Posted: January 21, 2023 | Author: bostonboomer | Filed under: cat art, Cats, caturday | Tags: Brett Kavanaugh, Covid-19, Davos, debt limit, Doug Letter, Janet Yellen, January 6, John Roberts, leaked draft, medicare, Roe v. Wade, Social Security, Supreme Court |

Goddess, Hunter, Consort, Thief, by Peter Paul Rubens, 16th Century
Happy Caturday!!
The Supreme Court is in the news and not in a good way. You know about John Roberts’ failed “investigation” into the leak of the draft decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, but did you know about the secret documentary on Brett Kavanaugh? Here’s the latest:
Charlie Savage at The New York Times: Supreme Court’s Inquiry Into Leak Included Interviews With Justices.
The Supreme Court’s internal investigation into who leaked a draft of the opinion last year overturning the landmark decision that had established a constitutional right to abortion included talking to all nine justices, the marshal of the court said on Friday.
But the justices — unlike dozens of law clerks and permanent employees of the court — were not made to sign sworn affidavits attesting that they had not been involved in the leak of the draft opinion overruling Roe v. Wade and that they knew nothing about it.
The clarification by the marshal, Gail A. Curley, who oversaw the inquiry, followed widespread speculation over its scope and limitations. In a 20-page report on Thursday, Ms. Curley disclosed that the investigation had not turned up the source of the leak while leaving ambiguous whether it had extended to interviewing the justices themselves.
“During the course of the investigation, I spoke with each of the justices, several on multiple occasions,” Ms. Curley said on Friday. “The justices actively cooperated in this iterative process, asking questions and answering mine.”
She added: “I followed up on all credible leads, none of which implicated the justices or their spouses. On this basis, I did not believe that it was necessary to ask the justices to sign sworn affidavits.”
Ms. Curley did not indicate whether she searched the justices’ court-issued electronic devices and asked them to turn over personal devices and cellphone records, as she did with other personnel. She also did not address whether she had interviewed any of the justices’ spouses, another question that arose after her report was made public.
It wasn’t much of an investigation if even Gini Thomas was not questioned, and the most likely suspects–the right wing justices– weren’t required to sign affidavits. But no one really expected Roberts to do a serious investigation when he won’t even deal with the justices’ political activities and conflicts of interest. What a weakling he is.
On to the Kavanagh documentary.
The Guardian: ‘I hope this triggers outrage’: surprise Brett Kavanaugh documentary premieres at Sundance.
A secretly made documentary expanding on allegations of sexual assault against supreme court justice Brett Kavanaugh has premiered at this year’s Sundance film festival.

Four year old girl with cat, by Jacob Gerritsz Cuyp, 1647
Justice, a last-minute addition to the schedule, aims to shine a light not only on the women who have accused Kavanaugh, a Donald Trump nominee, but also the failed FBI investigation into the allegations.
“I do hope this triggers outrage,” said producer Amy Herdy in a Q&A after the premiere in Park City, Utah. “I do hope that this triggers action, I do hope that this triggers additional investigation with real subpoena powers.”
The film provides a timeline of the allegations, initially that Kavanaugh was accused by Christine Blasey Ford of sexual assault when she was 15 and he 17. She alleged that he held her down on a bed and groped her, and tried to rip her clothes off before she got away. Kavanaugh was also accused of sexual misconduct by Deborah Ramirez, who alleged that he exposed himself and thrust his penis at her face without her consent at a college party.
About the film:
The first scene features Ford, half off-camera, interviewed by the film’s director Doug Liman, whose credits include Mr and Mrs Smith and The Bourne Identity. Justice features a number of interviews with journalists, lawyers, psychologists and those who knew Ford and Ramirez.
“This was the kind of movie where people are terrified,” Liman said. “The people that chose to participate in the movie are heroes.”
In the film, Ramirez, who previously told her story to Ronan Farrow in the New Yorker, also shares her story on-camera. Ramirez is referred to as someone “they worked hard for people not to know”, her story never given the space it deserved until long after Kavanaugh was confirmed to the court in October 2018….
The film then details how the circles around Ramirez and Kavanaugh responded, showing text messages of a discussion when Ramirez’s allegations were about to go public, of a mutual friend being asked by Kavanaugh to go on record to defend him. Another friend refers to it as “a cover-up”.
The New Yorker included a statement from a group of students at the time in support of Kavanaugh. A year later, the film shows that two of them emailed the New Yorker to remove their names from the statement.
Ramirez’s lawyers claim they contacted Republican senator Jeff Flake, who was involved in Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings, to explain what happened to her. The next day Flake called to delay the confirmation and insist on a week-long FBI investigation.
But the film details how the FBI failed to call on the many witnesses recommended by Ramirez’s lawyers. Footage is shown of the film-makers meeting with a confidential source who plays tape of Kavanaugh’s classmate Max Stier, now a prominent figure in Washington running a non-profit, who allegedly witnessed Kavanaugh involved in a similar act of alleged drunken exposure with a female student at a dorm party at Yale. The woman has chosen to remain anonymous and this is the first time this recording has been heard.
Read more details at the link. You can also check out this piece at The Hollywood Reporter: How Doug Liman Directed a Brett Kavanaugh FBI Investigation Doc in Secret.
Some January 6 investigation news:
Politico: The House’s legal lieutenant in its Trump wars speaks out — about Jan. 6 and more.
While Congress’ biggest Donald Trump antagonists are household names to political junkies — think Liz Cheney, Adam Schiff, Jamie Raskin — there’s a lesser-known Trump adversary who may have been more effective than the others: Doug Letter.

Portrait of Cleopea Krieg von Bellikon, 1499-1671, by Hans Asper
The former House general counsel was involved in every political brawl between House Democrats and Trump that has defined Washington politics for the past four years. Letter helped guide the work of the Jan. 6 select committee, played a critical role in both Trump impeachments and strategized the certification of Joe Biden’s win — before violent rioters upended those plans on Jan. 6, 2021….
In a wide-ranging interview with POLITICO, the House’s former top attorney described his tenure battling a former president who tested the limits of executive power at every turn, resisting efforts at accountability in ways that previous chief executives had not. But he has faith that his work helped to stem future presidential attempts to push constitutional boundaries, lending more power to lawmakers.
“I just feel like the Biden administration and future administrations are not going to act like the Trump administration,” Letter said. “They’re not going to show such ignorance of our system and think that the executive branch can ignore the legislative branch. That’s not the way it works.”
Doug Letter on January 6:
Letter was returning to the House floor from some basement vending machines when he ran into Speaker Nancy Pelosi being whisked from the Capitol under heavy guard. Don’t go back up there, one official told him. An angry mob had breached the building.
But Letter, in a panic, said he had to retrieve several giant binders that were full of sensitive strategy and scripts for the day’s proceedings. He opted to forgo evacuating with Pelosi and instead raced back to the chamber.
“I was the last person in before they locked the doors,” Letter recalled.
The attack on the Capitol led to the Jan. 6 select committee, where the House’s then-top attorney charted a legal strategy that Letter now describes as one of the hallmarks of his tenure.
Through his work on that panel, Letter secured at least two streams of information that became a core element of the committee’s voluminous findings: Trump’s confidential White House records and the Chapman University emails of attorney John Eastman, an architect of the then-president’s bid to subvert the 2020 election.
Letter also won court fights to obtain telephone records from Arizona GOP chair Kelli Ward, who took part in Trump world’s plan to send false electors to Congress. And he helped direct the House’s strategy to hold certain Trump advisers in contempt of Congress, which resulted in prosecutions of Trump advisers Peter Navarro and Steve Bannon.
“We had a whole enormous number of people that, as we now know, were putting together this massive, not just a conspiracy, but a whole bunch of conspiracies, to attack our democracy,” Letter said.
Read the rest at Politico.

Joseph Goodhue Chandler, American folk art
As you know, I went to a meeting in my over-60 apartment building awhile back. Most of the people there weren’t wearing masks. I came down with something a few days later, and it dragged on for weeks. I thought others here in the building were being careful too, but I was wrong. We haven’t talked much about Covid-19 on the blog lately, but yesterday I read this article that really angered me, and I want to share it with you.
Slate: Billionaires at Davos Don’t Think COVID Is a Cold.
In photos of 2023’s World Economic Forum—or Davos as it is commonly called, after the Swiss resort town where it annually occurs—you might not notice the HEPA filters. They’re in the background, unobtrusive and unremarked upon, quietly cleansing the air of viruses and bacteria. You wouldn’t know—not unless you asked—that every attendee was PCR tested before entering the forum, or that in the case of a positive test, access was automatically, electronically, revoked. The folks on stage aren’t sporting masks (mostly), so unless you looked at the official Davos Health & Safety protocol, you wouldn’t be aware that their on-site drivers are required to wear them. You also might be surprised to learn that if, at any point, you start to feel ill at Davos, you can go collect a free rapid test, or even call their dedicated COVID hotline.
It’s hard to square this information with the public narrative about COVID, isn’t it? President Joe Biden has called the pandemic “over.” The New York Timesrecently claimed that “the risk of Covid is similar to that of the flu” in an article about “hold outs” that are annoyingly refusing to accept continual reinfection as their “new normal.” Yet, this week the richest people in the world are taking common sense, easy—but strict—precautions to ensure they don’t catch COVID-19 at Davos.
In addition to high-quality ventilation, masks, hotlines and PCR testing, some have noted the signature blue glow of Far-UVC lighting, demonstrated to kill pathogens in the air, although this is unconfirmed. We can be certain, however, that the testing, high-quality ventilation, and filtration protocol is effective at preventing the kind of super-spreader events most of us are now accustomed to attending.
t seems unlikely to me that a New York Times reporter will follow the super-rich around like David Attenborough on safari, the way one of their employees did when they profiled middle-class maskers last month. I doubt they will write “family members and friends can get a little exasperated by the hyper-concern” about the assembled prime ministers, presidents, and CEOs in Switzerland. After all, these are important people. The kind of people who merit high-quality ventilation. The kind of people who deserve accurate tests.
Why is the media so hellbent on portraying simple, scientifically proven measures like masking—in environments absent of high-quality ventilation, full of people who do not have easy and consistent access to tests—as ridiculous and unnecessary as hundreds of people continue to die daily here in the U.S.?
Why is the public accepting a “new normal” where we are expected to get infected over and over and over again, at work events with zero precautions, on airplanes with no masks, and at social dinners trying to approximate our 2019 normal?
Very good questions. I guess the rich are entitled to protection, but the rest of us can just get sick and die for all they care. I hope you’ll go read the whole article at Slate.
Finally, a couple of articles about the upcoming fight over the debt limit:
CNN: Yellen warns of ‘global financial crisis’ if US debt limit agreement isn’t reached.
Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen on Friday warned of the widespread global effects that could be felt if the federal government exhausts extraordinary measures and fails to raise the debt ceiling, telling CNN’s Christiane Amanpour about the ways everyday Americans could face stark consequences.
Yellen’s warning comes after the United States on Thursday hit its $31.4 trillion debt limit set by Congress, forcing the Treasury Department to start taking extraordinary measures to keep the government paying its bills.

Still Life with Fighting Cats, by Frans Snyders (1579-1657), Flemish painter
While those newly deployed extraordinary measures are largely behind-the-scenes accounting maneuvers, Yellen told Amanpour that “the actual date at which we would no longer be able to use these measures is quite uncertain, but it could conceivably come as early as early June.”
Speaking exclusively to CNN from Senegal, Yellen said that after the measures are exhausted, the US could experience at a minimum downgrading of its debt as a result of Congress failing to raise the debt ceiling. The effects of the federal government failing to make payments, she argued, could be as broad as a “global financial crisis.”
“If that happened, our borrowing costs would increase and every American would see that their borrowing costs would increase as well,” Yellen said. “On top of that, a failure to make payments that are due, whether it’s the bondholders or to Social Security recipients or to our military, would undoubtedly cause a recession in the US economy and could cause a global financial crisis.”
“It would certainly undermine the role of the dollar as a reserve currency that is used in transactions all over the world. And Americans – many people would lose their jobs and certainly their borrowing costs would rise,” she continued.
Read more at CNN.
The Washington Post: Biden aides want to force GOP to abandon debt limit threats.
Shortly after last year’s midterm elections, a senior congressional Democrat called White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain and asked how the administration planned to prevent the new Republican House majority from using the debt ceiling — and the threat of a default that could wreck the economy — to force spending cuts.
Klain said the White House’s plan was straightforward, according to the lawmaker: Refuse to entertain any concessions, and launch a barrage of attacks highlighting the GOP position that would force Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) to fold.
“This debate is simple: We want to do the responsible thing, and they want to take the entire American economy hostage to cut Social Security and Medicare,” said the member of Congress, speaking on the condition of anonymity to reflect private conversations. Klain told the lawmaker that the fight could result in substantial political benefits for the Democratic Party. “The point he was making was clear: You can’t negotiate with people who take hostages.”

Felis Syriacus Ulisse Aldrovani (1522-1605), by Vintage Lavoie
But the question remains what the administration will do if Republicans won’t raise the debt limit without negotiations.
House Republicans have increasingly signaled that they will force a showdown with the administration over the nation’s debt ceiling, which sets a statutory limit on how much the federal government can borrow….
Many GOP lawmakers have said that they will not approve a debt ceiling increase without cuts to spending programs that the Biden administration has vowed to protect, creating an impasse with no clear resolution.
…[A]dministration officials [have] conclude[d], at least for now, that the only viable path is to press Republicans to abandon their demands to extract policy concessions over the debt limit — a position they have publicly reaffirmed in recent weeks. The Biden administration is focused on pressing the GOP to unveil a debt limit plan that includes spending cuts, with the hope that such a proposal will prove so divisive among Republicans that they are forced to abandon brinkmanship. This strategy stems in part from the belief among White House officials that it would be enormously risky either to negotiate policy with the GOP on the debt limit or try to solve it via executive order — and they appear willing to put that premise to the test.
How about having Biden and surrogates travel around the country educating voters about the consequences of either letting Republican crash the economy or letting them destroy Social Security and Medicare? Just a thought.
What are your thoughts about all this? What other stories do you recommend?
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Posted: January 28, 2013 | Author: dakinikat | Filed under: just because, morning reads, New Orleans | Tags: "disabled deadbeats", Christine Lagarde, Davos, feminist protests at Davos, krewe of barkus, New Orleans, Paul Krugman, superbowl 2013 |
Good Morning and Happy Carnival Season and Super Bowl Madness!!
My city is hopping with all kinds of things for the next few weeks. Yesterday, one of my favorite parade krewes rolled! It’s the Krewe Of Barkus!! Honey, Karma, and I used to do this all the time when we lived in the Quarter and they were alive. It’s a dog krewe and a fundraiser and adopt-a-krewe member event that raises funds for our NOSPCA. It’s a great time. Honey and Karma loved it because the parade attendees throw dog biscuits. They used to think the streets of the French Quarter were lined with treats for weeks after the parade!!! Kids and Dogs are just about the happiest I ever see them when this parade rolls! Be sure too check out Channel 4’s photo gallery because it’s 100 photos of cuteness!!!
Meanwhile, the 49ers have landed and sportscasters from all over are begging we host the game every year. I’m not sure we could handle that but it’s interesting for awhile. We’ve been told to be nice to Roger Goodell despite the hooplah over the bounty fines and penalties. Most Saints fans feel the team was unfairly singled out for punishment since it’s been a practice in other places too. You can’t go very many places where fans go where there’s not a sign that says that a place won’t serve Goodell; and many of the krewes that have already had to roll due to the interruption have had floats that have also laid into him.
Political analysts James Carville and Mary Matalin have spent many years arguing their individual philosophies (in summary: He’s on the left, and she’s not) even as they’ve enjoyed a surprisingly happy marriage for most of the last two decades. One thing that brings them together right now is their work with the Super Bowl host committee in New Orleans, which they co-chair. It’s an especially meaningful honor for Carville, who was born and bred in Louisiana, and is a rabid football fan.
Carville and most other Louisiana natives seem to firmly believe that having the Super Bowl back in New Orleans is a great measuring stick for the ways in which the city has not only moved on, but rebuilt and improved, after Hurricane Katrina devastated the landscape in 2005. Getting the game back here, and for the 10th time overall, was a big part of that.
“My hope is it can help bring some real closure here, and that the city can show what it can do,” Carville said in a recent host committee conference call. “But you just don’t know that feeling until you’re through with it. All of us on the committee are trying not to focus on that. We’re trying to focus on the mission at hand. Sometimes I wake up at night and say if this thing goes well this can really help people put a lot of things behind ‘em. Yes, that thought has crossed my mind. But I can’t allow myself to think like that. We’re a little bit like these teams. You can’t think what it’s like to win, you just gotta prepare. That’s been the attitude here.”
Paul Krugman says the Republicans have a new “welfare” queen” stereotype to flog. This time it’s “disabled deadbeats”. Once again, they can’t seem to do the math to figure out the aging of the baby boom generation is going to cause the numbers to go up in absolute, but not relative terms.
So yes, there has been some liberalization of the criteria — if you have multiple interacting conditions or mental illness, you may qualify in ways you didn’t before — but that liberalization is pretty reasonable. It’s still quite hard to qualify for DI.
What strikes me, however, isn’t just the way the right is trying to turn a reasonable development into some kind of outrage; it’s the political tone-deafness.
I mean, when Reagan ranted about welfare queens driving Cadillacs, he was inventing a fake problem — but his rant resonated with angry white voters, who understood perfectly well who Reagan was targeting. But Americans on disability as moochers? That isn’t, as far as I can tell, an especially nonwhite group — and it’s a group that is surely as likely to elicit sympathy as disdain. There’s just no way it can serve the kind of political purpose the old welfare-kicking rhetoric used to perform.
The same goes, more broadly, for the whole nation of takers thing. First of all, a lot of the “taking” involves Social Security and Medicare. And even the growth in means-tested programs is largely accounted for by the Earned Income Tax Credit — which requires and rewards work — and the expansion of Medicaid/CHIP to cover more children. Again, not the greatest of political targets.
The point, I think, is that right-wing intellectuals and politicians live in a bubble in which denunciations of those bums on disability and those greedy children getting free health care are greeted with shouts of approval — but now have to deal with a country where the same remarks come across as greedy and heartless (because they are).
I made the mistake of watching bits and pieces of MTP yesterday where both Paul Ryan and Jim Demint –aided and abetted by Dancing Dave–tried to convince every one that we have a fiscal crisis. That is so not true. As we know here, it’s code for drown the Federal Government in Grover Norquist’s bathtub while starving granny and offing Big Bird.
The other drone war is in Washington. The drones are in groups with names like the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget and Campaign to Fix the Debt. They drone on, and on, about the calamities that await unless we cut Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.
That the goal of the deficit drones is to cut Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid has been plain for years to anyone who looks at where the money comes from. It comes largely from Peter G. Peterson, a billionaire former secretary of Commerce under Nixon, who is Captain Ahab to Social Security’s Moby Dick. And when one trick, such as privatization, falls flat, his minions always have another, whether it’s raising the retirement age or changing the COLA. But a cut by any other name is still, and always, just a cut.
Peterson’s influence is vast; practically the entire DC mind-meld has bought his line to some degree.
The other day I was on CNBC, supposedly to discuss the debt ceiling, but the topic was Social Security all the way. My host, Andrew Ross Sorkin, was very blunt: “If now isn’t the time to cut entitlements,” he asked, “when would be?” My answer – in a word, never – is not one he seemed to have thought possible before.
Yet there is no good reason to cut Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid. These are insurance programs. They keep the elderly, their survivors and dependents, and the disabled, out of dire poverty. We can afford this. There is also no financing problem; if there were, investors would not be buying 20-year US bonds at 3 percent. These days when some economists say that cuts are needed, they say it’s only for show – to establish “credibility.” Old-timers may remember, that’s what DC insiders once said about the war in Vietnam.
Jim DeMint’s performance on the MTP panel was so abysmal that the camera actually caught Andrea Mitchell shaking her head no in disgust at something he said and furrowing her brow. The worst part was his response to how the Republican Party Race baits to get to the Dixiecrats. When asked if the Republicans were going to quit campaigning to the lowest common denominator, Demint went off on abortion for a good 3 minutes. He totally avoided the question which I suppose is part of their new messaging strategy. Yes the answer to republican racism is a rant on aborted fetuses.
Pressing DeMint, Gregory asked if he regretted “some of the comments about abortion in this last cycle, about rape, about, again, what Colin Powell thought were veiled racist comments from the party?”
The former South Carolina senator ignored the reference to “racist comments,” instead responding with a rant about fetal personhood.
“The fact that we are losing over 3,000 unborn children a day is an important issue,” DeMint opined. “But Republicans or conservatives should not engage in a wish list about exceptions for abortion when the other side will not even agree that we have real people, real human beings. And we need to fight the battle where it should be fought. Life is important. We know from all the new technology and improved sonograms that we do have a baby.”
“Instead of just offering my opinion on some hypothetical debate about exceptions for abortions, we need to move it back and particularly work with the states that are fighting just for the personhood of the child. And if we can start there, I think America will move with us.”
“Little different than the question about rhetoric and how it reaches voters,” Gregory noted as he moved on to the next topic.
You can see the performance at Raw Story. Talk about your “offensive and bizarre comments” after Demint went crazy-go-nuts after Dancing Dave played the Jindal “Party of Stupid” lecture. You can watch Andrea shake her head at about 1:48 as he take after Detroit and LA for being devastated as the result of Liberal agendas. The fetus rant is shortly after that. It’s jaw dropping. Also, Demint seems to think that Louisiana is a success story. I just don’t even know what to say to that.
Thirty-nine years after the forum’s annual meetings began in Davos, Switzerland, female participation hasn’t topped 20 percent of delegates. And that’s for the entire conference: Excluding moderators, there were only men among the bankers and policy makers discussing “Global Financial Context,” for instance, and executives and lawmakers on the “Global Energy Context” were also all male.
“The debate is still dominated by males frustrated by the crisis created by male-oriented industries,” said Kim Sung Joo, a businesswoman who co-chaired the election campaign last year for South Korea’s first female president. “The forum is reflective of the industries that used to lead. It’s not broad enough.”
Kim, whose Sungjoo Group owns German fashion brand MCM, joins delegates who point to an array of mechanisms the forum,
like the business and political world, could adopt to be more inclusive. The shift from a manufacturing to a knowledge, Internet-based economy is one element the forum is overlooking, and cheaper access might lure a wider spectrum of delegates including younger leaders, Kim said.
Davos reflects a global community in which women are still struggling to become leaders.
Women represent just 17 percent of independent directors at companies in the U.S. Standard & Poor’s 500 (SPX) stock index, barely above the 16 percent level of 2007, executive recruiter Spencer Stuart said in a November report. In the European Union, women with board positions climbed to 15.8 percent in October, according to European Commission figures.
The Feminist Protestors were from the Ukraine. You can watch a video report from the UK Guardian at this link.
Topless protesters from the activist group Femen clashing with police at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. The Ukrainian protest group painted their chests with ‘SOS Davos’, calling attention to poverty of women around the world and what they perceive as sexism and male domination of the world economy
Well, I think that’s it for me today. What’s on your reading and blogging list?
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Posted: January 24, 2011 | Author: dakinikat | Filed under: Economic Develpment, morning reads, SOTU, Stock Market, U.S. Economy, U.S. Military, U.S. Politics | Tags: Americans undereducation, Davos, Economic Forecast, efficient markets hypothesis, GDP growth, George Akerlof, State of the Unon Address, The Palestine Papers |
Good Morning!
The country is gearing up for the State of the Union Address. We’re going to be live blogging it here. It’s scheduled for Tuesday and my plan is to live stream it from CSPAN. It’s bad enough to watch all that stupidity in one place. I don’t need the echo chamber on top of it all. It’s actually something that’s demanded by the Constitution Article 2, Section 3.
[The President] shall from time to time give to the Congress Information of the State of the Union, and recommend to their Consideration such Measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient…
If Senator Dick Durbin is to be believed, part of the speech will contain a New Obama Plan that is “part stimulus”. I still keep hearing David Bryne speak “same as it ever was” over and over again. But, the links at Politico and here’s a taste.
“It’s part of a stimulus. but we’re sensitive to the deficit,” Durbin said on “Fox News Sunday” when asked by host Chris Wallace about the president’s expected plans to call for more spending for infrastructure, education, research in his State of the Union address Tuesday night to a joint session of Congress.
Noting his support for the president’s deficit commission recommendations, Durbin said Congress should be cautious about large spending cuts until the economy is showing sustained patterns of growth.
“They said be careful,” he said citing the report. “Don’t start the serious spending cuts, the deficit reduction, until were clearly out of the recession in 2013. We’ve got to make sure this economy is growing with more jobs, more business success.”
I’m not sure which part of economics 101 and 102 these folks missed–given the took them at all–but the growth we’re anticipating during this ‘recovery’ is not enough to eliminate the current unemployment rate. Mature economies do not grow very quickly. Any growth rate of real gdp from about 1-4% would be healthy and normal for a developed, mature economy. That’s not going bring down unemployment any time soon, let alone within a two year presidential election cycle. Giving tax breaks to corporations that can head to markets over seas where there are actually customers is not going to create jobs here. The only thing that is stopping this Democratic Death Wish is the fact that Republicans are BAT shit crazy and even then, they still managed to recapture the house.
Speaking of the Republicans, they’re all in for taxcuts to Billionaires, but any spending ascribed to help ordinary Americans still will get the wall of no. At least that’s what Senator Mitch McConnell is saying.
Speaking on Fox News Sunday, Mr. McConnell countered that “The American public, as one pundit put it, issued a massive restraining order,” against government spending and excessive debt in November’s Congressional elections.
Indeed, Mr. McConnell seemed at times gleefully sardonic about President Obama’s efforts to depict himself as a centrist trying to find common ground with Republicans. The president, he said, has certainly moved to the enter , but mostly “rhetorically.”
“The president needs to pivot,” Mr. McConnell said. “He seems to be pivoting on virtually everything else, and I don’t put him down for that. I mean he obviously saw what happened in the November election and is trying to go in a different direction. He’s quit bashing business and is now celebrating business.”
“Well it’s about time,” Mr. McConnell added, “because the only way we’re going to get unemployment down and get out of this economic trough is through private sector growth and development. I think excessive government spending, running up debt, making us look like a Western European country is the wrong direction.”
I’m not sure which Western European Country he’s referring to here except maybe Ireland or Greece. Most of the rest of them are growing at about the same level that we’re expected to grow with a few above and a few below. Developed economies don’t really grow rapidly unless they get some kind of boost from a technological advance or something else. Here’s some estimates from the CIA factbook. McConnell just says anything that serves his narrative, I swear.
Even if we do get some ‘normal growth’, I doubt we’ll see anything to kick us up a notch given this kind of education and research and development environment. Wonder where are priorities are?
- U.S. consumers spend significantly more on potato chips than the U.S. government devotes to energy R&D.
- In 2009, for the first time, over half of U.S. patents were awarded to non-U.S. companies.
- China has replaced the U.S. as the world’s number one high-technology exporter.
- Between 1996 and 1999, 157 new drugs were approved in the U.S. Ten years later, that number had dropped to 74.
- The World Economic Forum ranks the U.S. #48 in quality of math and science education.
Here’s some good news that shows all hopes for science and reality may not be lost completely for the US. You’ll see that it doesn’t come from registered Republicans however.
52% of GOP reject evolution; 36% reject creationism

More Americans today believe that human beings developed without any involvement of a higher power, according to a new poll.
Gallup reported that since 1982, the number of Americans believing that humans evolved over millions of years increased by seven percentage points.
The current figure – 16 percent – has trended upwards since 2000.
Since 1982, Americans who believe that humans evolved with God guiding the process haven’t changed (38 percent), while Americans who believe God created humans in present form has decreased four points to 40 percent.
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