointed—to set a trial date of May 20, 2024, for Trump to face off with the federal government in the classified-documents case, that had staffers and aides hiding in hallways and coat closets to avoid Trump’s ire (and whatever ketchup bottles he could get his hands on). While the spring date is several months later than prosecutors had requested, it is very much well before the postelection one Team Trump had been angling for in the hopes of putting it off until the ex-president could have won a second term and made all of his legal problems—on the federal level, that is—go away.
Of course, just because Cannon issued a ruling that Trump will undoubtedly be very unhappy about today does not mean she won’t, as many fear, blow up the case in his favor when the trial finally kicks off. (As The Washington Post notes, “In her role, Cannon can have a significant impact on the case, including by ruling on what evidence can be included and deciding on any potential motions challenging the charges.”) On the other hand, the government’s indictment against Trump is said to be extremely strong: After the charges were unveiled last month, former attorney general Bill Barropined: “I was shocked by the degree of sensitivity of these documents and how many there were, frankly. If even half of it is true, he’s toast.” As one Fox News legal analyst noted, “All the government has to do is stick the landing on one count, and he could have a terminal sentence. We’re talking about crimes that have a 10- or 20-year period as a maximum.” (Trump, along with his alleged co-conspirator, has pleaded not guilty.)
The Fulton county district attorney investigating Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results in the state of Georgia has developed evidence to charge a sprawling racketeering indictment next month, according to two people briefed on the matter.
The racketeering statute in Georgia requires prosecutors to show the existence of an “enterprise” – and a pattern of racketeering activity that is predicated on at least two “qualifying” crimes.
In the Trump investigation, the Fulton county district attorney, Fani Willis, has evidence to pursue a racketeering indictment predicated on statutes related to influencing witnesses and computer trespass, the people said.
Willis had previously said she was weighing racketeering charges in her criminal investigation, but the new details about the direction and scope of the case come as prosecutors are expected to seek indictments starting in the first two weeks of August.
The racketeering statute in Georgia is more expansive than its federal counterpart, notably because any attempts to solicit or coerce the qualifying crimes can be included as predicate acts of racketeering activity, even when those crimes cannot be indicted separately.
The specific evidence was not clear, though the charge regarding influencing witnesses could include Trump’s conversations with Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, in which he asked Raffensperger to “find” 11,780 votes, the people said – and thereby implicate Trump.
For the computer trespass charge, where prosecutors would have to show that defendants used a computer or network without authority to interfere with a program or data, that would include the breach of voting machines in Coffee county, the two people said.
The breach of voting machines involved a group of Trump operatives – paid by the then Trump lawyer Sidney Powell – accessing the voting machines at the county’s election office and copying sensitive voting system data.
Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R) has been contacted by the federal special counsel investigating former President Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election, Kemp’s office confirmed Friday.
Former Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey (R) was also contacted for the investigation, according to CNN reports.
Special Counsel Jack Smith is investigating Trump’s efforts to overturn the election and his actions related to the Jan. 6 insurrection. He served Trump a target letter on Sunday, informing the former president that he is the target of the probe.
By Agnes Miller Parker
The move shows overlap between Smith’s federal investigation and Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis’s investigation into the same conduct in Georgia.
Smith’s probe in Arizona is questioning lawsuits brought by the Trump campaign against the state which alleged that the election was fraudulent. Smith subpoenaed the Arizona Secretary of State’s office earlier this month and subpoenaed state lawmakers in February.
Trump called Ducey multiple times to pressure him to overturn Arizona’s election results. President Biden won Arizona, the first time the state voted for a Democratic presidential candidate since 1996.
Mark Meadows joked about the baseless claim that large numbers of votes were fraudulently cast in the names of dead people in the days before the then-White House chief of staff participated in a phone call in which then-President Trump alleged there were close to 5,000dead voters in Georgia and urged Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to overturn the 2020 election there.
In a text message that has been scrutinized by federal prosecutors, Meadows wrote to a White House lawyer that his son, Atlanta-area attorney Blake Meadows, had been probing possible fraud and had found only a handful of possible votes cast in dead voters’ names, far short of what Trump was alleging. The lawyer teasingly responded that perhaps Meadows’s son could locate the thousands of votes Trump would need to win the election. The text was described by multiple people familiar with the exchange.
The jocular text message, which has not been previously reported, is one of many exchanges from the time in which Trump aides and other Republican officials expressed deep skepticism or even openly mocked the election claims being made publicly by Trump, according to people familiar with the investigation, who spoke on the condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the criminal investigation.
Special counsel Jack Smith, who is leading a Justice Department investigation of Trump’s activities in the weeks leading up to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, has focused on exploring whether Trump and his closest advisers understood that claims of fraud in the election were baseless, even as they pressed state officials and others to overturn Biden’s victory and convinced Trump’s millions of supporters that the election had been stolen, people familiar with the probe have said.
The text message is a small part of a broader portrait of Meadows that Smith appears to be assembling as he weighs the actions of not just Trump but a number of his closest advisers, including Meadows.
After an overhaul to Florida’s African American history standards, Gov. Ron DeSantis, the state’s firebrand governor campaigning for the Republican presidential nomination, is facing a barrage of criticism this week from politicians, educators and historians, who called the state’s guidelines a sanitized version of history.
Siamese cats, Agnes Miller Parker
For instance, the standards say that middle schoolers should be instructed that “slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit” — a portrayal that drew wide rebuke.
In a sign of the divisive battle around education that could infect the 2024 presidential race, Vice President Kamala Harris directed her staffers to immediately plan a trip to Florida to respond, according to one White House official.
“How is it that anyone could suggest that in the midst of these atrocities that there was any benefit to being subjected to this level of dehumanization?” Ms. Harris, the first African American and first Asian American to serve as vice president, said in a speech in Jacksonville on Friday afternoon.
Ahead of her speech, Mr. DeSantis released a statement accusing the Biden administration of mischaracterizing the new standards and being “obsessed with Florida.”
Florida’s new standards land in the middle of a national tug of war on how race and gender should be taught in schools. There have been local skirmishes over banning books, what can be said about race in classrooms and debates over renaming schools that have honored Confederate generals.
Vice President Harris, taking aim at Gov. Ron DeSantis’s “war on woke” on Friday in his home state, blasted Florida politicians for making changes to the public school curriculum that she said amounted to little more than a “purposeful and intentional policy to mislead our children,” especially when it comes to slavery.
Harris never mentioned DeSantis (R) by name, referring only to “extremists” and people who “want to be talked about as American leaders.” But her fiery speech in Jacksonville focused squarely on the policies of the Florida governor and presidential candidate, as well as on the state’s Board of Education and its Republican-controlled legislature.
Florida’s new standards on Black history lay out numerous benchmarks, but one has especially caught critics’ attention — a statement that “slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.” Since the guidelines were approved on Wednesday, many civil rights leaders have denounced the notion that slavery benefited its victims in some ways.
“Come on — adults know what slavery really involved,” Harris said. “It involved rape. It involved torture. It involved taking a baby from their mother. It involved some of the worst examples of depriving people of humanity in our world.”
By Agnes Miller Parker
She added, “How is it that anyone could suggest that in the midst of these atrocities, that there was any benefit to being subjected to this level of dehumanization?”
Since DeSantis announced his bid for the presidency in May, polls have cast him as former president Donald Trump’s top competition for the Republican nomination, at least for now. As DeSantis makes his pitch in early-voting primary states, he has blasted what he calls “woke indoctrination” in schools and said recent legislative changes in Florida could be a model for the rest of the nation.
Harris’s trip to the governor’s home state to rip into his policies could be a pivotal moment both for the Biden campaign, which has generally resisted going after the GOP presidential hopefuls, and for the vice president, who has sometimes seemed to cast about for a resonant issue.
Read more at The WaPo.
Bidenomics News
It’s difficult to understand why President Biden isn’t more popular. He has really delivered on his promises. What more do voters want? Are people really stupid enough to fall for GOP propaganda about the economy?
Morgan Stanley is crediting President Joe Biden’s economic policies with driving an unexpected surge in the U.S. economy that is so significant that the bank was forced to make a “sizable upward revision” to its estimates for U.S. gross domestic product.
Biden’s Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act is “driving a boom in large-scale infrastructure,” wrote Ellen Zentner, chief U.S. economist for Morgan Stanley, in a research note released Thursday. In addition to infrastructure, “manufacturing construction has shown broad strength,” she wrote.
As a result of these unexpected swells, Morgan Stanley now projects 1.9% GDP growth for the first half of this year. That’s nearly four times higher than the bank’s previous forecast of 0.5%.
“The economy in the first half of the year is growing much stronger than we had anticipated, putting a more comfortable cushion under our long-held soft landing view,” Zentner wrote.
The analysts also doubled their original estimate for GDP growth in the fourth quarter, to 1.3% from 0.6%. Looking into next year, they raised their forecast for real GDP in 2024 by a tenth of a percent, to 1.4%.
“The narrative behind the numbers tells the story of industrial strength in the U.S,” Zentner wrote.
Morgan Stanley’s revision came at a pivotal time for the Biden White House. The president has spent the summer crisscrossing the country, touting his economic achievements. “Together we are transforming the country, not just through jobs, not just through manufacturing, but also by rebuilding our infrastructure,” Biden said Thursday during a visit to a Philadelphia shipyard.
Read more at CNBC.
Have a fabulous Caturday and a great weekend, everyone!!
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The Sky Dancing banner headline uses a snippet from a work by artist Tashi Mannox called 'Rainbow Study'. The work is described as a" study of typical Tibetan rainbow clouds, that feature in Thanka painting, temple decoration and silk brocades". dakinikat was immediately drawn to the image when trying to find stylized Tibetan Clouds to represent Sky Dancing. It is probably because Tashi's practice is similar to her own. His updated take on the clouds that fill the collection of traditional thankas is quite special.
You can find his work at his website by clicking on his logo below. He is also a calligraphy artist that uses important vajrayana syllables. We encourage you to visit his on line studio.
The Economic Data from the U.S. is impressive. This is from 
Canada is our mini-me. They shadow and follow are economic results so it’s not surprising they’re number two on that list. But, the same reason we could not get a bi-partisan immigration bill is the same reason we may get a government shut-down right before the election. 
The worst headlines still fill today’s papers and are always about you-know-who or the candidates running with MAGA status. North Carolina Gubernatorial candidate Mark Robinson is the latest in the MAGA lineage of someone who shouldn’t hold public office. 
Controversies have been present in most of the MAGA set. I mean, what type of weirdo can vote for a guy who’s about to get his sentence for committing 34 felons, is an adjudicated felon, and still has plenty of my felonies lined up to get him if he doesn’t get into office. His wife won’t even be seen with him, and she was just paid to show up at a Log Cabin Republican meeting by some unknown person. 
We’re basically seeing a family tree full of sociopaths! And blame that on Hillary??? WTF? So, there appears to be a spending deal that my avoid the government shutdown Trump wants. 
I have just a few other recommendations. The first one comes from Emptywheel. Also, if you haven’t watched From Russia, with Lev, You should.
There are also a few more articles analyzing DonOLD. I’ll be brief with these. 
Juan Williams dives in further at 
Ashley Parker writes this at The Washington Post. “Donald Trump’s imaginary and frightening world. His extreme caricatures serve as a way to paint an alarming picture of America under the Biden-Harris administration.”
Ask Elmo. Why Is Elmo a Topic on the Evening and Morning News Shows? He showed up on social media asking how everyone felt, and they told him
I didn’t add anything to the list, but I sure could’ve. We have an excellent economy, and the response of 
Biden and Nikki Haley are not holding back on attacking Donnie Dotard. Most of the funds raised by his supporters go to take care of his massive legal troubles. The Washington Post reported yesterday that 
My thoughts exactly, Mr. President. “”What a fucking asshole the guy is.”
His misogyny was worse in a prior case that Kaplan was handling.
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