Mostly Monday Reads: This is the Craziest Party that Could Ever Be

Modern Day Moses Mike Johnson has achieved Rinocchio status as Trumplicans demand a motion to vacate the chair. John Buss, @repeat1968

Good Day, Sky Dancers!

There’s been good news on the U.S. economy and other issues like a decreasing crime rate.  Weirdly, the legacy media wouldn’t cover history-making- statistics like the ones we’ve experienced over the last 4 years. But 48% of the country seems to prefer dark, weird lies for some reason.  “Murder and other violent crime dropped across the U.S. last year, FBI data shows. Murder dropped 11.6% from 2022 to 2023, the largest single-year decline in the last 20 years. Property crime was also down overall, while motor vehicle theft and shoplifting rose.”  This crime report is from NBC News.

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.

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.  Just 3 days ago, the FED cut the FedFunds rate by 1/2%. As a Financial Economist, I can tell you this is a BFD.  Did you know that Biden spoke at the New York Economic Club?  Of course, it wasn’t covered the way the Trump debacle was. This is from ABC News. “Biden calls rate cut ‘an important day for the country.’ Biden told The Economic Club how far the U.S. has come since the COVID pandemic.”

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.

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.  “Melania Trump was paid for a rare appearance at a political event. It’s not clear who cut the unusual six-figure check.” She made another weird, rare appearance at the RNC.  It was filled with the visual rebuffs of her husband.  For a Political Party obsessed with a traditional family and flying so-called Christian Values, something is very wrong here.

Also, the Barron Trump allegations are beginning to come out since he’s no longer considered a kid. Oy, and what a kid he was!  “The shocking Barron Trump allegations just keep getting worse.”  This is from MSN.

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.

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.  This is from the AP. “Spending deal averts a possible federal shutdown and funds the government into December.” I’m not sure how dumb you must be to know that the party that doesn’t deliver the deal gets blamed.  The Citizens get really pissed if they start missing all kinds of things owed them, like Vet Benefits and paychecks.

 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.”

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. “Why No One Went to Prison for Rudy Giuliani’s Hunter Biden Corruption.”

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.

There are also a few more articles analyzing DonOLD.  I’ll be brief with these.  From the Washington Post and Phillip Bump: “The ‘policy’ mirage that undergirds Donald Trump’s support. The former president and his supporters insist he wins a race centered on policy. It’s not because of Trump’s detailed policy platform.”

Juan Williams dives in further at The Hill. “Trump is at 48 percent. How could this be possible but for widespread racism?”

At this point, the racism is obvious. How else does it make sense that 48 percent of registered voters in last week’s Fox News poll say they have no problem putting Donald Trump back in the White House?

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?

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R- Ga.), no snowflake, condemned the comment as “appalling,” “racist” and “hateful.”

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?