We're missing 6.2 million jobs in July 2018 because only 60.5% are working

Democrats want you to know House candidate Abigail Spanberger was just monkeying around teaching at an Islamic school in DC

Democratic House candidate Abigail Spanberger suffers the kind of election year smear John McCain would recognize [thanks to a Postal Service error divulging the information]:

The Republican firm says it got the form by mistake from the Postal Service, where Spanberger once worked as a postal inspector. The Postal Service on Thursday apologized for its "human error."

That doesn't explain how a mistake of that magnitude occurred so rapidly. Spanberger requested her own personnel records months ago and hasn't received them. ...

Outraged Democrats, fearing other candidates remain at risk, have demanded a federal investigation. Without elaboration, the Postal Service says "a small number of additional requests for information from personnel files were improperly processed."

Ah, you can't get your own mail but somebody else can! The incompetent big government wanted by most Democrats, and too many Republicans, just keeps on giving.

Hm, the famous Chuck Berry wrote and recorded his fifth single "Too Much Monkey Business" in 1956

"Too Much Monkey Business" is a song written and recorded by Chuck Berry, released by Chess Records in September 1956 as his fifth single. It was also released as the third track on his first solo LP, After School Session, in May 1957; and as an EP. The single reached number four on Billboard magazine's Most Played In Juke Boxes chart, number 11 on the Most Played by Jockeys chart and number seven on the Top Sellers in Stores chart in 1956. -- Wikipedia

Listen to it here.

It's not an economic beum, you fools

At the end of 2017 we still had 14 million more on food stamps than at the pre-Great Recession average

16.5% of the U.S. population was on food stamps on average in 2017, versus 11% on average from 1973-2008.

In 2017 over 42 million received food help from the program, but only 28 million would have had the average receiving help returned to 11%.

In the first five months of 2018 the percentage receiving help has fallen to 15.4% on average, implying a smaller gap of about 11.6 million.

The trend is in the right direction, but we are hardly back to normal.

Hey Hey They're The Monkeys: Democrats say they monkey around

In death John McCain remains the jerk he was in life: Sarah Palin, his running mate in 2008, excluded from his funeral

Reported here.

Hopeless Arizonans choose another immigration squish, A-10 pilot Martha McSally, to run for resigning Flake's US Senate seat

Republican McSally (AZ-2), who could be a man masquerading as a woman for all we know and appears to have been flying solo since the annulment of her marriage in 1999, faces openly bisexual Democrat Kyrsten Sinema (AZ-9) for the Senate seat in November.

As in many other states, independents may vote in Republican Party primaries in Arizona.

Steep, sustained increases in new STD infections in the last five years, not seen for twenty

Reported here:

[N]early 2.3 million cases of chlamydia, gonorrhea and syphilis were diagnosed in the U.S. in 2017, surpassing the record set in 2016 by more than 200,000, CDC scientists reported Tuesday. ... CDC researchers found that gonorrhea diagnoses increased by 67 percent — from 333,004 to 555,608 — in just five years. ... Syphilis diagnoses, which rose by 76 percent, from 17,357 to 30,644, were mostly in men. ... The chlamydia rate held relatively steady with more than 1.7 million cases diagnosed in 2017, just a few percentage points above where it was in 2013.

Why does it take a Lanny Davis to teach Glenn Greenwald that GoFundMe is ground zero for gg...grifters?

Honest liberal Glenn Greenwald reminds the world about the media's chronic, systematic, reckless reporting of fake news

Including about CNN's latest lies about what Cohen's got on Trump, here in The Intercept:

When reporting on that story, I detailed just some of the similarly significant and false stories major outlets have published on this story over the last eighteen months, notably always in the same direction, pushing the same narrative interests:

• Russia hacked into the U.S. electric grid to deprive Americans of heat during winter (Wash Post)
• An anonymous group (PropOrNot) documented how major U.S. political sites are Kremlin agents (Wash Post)
• WikiLeaks has a long, documented relationship with Putin (Guardian)
• A secret server between Trump and a Russian bank has been discovered (Slate)
• RT hacked C-SPAN and caused disruption in its broadcast (Fortune)
• Russians hacked into a Ukrainian artillery app (Crowdstrike)
• Russians attempted to hack elections systems in 21 states (multiple news outlets, echoing Homeland Security)
• Links have been found between Trump ally Anthony Scaramucci and a Russian investment fund under investigation (CNN)

Whatever words one wishes to use to defend the U.S. media’s conduct here, “rare” and “isolated” are not among those that can be credibly invoked. Far more accurate are “chronic,” “systematic” and “reckless.”

Agent admits FBI leaks info to get it into the news, reports about which are then used by FBI to get FISA warrants

The practice is similar to the FBI's common practice of identifying potential "terrorists" whom FBI agents then suborn to commit criminal acts by posing as terrorists themselves.

From the story here:

A top FBI special agent admitted to House committees last week that bureau officials were known to leak information to the press and then use the resulting articles to help obtain surveillance warrants. 

Special Agent Jonathan Moffa, who worked with controversial former FBI officials Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, testified last Friday behind closed doors before the House Judiciary Committee and House Oversight Committee. 

A source with knowledge of his testimony confirmed to Fox News that Moffa said FBI personnel would use media reports based on information they leaked to justify applications for Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrants.

Japan's Shinzo Eeyore-Abe meets with China's Xi Jinpingpoo

Innocent Japanese school girls were legitimate targets of the American atomic bombs

Technological advancement means that now neither you nor the freak show have to travel to see each other

The Muppets' version of Luther's Von den Juden und ihren Lügen (January 1543)

Glenn Greenwald was not happy with The Intercept for its incompetent exposure of Reality Winner

Easy for him to say. She's the one paying the price for trusting The Intercept. Oh well, just another victim of a drone attack, or something.

Maybe the founder of eBay, Pierre Omidyar, should ask for his money back.

From a profile of Greenwald, here:

Greenwald went on to describe his frustration with an Intercept story, published last summer, that was based on an N.S.A. report leaked by Reality Winner, an N.S.A. contractor. The article described an attempt by Russian military intelligence to introduce malware into the computers of U.S. election officials in 2016. In Greenwald’s view, the story was overblown: the N.S.A. analysis included no underlying evidence. Before publication, Greenwald vetoed a suggestion that Snowden be invited to examine the leaked material. “I said, ‘I think it’s not a very good idea to send a top-secret N.S.A. document that purports to describe Russia to Russia.’ ” He laughed. “Not even I would look very kindly on that, if I were in the Trump Justice Department.” He was also dismayed, as many people were, that the Intercept had not properly disguised the document before showing it to the government for verification, making it easy for Winner to be identified as its leaker; she was arrested shortly after publication. The Intercept apologized, and supported her legal defense. The site “fucked up,” Greenwald said. He added that, if he didn’t work there, he might be wondering aloud why nobody was fired. (On August 23rd, Winner was sentenced to five years in prison.)

Remembering when Mario Draghi really, truly got it (sort of)

"Five years ago today, Mario Draghi saved the euro", by Eshe Nelson, July 26, 2017:

But with a simple, seemingly off-the-cuff phrase, Draghi fundamentally changed the course of events: “whatever it takes.”

At a speech in London on July 26, 2012, the ECB president gave an account of the euro-zone economy. Bond yields of weak euro-member governments were soaring, and traders doubted that national, euro- or EU-level institutions could get their act together in time to avert disaster. Draghi sought to convince international investors that the region’s economy wasn’t as bad as it seemed. He then made the momentous remark:

“Within our mandate, the ECB is ready to do whatever it takes to preserve the euro. And believe me, it will be enough.” ... the promise was enough to calm investors and bring down bond yields across the euro zone.

Martin Wolf for The Financial Times likes business historian Adam Tooze's important new book CRASHED: HOW A DECADE OF FINANCIAL CRISES CHANGED THE WORLD

See Martin Wolf, What really went wrong in the 2008 financial crisis?

Tooze has been making the rounds at places like Bloomberg (and especially here) and CNBC promoting the theses of the new book, and was notably interviewed yesterday on Bob Brinker's radio program "Money Talk" (the dismissive summary of the interview provided here is notably blind to Tooze's importance, weakly observing how Tooze maintains that "money has no tangible underpinning", which is about all that grabs the attention of libertarian fundamentalists).

Those more popular presentations give only a tantalizing hint of the narrative power this trained historian brings to the story of the 2008 panic.

To see that in action there is an important lecture available here which Tooze gave at the American Academy in Berlin earlier this year, on March 13th.

"Conservatives" will doubtlessly recoil at Tooze's characterizations of the role played by them during the financial crisis. That those conservatives are really the GOP's libertarians is a distinction the significance of which seems lost on Tooze.

That said, the value of Tooze's perspective goes far beyond the subject of the warring factions of libertarian fundamentalism and neoliberalism, however important those are for understanding our times.

For one thing, Tooze is almost unique in describing in such vivid detail the dominating role now played by the "dollar" in the global economy (American analyst Jeffrey Snider being the notable but obscure exception). It takes an historian. This is, of course, the eurodollar, the proper understanding of which permits Tooze to show how the financial crisis in the United States centered in the mortgage market was globalized via international banking through London and Frankfurt independently of the wishes of the state actors. It also reveals to him that the most important global economic relationship has not been the US with China but the US with London.

Same as it ever was. The king and his colonies still rule the world, with a little help from the Bank of England.

For another, Tooze's work shows the degree to which the global economy has been captured by the bankers in providing these eurodollars, who acted unilaterally behind the scenes, first in the US (Ben Bernanke) and regrettably only later in Europe (Mario "whatever it takes" Draghi), to provide liquidity swaps in the trillions of dollars during the financial crisis while politicians argued about how states should deploy mere billions.

One inescapable conclusion ten years after the financial crisis is that citizens of states are in larger measure no longer masters of their own destinies, and haven't been for a very long time. They are today really ruled by technocrats in charge of central banks who work now more, now less in concert with their host governments to manage economic flows. The danger of this global state capitalism is that it might one day slip back into the outright fascism it so closely resembles.

To the millions of unemployed who were not bailed out in the crisis and who lost their homes and their hope in the United States and in the PIIGS, or to the hundreds of thousands of Muslims now in Chinese reeducation camps, it already has.

The crisis for neoliberalism does not come from capitalist fundamentalism. It comes from its growing list of victims.

Ebola kills 72 in new outbreak in Congo, fears of spreading to Uganda, Rwanda, South Sudan

Reported here.

Barack Obama's tyrannical overreach is directly responsible for the Trump presidency

And you can add in Congressional incompetence and cowardice in crafting immigration legislation.

The people have their champion, and all the incompetents and cowards can do is continue to act in character.

To hell with you all!

Obama announced DAPA on November 20, 2014.

Trump launched his campaign for president just seven months later, on June 15, 2015, making illegal immigration the heart and soul of his candidacy.

Seven months.

In February 2015, the Migration Policy Institute estimated that about 3.7 million unauthorized immigrants in the United States are potentially eligible for DAPA, around 766,000 in just five counties: Los Angeles and Orange in California, Harris and Dallas in Texas, and Cook in Illinois.

The President’s program, when combined with Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, would have delayed deportation of slightly less than half of the 11 million illegal aliens in the United States. 

Hooah Orange Country Register: The hard truth is Turkey should be kicked out of NATO

Here:

[T]he U.S. should, quietly, plan out both Turkey’s exclusion from NATO and the destabilizing consequences to follow. Enacting the plan is so fateful a move that it must be done with as much care and forethought as possible. It should also, if and when it happens, be a turnkey operation.

John McCain is dead, the so-called conservative politician who relied on independents and liberals to win

From the 2004 story here about the South Carolina primary in 2000 against George W. Bush:

McCain’s overall strategy relied heavily on the state’s 400,000 veterans and military retirees’ siding with the war hero, and on his appealing, as he had in New Hampshire, to independents and liberals. He thought a high turnout in the open primary would favor him.

The turnout on Saturday, February 19, was huge—573,000 voters, more than double the previous high in a primary—but Bush still won by 11 points, 53 to 42. (Alan Keyes got a little less than 5 percent.) The veterans’ vote split evenly; Bush was buoyed by a two-to-one margin among Christian conservatives, a third of total voters. McCain outpolled him only in the more liberal coastal counties. Remarkably, a majority of voters saw Bush as the one who had run the more positive campaign, despite the attacks from pro-Bush groups.

Reality Winner wins 63-month sentence with reality for espionage

Reality Winner sentenced for leaking top secret U.S. report:

(Reuters) - A federal judge sentenced former U.S. intelligence contractor Reality Winner on Thursday to more than five years in prison after she admitted leaking to a media outlet [The Intercept] a top secret report on Russian interference in U.S. elections, her attorney said. ...

The NSA document she gave the news outlet contained technical details on what it said were Russian attempts to hack election officials in the United States and a voting-machine company before the November 2016 presidential election, two U.S. officials with knowledge of the case have said. ...

Betsy Reed, editor in chief of The Intercept, said in a statement that Winner should be honored, and that her sentencing and other prosecutions of whistleblowers were attacks on freedom of speech and of the press.

“Instead of being recognized as a conscience-driven whistleblower whose disclosure helped protect U.S. elections, Winner was prosecuted with vicious resolve by the Justice Department under the Espionage Act,” Reed said. 

The Intercept laughably maintains that publishing Winner's leaked document long after Election 2016 in June 2017 helped alert US states to Russian interference in the 2016 election when, as The Intercept itself admits, Russian hacking attempts of US elections have been and are "still front-page news almost two years later":

The federal government kept several states allegedly targeted by hackers in the dark about the specifics of these attacks until The Intercept published its story.

In fact, the day after The Intercept’s story came out, the Election Assistance Commission — the federal agency in charge of assisting state election officials — wrote an urgent bulletin to states, calling the report “credible” and urging state officials to read it. The EAC then provided advice on how to take action. (The commission, unbelievably, tweeted the hashtag #RealityWinner to promote its bulletin on social media).

Christina Warren of Microsoft mistaken for a white person

Most Americans see the difference between out-and-out lies and Trump's self-evident hyperbole

Yeah, but mostly only in flyover country where there is still a connection with reality. Contemporary liberalism is untethered to reality and is incapable of such distinctions. That's why liberalism is rightly seen to be coterminous with the "creative" class on the coasts and in the academy, the spinners of yarns and fictions and fantastic tales.

Trump would gain more traction in the current contretemps if he made more fun of them.

"Ridicule is man's most potent weapon".

Lee Edwards, here.

Bradley Smith, former head of the Federal Election Commission, doesn't think Trump's payments were campaign expenditures

Here in WaPo, amusingly turning the matter back on Mueller at the end:

However, regardless of what Cohen agreed to in a plea bargain, hush-money payments to mistresses are not really campaign expenditures. It is true that “contribution” and “expenditure” are defined in the Federal Election Campaign Act as anything “for the purpose of influencing any election,” and it may have been intended and hoped that paying hush money would serve that end. The problem is that almost anything a candidate does can be interpreted as intended to “influence an election,” from buying a good watch to make sure he gets to places on time, to getting a massage so that he feels fit for the campaign trail, to buying a new suit so that he looks good on a debate stage. Yet having campaign donors pay for personal luxuries — such as expensive watches, massages and Brooks Brothers suits — seems more like bribery than funding campaign speech.

That’s why another part of the statute defines “personal use” as any expenditure “used to fulfill any commitment, obligation, or expense of a person that would exist irrespective of the candidate’s election campaign.” These may not be paid with campaign funds, even though the candidate might benefit from the expenditure. Not every expense that might benefit a candidate is an obligation that exists solely because the person is a candidate. ...

Cohen is not the normal defendant, and prosecutors almost certainly squeezed him to plead guilty on these charges, in part, for the purpose of building a case for possible criminal or impeachment charges against the president, or even, daresay, “influencing the reelection” of Trump.

Michael Savage is as lazy as Rush Limbaugh, shoots off his mouth about Obama without reading Obama's full speech in South Africa

Far from stirring up race hatred, Obama was attacking it.

We covered it here. WaPo had the full transcript of Obama's remarks in July. Too bad Savage is too lazy to read it.

Another irresponsible person with a microphone.

Paul Manafort found guilty and Michael Cohen pleads guilty on same day Ann Coulter releases Resistance is Futile

I seem to remember In Trump We Trust was released in August 2016, just as Trump started backtracking on illegal immigration in Arizona.

Do Coulter book releases make the sky fall?

Today's reasons for hating Republicans (I don't need any to hate Democrats)

1) 52% of Republicans support Medicare for all.

2) 41% of Republicans support free college tuition.

Story here.

CNBC thinks rising number of murders of whites and of farm seizures in South Africa is a fringe talking point, not news

Trump is hyping a fringe talking point about South African government 'seizing land from white farmers':

'At the start of August, Ramaphosa announced plans by the ruling African National Congress to change the constitution to allow the expropriation of land without compensation. ...

'The notion that white farmers are persecuted in South Africa largely stems from a fringe group called AfriForum. Some far-right commentators and pundits have picked up on the idea, suggesting that there could be a "genocide" of white people in the country.' 

Separately, the Australian press puts the number of whites murdered on farms in the last 15 months at 70.

The relatively small number is not important to liberals, any more than is the murder of Mollie Tibbetts in Iowa by an illegal alien, because they claim others who put the number at 400 are exaggerating.

Yeah I know, the Holocaust wasn't 6 million, either. 

Elizabeth Tin Ear Crockagawea smoke pipe, say murder of Mollie Tibbetts by illegal alien not heap big problem

Keep it up, Lizzie.

Quoted here:

SEN. ELIZABETH WARREN (D-MA): My, I’m so sorry for the family here and I know this is hard and not only for the family but for the people in her community, the people throughout Iowa. But one of the things we have to remember is we need an immigration system that is effective, that focuses on where real problems are.

FBI soft-pedaled first Hillary e-mail probe, Loretta Lynch, James Comey and Peter Strzok out-and-out suppressed the second probe of Weiner laptop e-mails

So says a special investigation by Paul Sperry for Real Clear, here, which suggests the 30,000 missing e-mails which Hillary originally deleted are still on it:

Although the FBI’s New York office first pointed headquarters to the large new volume of evidence on Sept. 28, 2016, supervising agent Peter Strzok, who was fired on Aug. 10 for sending anti-Trump texts and other misconduct, did not try to obtain a warrant to search the huge cache of emails until Oct. 30, 2016. Violating department policy, he edited the warrant affidavit on his home email account, bypassing the FBI system for recording such government business. He also began drafting a second exoneration statement before conducting the search.

The search warrant was so limited in scope that it excluded more than half the emails New York agents considered relevant to the case. The cache of Clinton-Abedin communications dated back to 2007. But the warrant to search the laptop excluded any messages exchanged before or after Clinton’s 2009-2013 tenure as secretary of state, key early periods when Clinton initially set up her unauthorized private server and later periods when she deleted thousands of emails sought by investigators.

Far from investigating and clearing Abedin and Weiner, the FBI did not interview them, according to other FBI sources who say Comey closed the case prematurely. The machine was not authorized for classified material, and Weiner did not have classified security clearance to receive such information, which he did on at least two occasions through his Yahoo! email account – which he also used to email snapshots of his penis.

Many Clinton supporters believe Comey’s 11th hour reopening of a case that had shadowed her campaign was a form of sabotage that cost her the election. But the evidence shows Comey and his inner circle acted only after worried agents and prosecutors in New York forced their hand. At the prodding of Attorney General Lynch, they then worked to reduce and rush through, rather than carefully examine, potentially damaging new evidence. ...

[C]onducting a broader and more thorough search of the Weiner laptop may still have prosecutorial justification. Other questions linger, including whether subpoenaed evidence was destroyed or false statements were made to congressional and FBI investigators from 2014 to 2016, a time frame that is within the statute of limitations. The laptop was not searched for evidence pertaining to such crimes. Investigators instead focused their search, limited as it was, on classified information.

Stock market return in the last 18 years has been better than during the Great Depression and WWII, but not by much

Flashback: Obama campaign fined $375,000 for keeping illegal donations, hiding donors in 2008

Obama Campaign Fined Big for Hiding Donors, Keeping Illegal Donations

Obama 2008 campaign fined $375,000

Another beautiful American girl murdered by an illegal alien, this time in Iowa

Mollie Tibbetts case: Undocumented immigrant charged with murder:

Cristhian Bahena Rivera, 24, has been in the area for four to seven years, officials said. Charges were filed in Poweshiek County court. He is being held on a $1 million cash bond. 

Unlike most violent crimes, this kind is entirely preventable by not letting illegal aliens stay here in the first place.

Ann Coulter agrees Cohen's "crimes" aren't crimes

If you haven't been listening to Mark Levin tonight, you are probably panicking about the Michael Cohen plea for no reason

Mark Levin says the myriad talking heads out there, especially Jonathan Turley, have the Cohen plea all wrong. In fact, he says Cohen stupidly pleaded guilty to things which aren't crimes. The special prosecutor wants it to appear that there are campaign crimes involving Trump, but there are not. And because this is a plea, this isn't a finding of a court. So there is no effect, setting a new precedent. Cohen's plea comes to avoid more serious charges.

Levin even had the former head of the Federal Election Commission on to explain how there was no violation involved.

Good stuff.

Watch for the synopsis later, here.

Hooah Rand Paul: Edward Snowden is no traitor, he didn't sell secrets to anybody, he proved Clapper a liar

Quoted here in July:

"He didn't sell secrets to the Russians, he wasn't a traitor. He revealed something that revealed the highest ranking member of our intelligence community lied. I think he did it as a whistle-blower, he was reporting malfeasance," Paul said.

Paul, who previously joked about Snowden sharing a prison cell with former intelligence director James Clapper, whose inaccurate testimony Snowden exposed, doubled down after polling students, finding a similar number viewed Snowden as a traitor and a whistleblower.

"I don't see him as a traitor at all," Paul added about Snowden, saying later, "People have to decide on Snowden. My preference has become stronger and stronger that he was revealing the government was lying to us in a big way." Paul said he'd like to see a deal struck where Snowden can return from Russia without a long prison sentence.

The five-year statutes of limitations for prosecuting Clapper expired in March 2018.

Our feckless Congress let him off.

One rule for Clapper, another for Snowden, who marks his fifth year in Russian exile this summer.

Should have executed more of them when we had the chance

"Prisoners nationwide go on strike to protest 'modern-day slavery'":

Inmates plan to abstain from reporting to their assigned jobs, halt commissary spending, hold peaceful sit-in protests and refuse to eat during the strike.

Al Sharpton dresses down Donald Trump, tells him to show Omarosa a little R.E.S.P.I.C.T.

Here in "Sharpton misspells 'respect' while quoting Aretha Franklin to Trump".

Who knew Omarosa was Hispanic?

The Tobin Q ratios for Germany and America tell us Elizabeth Warren and David Dayen are wrong

Louis Woodhill, here:

Put simply, a Tobin Q ratio higher than 100% means that a company is creating economic value, and a Tobin Q below 100% means that a company is destroying value.  The most fundamental social responsibility of a company is to add value to the capital it employs, so the most fundamental job responsibility of a corporate CEO is to keep the Tobin Q ratio of the company he or she leads above 100%. 

Writing for The New Republic, progressive David Dayen argues:

“There’s proven evidence that this model of corporate governance [Warren's] can work. “Co- determination,” the term for worker representation on corporate boards, has created a form of capitalism in Germany where workers are far more equitably compensated and decisions are made with an eye toward long-term goals.”

The problem with this argument is that Piketty’s data shows that, since 1995, America’s Tobin Q ratio has averaged more than 100%, while Germany’s Tobin Q ratio has averaged about 55%.  In other words, America’s evil, rapacious corporations are creating economic value, while Germany’s enlightened companies are doing the equivalent of burning 45% of the euros entrusted to them.

The superstitious George Packer of The New Yorker imagines that the 2009 stimulus which PASSED failed because Republicans put a hex on it

Proving that it isn't just George Will who suffers from the disease. As Paul Krugman pointed out at the time, the stimulus simply wasn't big enough.

It never is.

Here is Packer:

In February, 2009, with the economy losing seven hundred thousand jobs a month, Congress passed a stimulus bill—a nearly trillion-dollar package of tax cuts, aid to states, and infrastructure spending, considered essential by economists of every persuasion—with the support of just three Republican senators and not a single Republican member of the House. Rather than help save the economy that their party had done so much to wreck, Republicans, led by Senator Mitch McConnell, chose to oppose every Democratic measure, including Wall Street reform. In doing so, they would impede the recovery and let the other party take the fall. It was a brilliantly immoral strategy, and it pretty much worked.

Atheist George Will conflates economy and stock market, remains oddly superstitious about deficits

George Will forgets we've had trillion dollar deficits quite recently but without a stock market crash. 

The trillion dollar deficits recently were in:

2009 $1.41 trillion

2010 $1.29 trillion

2011 $1.29 trillion

2012 $1.08 trillion.

These deficits triggered nothing in particular except fevers among Republicans, but are associated with the misallocation of capital which produces L-shaped instead of V-shaped economic recoveries. Meanwhile that it's an L-shaped recovery is a concept which eludes George Will, eyes fixed as they are on his towering S&P 500 idol. But we do agree the economy isn't the best it's ever been as the president insists. The gap is now about $5 trillion and rising.

Here:

When He, or something, decides that today’s expansion, currently in its 111th month (approaching twice the 58-month average length of post-1945 expansions), has gone on long enough, the contraction probably will begin with the annual budget deficit exceeding $1 trillion.

China eating America's lunch for 25 years by following exactly the protectionist strategy free traders say will destroy US

Jeff Ferry here in USA Today says free traders can't explain China's success because their free trade ideology blinds them to how protectionism has made China great:

China has been eating America’s lunch for a quarter-century. And they’ve done it by following exactly the strategy that pundits and free traders now suggest will be destructive to the US economy. ... Unless Washington stands up to China now, the trajectory of the past 25 years points to a troubling, continued decline for America’s working families. And so, for those who suggest that tariffs are a mistake, they need merely look at China’s rise for an instructive rethink.

Since the 1980s the share of job seekers relocating has fallen from more than a third to ten percent now

The Wall Street Journal reports via Mish, here:

The share of job seekers relocating for new employment has fallen dramatically since the late 1980s, when more than a third moved to take new opportunities elsewhere, according to surveys from outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas Inc. In the 1990s, job-related moves ebbed and flowed between 20% and 35%, then fell below 20% after 2000. Roughly 10% of job seekers relocated for new opportunities in the first half of this year, Challenger said.

John Brennan and his liberal sycophants make Glenn Greenwald want to puke

Your next opportunity to pick a parasite is little more than two months away

In a truly representative republic which reflected the intent of the Founders, America would have 100 senators picked by the state legislatures, not by popular vote, and at least 6,561 members of the US House (using the ratio of 1 representative per 50,000 of population intended by Article the First, not ratified; the father of our country wanted a ratio of 1:30,000 for 10,934 members of the US House in 2018). Instead we have 100 senators and 435 representatives, and 10,840 lobbyists in 2018. The corporate takeover of the Congress was a fait accompli by 1929, thanks to Republicans.

The English today are better represented than Americans with one member of parliament to about 101,000 of population, for all the good it does them. In the US the current ratio is 1:754,092. When Republicans stopped the growth of representation once and for all in 1929, the ratio stood at about 1:280,460. Using the 1929 ratio in 2018 would mean 1,170 members in the US House instead of 435.

Surely what was good enough for 1929 is good enough for 2018, no? But good luck even with that.

Author finds cost of housing and daycare to be the main drivers of the middle class "squeeze"

From the transcript of the podcast here:

Middle-class life is 30% more expensive than it was 20 years ago. ... The main problem is the cost of housing. ... The second problem was the cost of daycare. A lot of it had to do with wages that were just not keeping up with other kinds of expenses. ...  [R]eal estate is no longer a place to live, but it’s an investment vehicle. That has driven up the cost of housing for ordinary people or the precarious middle class, as I call them. 

Unstated here is the new necessity of two incomes once women entered the labor force in quantity after the 1960s under the influence of feminist ideology. For the first twenty years of the post-war this was not so. When you dramatically increase the size of the labor force, the cost of the labor naturally comes down. The result was that women entering the workforce increased their average real income, but only just enough over time to pay for the cost of daycare, a wash. Meanwhile real male incomes stagnated.

Women working in large numbers naturally put pressure on the future growth of the labor force as well. Because they were not having the children who would become the country's next workers, a future labor shortage was inevitable as the post-war 4-child families transformed into 2-child families.

Enter the pressure to increase immigration, wink at low-labor-cost illegal immigration, and export jobs, a new era of which was inaugurated under George H. W. Bush in 1989, who doubled the level of legal immigration overnight, and under his son George W. Bush in 2001, who presided over the export of 3 million manufacturing jobs, a trend continued under Barack Obama who exported 3 million more. Manufacturing jobs had been the most important anchors and hubs for middle class jobs in American communities, the absence of which turned college from an option into a necessity in order to maintain what was formerly possible with only a high school diploma. Increase the demand for college, and you increase its price, and with it the pressure on stagnating pocketbooks.

Housing prices rose dramatically from the late 1990s in consequence of the fateful decision under Bill Clinton to unleash the savings hidden in the nation's housing stock for sixty years. Clinton signed in 1997 the libertarian Republican legislation rewriting the tax laws which had forced homeowners to stay in their homes or move up to avoid large capital gains tax hits. Large economic forces were behind this, not the least of which was the growing sense of the unsustainability of the middle class consumption culture without a new source of savings. 

The birth of the housing ATM under Reagan in the 1980s had no doubt prepared the way for these developments, who infamously did away with the tax deductibility of credit card interest while increasing the same for home equity lines of credit. The effect was to get the children of the Baby Boom to think of their homes as mere commodities which could be exploited to extract value. The liquidity unleashed by the Clinton legislation ten years later hit the economy like a tidal wave, driving prices higher and higher into the now infamous housing bubble as homes were churned by flippers and families alike. It took just ten years of that to drive the economy into the worst panic it had experienced since the Great Depression.

Reversing these horrible developments would require a civilizational transformation of values which in the past only Protestant Christianity seems to have been able to provide. Feminist ideology, like all ideology, has done nothing but take away. The revaluation of values necessary in our situation would have to begin with women insisting on fidelity and marriage once again. Women are biologically predisposed to the self-sacrifice needed. To get the men to go along they will need a Lysistrata, but she's probably not Camille Paglia.

Communism works in only one place.  

Priceless: Yale historian Timothy Snyder blames Democrats for Hillary's loss

Here, on May 1, 2017, in Historian Timothy Snyder: “It’s pretty much inevitable” that Trump will try to stage a coup and overthrow democracy:

 '"On Tyranny" is a suggestion of things that everyone can do. ... [T]he other lessons — such as supporting existing political and social institutions, supporting the truth and so on — those things will then come relatively easily if you can follow the first one, which is to get out of the drift, to recognize that this is the moment where you have to not behave as you did in October 2016.' 

Funny how he lets that little slap slip at the end of an interview about his fears. It is the great, unacknowledged truth of Election 2016.

The rest of it reminded me of myself in 2009.

When I saw how leftists started trashing Obama one year in to his presidency it dawned on me that the tyranny I had feared from an Obama presidency had been a misplaced fear. Then the stories of Obama's laziness started to surface, and the personal details about his penchant for watching sports on TV, traveling, fine dining and playing golf. The guy got captured by the trappings of the office. Only then was it clear that there was nothing existential to fear. And then the guy punted on Obamacare, letting the House and Senate duke it out, creating a grotesque. And after reelection, he actually made the Bush tax cuts permanent and fixed the AMT.

Wow. What a revolutionary!

If Snyder breathed into a paper bag for a minute or two, he might realize that Trump's first midterms are upon us and only now is Trump starting to realize what presidential power is all about. The thing is, it's way too late. He has already squandered his political capital in year one, failing at job one, which is to get the order of the agenda correct. This was partly the result of making lousy appointments across the board in the first place, many of whom have gone on to blow up like so many Clinton bimbo eruptions but without the sex. By generally being incompetent like any true outsider would be in Washington Trump was at a huge disadvantage from the start anyway. But the people who could have helped him didn't because Trump got elected in part by insulting them.

This presidency is already much like Obama's, a creation of the House and Senate, not of the president. Recourse to executive orders to get what you want but can't get the ordinary way is a sign of weakness, not strength. It shows that the master is the slave. 

Few presidents get three important things done. Trump has one major accomplishment but it wasn't the one people remember the fearless leader championing at every venue of 2015 and 2016. So far the corporate tax cut is not translating into unequivocal results for the people. As a percentage of civilian population, employment remains over 6 million behind the pre-Great Recession average.

"Hillary isn't president" is something to be truly grateful for, but sooner or later it will dawn on the Trumpists that Trump isn't either.

Black privilege in Michigan

Remember all those stupid ads on conservative talk radio a few months ago about a breakout for silver?

There was even this story about it in April, "Silver On The Verge Of A Breakout".

Silver's down about 15% since April 19th when the story was published.

What they didn't tell you was the expected breakout was to the downside, and "it would be really nice of you to buy all this silver I need to unload".

Silver soared to 48.70 in April 2011, but it's been all downhill from there.

Average US House seats lost by Republican and Democrat presidents in midterm elections

Average including all midterms:

9 Republican: 21

12 Democrat: 32

Average for midterms after initial election to office:

6 Republicans: 17

7 Democrats: 31

Data here. 

Matthew Continetti is delusional, imagines Republicans after 2010 "overreached", thinks Democrats might after 2018

Here, when in reality the so-called Tea Party Congress utterly capitulated.

It continued to ratify the new level of Obama's spending from fiscal 2009 onward, increased 25% overnight and kept there through the end of his presidency.

The Congress wasn't supine just in respect of the spending, either. John Boehner explicitly ceded the agenda to Obama after his reelection in 2012. Congress did nothing to hamstring an imperial president bent on ruling by decree. It was the Supreme Court which had to repeatedly rebuke the Obama administration, which simply ignored the court and kept on doing it.  

One can only wonder what Continetti would call it if Congress had actually exercised its constitutional power of the purse instead of lining up at the hog trough to lap it up with the rest of the pigs. Probably something about the tyranny of the legislative, or some such rot.

Why did the liberal cross the road, mommy?

Same as the squirrel, honey. He wanted to die.

The liberal death wish fulfilled by Islam

Puncturing Matt Yglesias: Kids today may be growing less tolerant of those they actually disagree with

Noted here at Heterodox Academy:

Contemporary young adults are significantly less likely to endorse “racist” views than any other U.S. age cohort. Well, are they more likely to give the racists a platform? Actually, they are far less willing today than they ever have been to grant racists a platform. And this is actually far more significant than it may initially seem in light of the fact that the sphere of what counts as “racist” has radically expanded – from David Duke in the 70’s to things like “microaggressions” today. In other words, not only are contemporary youth more willing to censor those they deem racist than previous cohorts, but they are likely to brand a much wider range of speech as “racist” (and therefore, worthy of censorship). ... Coverage on campus speech by Vox writers seems to regularly suffer from bias.

Public school indoctrination about race clearly has succeeded.

Hey Boston Business Journal, tell it to the gun industry and the NRA, you jerks

Obama spied on Americans FOR YEARS, crickets from his SLAVES in the media

'The normally supportive [FISA] court censured administration officials, saying the failure to disclose the extent of the violations earlier amounted to an “institutional lack of candor” and that the improper searches constituted a “very serious Fourth Amendment issue,” according to a recently unsealed court document dated April 26, 2017.

'The admitted violations undercut one of the primary defenses that the intelligence community and Obama officials have used in recent weeks to justify their snooping into incidental NSA intercepts about Americans.' 

Story here.

The enemies of the people circle the wagons

Former communist head of the CIA loses his security clearance

Sad.

"Wayne Isaac" provides a sage estimation of Richard Spencer, and much else besides

Here at American Greatness:

Spencer’s aims are rooted instead in a romantic vision of defending the volksgeist. ... Spencer is, at heart, a contrarian social critic. ... Instead of bourgeois and proletariat, we now have whites versus the marginalized. Spencer is the poster-boy archvillain of that construct. The entirety of Spencer’s argument is simply to posit the opposite of the Left: whites aren’t bad. In fact, they’re wonderful. ... [I]n the end, he is a provocateur and critic of liberalism, nothing more. Spencer’s politics are reactionary not “Progressive.” His erudition and urbanity allowed him to become the perfect representation of all the Left’s nightmares: a defender of whiteness sensible enough to be a threat but fringe enough to be safely skewered by the elite everywhere and anywhere. Spencer is a convenient Leftist boogeyman. But in the end, there is no “there” there. Spencer is wide, not deep.

Julie Kelly unpacks in August 2018 what Pat Buchanan had already assembled in October 2017

"Thus we have Free Beacon neocons, never-Trump Republicans, the Hillary Clinton campaign, the DNC, a British spy and comrades in Russian intelligence, and perhaps the FBI, all working with secret money and seedy individuals to destroy a candidate they could not defeat in a free election."

Here:

The Washington Free Beacon admitted last year that they retained Fusion from late 2015 until April 2016 to gather opposition research on Republican primary candidates. The website is run by Kristol’s son-in-law, Matthew Continetti. The Beacon posted numerous negative stories about the Trump campaign in 2016, including hit pieces on Carter Page in March and July.

The Beacon’s story keeps changing, however. At first, Continetti admitted that the Beacon “retained Fusion GPS to provide research on multiple candidates in the Republican presidential primary.” Days later, Continetti explained why his website failed to mention its relationship with Fusion in several related articles prior to October 2017. After some blather about aggregated articles, Continetti vowed that future articles “will mention its history” with Fusion.

And they did. A few days after that, the Beacon posted an article with this disclaimer: “The Washington Free Beacon was once a client of Fusion GPS. That relationship ended in January 2017.”

Say what? Something is not adding up here; in fact, it stinks.

We are expected to believe that Bill Kristol’s son-in-law paid Fusion throughout the 2016 presidential campaign cycle but Simpson doesn’t pitch one dossier-related story to either one? Kristol just comes up with the very same flimsy talking points that Simpson and Steele are peddling—at the exact same time—and it’s pure coincidence? Kristol just happens to call for an investigation one week before the FBI takes the outrageous and unprecedented step of probing private citizens working on an opposing presidential campaign? Kristol and Robby Mook just strangely regurgitate the identical Trump-Russia plotline—on the same morning?

Chief economist at Merrill Lynch when it went bankrupt ignores the first 130 years of US history, aptly proffers a figure of mere myth

Those Cuomos sure are kwazy

Chris Cuomo says Antifa is on the side of right.

Andrew Cuomo says America was never great.

Since Antifa wants to overthrow America, they're reading from the same page.

So that's the meaning of Mario Cuomo's liberalism. Or its legacy anyway.

There is no contradiction between liberalism and socialism.

Republicans apparently have had enough of the man who first brought the Muslims to Minnesota

Omarosa's not a dog, she's a chameleon: She worked in the Clinton administration in her 20s

Trump's not the only one who's switched parties.

Reported here last December:

In her 20s, she was a political appointee in the Clinton administration where, according to People, she held four jobs in two years. ... In the last, she was reportedly “asked to leave as quickly as possible, she was so disruptive.”

Trump expands infrastructure of the coming police state, body scanners coming to LA subway system

This will be in mass transit countrywide before you know it, and then in every public building and on every roadway. And then on your street, and on your house. There will be no escape from the surveillance of Big Sis.

If you object to the surveillance, you won't be able to ride or eventually do other things you take for granted now under the free republic. In effect this will be no different than the Chinese social credit system, which denies travel, and other "privileges", to people who receive low scores for not cooperating with the state's demands in matters of politics or religion.

From the story here:

Los Angeles' subway will become the first mass transit system in the U.S. to install body scanners that screen passengers for weapons and explosives, officials said Tuesday.

The deployment of the portable scanners, which project waves to do full-body screenings of passengers walking through a station without slowing them down, will happen in the coming months, said Alex Wiggins, who runs the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority's law enforcement division.

The machines scan for metallic and non-metallic objects on a person's body, can detect suspicious items from 30 feet (9 meters) away and have the capability of scanning more than 2,000 passengers per hour. ...

Signs will be posted at stations warning passengers they are subject to body scanner screening. The screening process is voluntary, Wiggins said, but customers who choose not to be screened won't be able to ride on the subway.