Showing posts with label COVID-19 2024. Show all posts
Showing posts with label COVID-19 2024. Show all posts

Monday, December 23, 2024

Joe Biden commutes federal death sentences to life in prison without parole but not for Robert Bowers, Dylaan Roof, and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev

 President Biden used his clemency authority Monday to commute the sentences of 37 of the 40 men on federal death row to life without parole, in one of the most significant moves taken against capital punishment in recent presidential history. ...

Biden's actions come shortly after he pardoned 39 individuals who were convicted of nonviolent crimes, and commuted the sentences of nearly 1,500 others who were placed on home confinement during the COVID pandemic.

Monday's announcement also follows controversy over Biden's pardon of his own son, Hunter Biden, for gun and tax charges.

More.

Friday, December 6, 2024

American whiners generally rate their own healthcare positively but not the country's

 Gallup, here.

People are in a bad mood about it since 2020 because of what happened during the pandemic with lock-downs, quarantines, and mask and vaccine mandates, and because the expanded emergency coverage from that year has expired with the expiration of the emergency in 2023.

But 71% still think their own healthcare quality is pretty good, compared with 44% saying the same thing about the quality for the country as a whole.

There's always been that disconnect.

And generally speaking, it is difficult to draw any conclusions from this about pre-Obamacare and post-Obamacare experiences because of it. But 62% rated the quality of healthcare in the country highly in both 2012 and 2010, the year Obamacare was passed. That's now down 18 points to 44%. 71% now rate the quality of their own healthcare highly, down 11 points since 2012 from 82%.

I suspect we'll be living with the after effects of the pandemic debacle for a while longer.

 





Saturday, October 26, 2024

Cheap gasoline prices were key to the Trump-era "boom" for the bottom half of income earners destroyed by the Great Recession

Reported here in "Inflation-shocked low- and middle-income Americans may not spend normally for years":

“For a very large share of Americans, the bottom 60% are spending more on essentials than before the pandemic,” said Michael Pearce, Oxford Economics deputy chief U.S. economist. “The burden is hardest among the lowest income but also touches middle income. Spending patterns of low-income Americans will take years to recover.” ...

The last time low-income Americans’ discretionary spending fell this much, which was during the Global Financial Crisis of 2007-2008, it took five to 10 years for spending patterns to return to previous levels, he said.

“And the reason was gas prices fell,” Pearce said. Global oil prices fell by about 70% between 2014-16, which pushed pump prices sharply lower and helped low-income Americans catch up.

“It’s harder to see some revolutionary cost saving (like that) on the horizon,” he said. 

          

Harder to see only if we continue with the green energy nonsense.

The opportunities are YUGE for Trump/Vance because ALL energy costs much more now.

It's not just gasoline. Get the government boot off the neck of fossil fuel producers and gasoline will come down, natural gas will come down, and electricity will come down. 

Base energy from coal should be transitioned to nuclear, which works in cold weather and hot weather without fail just like coal, unlike natural gas, wind, and solar, which are fine where appropriate but not as base energy, the energy you must have when you need it when the sun doesn't shine, the wind doesn't blow, and the gas won't flow.

J. D. Vance knows:

 



 

Monday, October 21, 2024

Barack Obama is a lyin' pos who could have made any such life-saving measures public long before now, but everyone knows they never existed

If they did exist, the lost lives are on him and no one else because he kept his mouth shut, which is what he should be doing right now instead of spewing lies to get Kamala Harris elected.

 


Saturday, October 19, 2024

Sometimes it's not the economy stupid: Headline employment under Obama didn't recover until May 2014, but he got re-elected in 2012 anyway

 Six years and four months went by: Jan 2008-May 2014.

And economic confidence actually declined from -11 in 2012 to -10 in 2014 when it did!

It's one of the craziest things in US political history, comparable to FDR getting re-elected throughout the Great Depression, which his economic experimentation only made worse.

By October 2012, 72% said the effects of the Great Recession were still the most important problem, compared to 43% today in October 2024, but it didn't matter that Obama wasn't solving it. He beat Romney anyway.

Is this one of those sometimes?

The same phenomenon may be happening today, but in reverse.

Harris stands to lose despite economic indicators which are chugging along in her favor, or at least not falling apart, to which those 43% seem oblivious.

Civilian employment in July and September 2024 remains near the November 2023 peak. Core inflation is still too high at 2.7%, but it isn't in the 5s anymore like it was for four straight quarters. Congress has thrown the book at the economy since 2Q2020, with nominal GDP growing at an astounding 9.84% compound annual rate because of pandemic spending. That's been a double-edged sword, however, exploding the national debt, inflation, and interest rates.

But economic confidence is Obama-like negative, and has been since it crashed during the pandemic in April 2020 to -32 from its highest level in 20 years under Trump just two months before, in February 2020 at +41.

Trump didn't shut down the economy in 2020, but governors sure did. It was a stark demonstration of just how quickly the wrong leadership can make everything go to hell in a hand basket overnight. The people today aren't wrong to lack confidence.

Ominously for incumbent VP Harris, Gallup thinks 2024 is most analogous to 1992, when Americans booted the incumbent Bush 41 even though the recession had ended more than a year before in 1991.

Majority of Americans Feel Worse Off Than Four Years Ago

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- More than half of Americans (52%) say they and their family are worse off today than they were four years ago, while 39% say they are better off and 8% volunteer that they are about the same. The 2024 response is most similar to 1992 among presidential election years in which Gallup has asked the question. ...

With a majority of Americans feeling they are not better off than four years ago, economic confidence remaining low, and less than half of Americans saying now is a good time to find a quality job, the economy will be an important consideration at the ballot box this year. As inflation persists and economic concerns dominate voters' minds, the upcoming election may hinge on which candidate can best address these pressing issues.

 






Wednesday, October 16, 2024

The vast majority in America is shunning vaccination against COVID-19 more than a month after availability according to the CDC


 

Reported on Friday, October 11th, 2024:

  • The percent of adults age 18+ reporting receipt of the updated 2024─25 COVID-19 vaccine is 11.2% (9.7-12.7), including 26.7% (21.7-31.7) among adults age 65+.

Wednesday, October 9, 2024

Gallup poll not good for the incumbents Biden-Harris: Economy ranked most important as in 2008 when the voters dumped the incumbent Republicans represented by John McCain

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- The economy ranks as the most important of 22 issues that U.S. registered voters say will influence their choice for president. It is the only issue on which a majority of voters, 52%, say the candidates’ positions on it are an “extremely important” influence on their vote. Another 38% of voters rate the economy as “very important,” which means the issue could be a significant factor to nine in 10 voters. ...

The current 52% of voters rating the economy as an “extremely important” influence on their vote for president is the highest since October 2008 during the Great Recession, when 55% of voters said the same.

More

It's not 2008, obviously, where everyone feared a catastrophe with banks failing left and right, homes going into foreclosure, and stocks tanking, but the perception of the economy as lousy today because of high inflation is remarkably high as it was in 2008 as indicated by this poll.

Everyone forgets that the vast majority of the job losses came after Obama was elected in 2008, not before, which took a record number of years to recover, setting the stage for Donald Trump. And pandemic fear drove the election cycle in 2020 and not the economy because of the gargantuan bailouts of the people.

Kicker:

Voters view Donald Trump as better able than Kamala Harris to handle the economy, 54% versus 45%.



Thursday, September 26, 2024

Kamala Harris dodges price controls question, Democrat hack Stephanie Ruhle is just fine with that

 Stephanie Ruhle is the Democrat hack who was a cheerleader for the orgy of pandemic spending, which Biden's economic adviser Jared Bernstein (who famously can't explain the fiat money system) thanked her for, and who once opined that it was good enough for Kamala to say bread costs 50% more because that proves she's not avoiding the issue.







Tuesday, September 24, 2024

Oh! Gee! Covid-19 is heading south after all the hopeful alarums of another pre-election catastrophe

Oh my God, batten down the hatches, nothing bad coming to save Kamala Harris!

 

 


Sunday, September 8, 2024

The Feds are renewing the COVID-19 hospitalization reporting requirement effective Nov 1 despite an actually lower current infection peak than in previous years

 I couldn't believe it when I saw it, but it's true.

The pandemic emergency ended in May 2023.

Required reporting of hospitalizations expired in April 2024, after which "The number of hospitals regularly reporting data decreased by nearly two thirds." 

Are the Feds preparing for the general?


 

 

https://www.cdc.gov/nwss/rv/COVID19-nationaltrend.html

https://www.cdc.gov/ncird/whats-new/updated-hospital-reporting-requirements-for-respiratory-viruses.html

https://www.cms.gov/newsroom/fact-sheets/fy-2025-hospital-inpatient-prospective-payment-system-ipps-and-long-term-care-hospital-prospective-0

 






Tuesday, August 27, 2024

Biden-Harris are the enemies of free speech, Zuckerberg lamely admits they tried to censor COVID-19 content on Facebook

But Facebook actually censored people anyway, Mark. We're waiting for the apology.


 

“In 2021, senior officials from the Biden Administration, including the White House, repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain COVID-19 content, including humor and satire, and expressed a lot of frustration with our teams when we didn’t agree,” Zuckerberg wrote in a letter to the Republican-led House Judiciary Committee. ...

“I regret that we were not more outspoken about it,” Zuckerberg said. ...

In August 2021, Facebook said it had removed more than 20 million posts related to Covid-19 for violating its content rules across the main social networking site and Instagram.

More.