VOX.
Thursday, December 28, 2023
Tuesday, November 21, 2023
Assistant Press Secretary Michael Kikukawa shows that The White House is still Cloud MAGA Cuckoo Land
. . . with inflation still high, interest rates on goods stubbornly
through the roof and the housing market hobbling, Biden’s handling of
the economy takes hit after hit in polls. Voters say they felt better
off financially under his predecessor — whom he will likely meet again
in the 2024 general election — leaving Democrats to suggest it’s time
for the Biden campaign to change its game on the matter. ...
"We’re working every day to show the American people what President Biden and Congressional Democrats have delivered by lowering prescription drug prices, creating manufacturing jobs, and rebuilding our roads and bridges,” said Michael Kikukawa, assistant White House press secretary.
“That’s Bidenomics, and recent elections have shown that Americans prefer it to trickle-down MAGAnomics. We will continue reaching out to the portion of Americans who are not yet aware of those incredibly popular accomplishments,” he said.
Quoted here at The Hill.
Tuesday, November 7, 2023
WeWork, which once pretended to be worth $47 billion, files for bankruptcy protection
From the story here:
WeWork has struggled in a commercial real estate market that has been rocked by the rising cost of borrowing money, as well as a shifting dynamic for millions of office workers now checking into their offices remotely.
Tuesday, September 12, 2023
Sunday, September 10, 2023
I'm sure everyone will be just thrilled to know that the Secret Service detail protecting the Kennedy family had been out "socializing" until 5 a.m. the day JFK was assassinated
Mr. Landis said he was surprised that the Warren Commission never interviewed him, but assumed that his supervisors were protecting the agents, who had been out late the night before socializing (Mr. Landis until 5 a.m., although he insisted they were not drunk). “Nobody really asked me,” he said.
Many pictures of those days of mourning show Mr. Landis at Jacqueline Kennedy’s side as she endured the rituals of a presidential farewell. Night after night, those seconds of violence in Dallas kept replaying in his head, his own personal Zapruder film on an endless loop. “The president’s head exploding — I could not shake that vision,” he said. “Whatever I was doing, that’s all I was thinking about.”
With Mr. Landis and Mr. Hill still protecting her, the former first lady was in constant motion in the months afterward. “She’d be in the back seat sobbing and you’d want to say something but it wasn’t really our place to say anything,” Mr. Landis recalled.
After six months, he could not take it anymore and left the Secret Service. Haunted, he moved to Cape Cod in Massachusetts, then New York, then Ohio near Cleveland. For decades, he made a living in real estate and machine products and house painting, anything as long as it had nothing to do with protecting presidents.
More.
That's what caught my eye about this man's story that the so-called magic bullet didn't injure Governor Connally. Landis says he found it "in the presidential limousine lodged in the back of the seat behind where Kennedy was sitting" and later put it on Kennedy's stretcher, which corrects his written testimony from the time.
Sunday, July 2, 2023
Wednesday, June 7, 2023
Young Americans are too ignorant to blame the correct government entity for housing unaffordability for some reason
. . . young Americans condemn their municipal and state governments for the current housing affordability problem.
More.
Monday, May 29, 2023
LOL, National Review reports AOC expels protesters at her own townhall in Queens, characteristically buried on the Friday night of the summer's first big holiday weekend to minimize such things
‘American Citizens before Migrants’: Protesters Heckle AOC at NYC Town Hall

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Protesters booed and heckled Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez at a town hall she held in Queens, N.Y., on Friday night.
A man holding small American flags approached the progressive “Squad” member and shouted, “American citizens before migrants.”
“Where are you on the migrant issue? You’re a piece of s***,” he added.
Ocasio-Cortez said, “OK,” as the man was escorted off.
New York governor Kathy Hochul (D.) declared a state of emergency in New York after the expiration of Title 42 earlier this month. The state has roughly 60,000 asylum seekers relying on social services. New York City has gotten so overwhelmed with the influx of migrants that the city has begun sending them to the suburbs. Hochul said she is “looking at all state assets to help ameliorate the problem that is at a crisis level here in the City of New York,” which could includes housing migrants at SUNY campuses, closed psychiatric centers, large parks and parking lots.
Protesters at the town hall held signs concerning a number of issues: “America First. Vetted legal migrants only,” “Stop funding Ukraine,” “AOC: An Obvious Criminal,” and “AOC: Stop pushing drag queen story hour,”
More protesters came forward throughout the evening, including a woman who was critical of Ocasio-Cortez’s support for U.S. funding in Ukraine. The New York Democrat voted to send $40 billion in military and humanitarian aid to Ukraine last year.
“Stop funding this war, there’s a lot of communities that need help and need that money,” another woman said as she was removed from the event.
Ocasio-Cortez was met with both boos and cheers from the crowd when she suggested the Biden administration should abolish the debt limit, as a June 5 debt default deadline looms.
“$100 billion for Ukraine that you voted for!” one man shouted in response to Ocasio-Cortez’s comments on the debt ceiling.
The progressive lawmaker said earlier this week that the “stakes of a default cannot be understated.”
“The chaos that would ensue and the impact on people’s everyday lives would likely be immediate and it is one of the reasons why we need to take default off the table,” she said.
Send a tip to the news team at NR.
The Dingbat meant overstated, not understated.
Sunday, May 28, 2023
Saturday, May 27, 2023
Wednesday, May 17, 2023
Nellie Ohr of opposition research firm Fusion GPS, employed by the Hillary campaign, and wife of DOJ prosecutor, Bruce Ohr, first authored the Trump Dossier's Millian fictions in April 2016 according to Durham
Nellie Ohr is an ex-CIA contractor.
She wrote her first
Millian report in April 2016, the month before Fusion GPS hired former
British intelligence officer Christopher Steele to put his imprimatur as
a supposed former “spy” and "Russian insider" on the dossier.
"This
report was prepared just ten days after Fusion GPS was retained by
[Clinton campaign law firm] Perkins Coie to conduct opposition research
on Trump,” the Durham Report states, "and prior to Steele being retained
by Fusion GPS."
Durham suggests Nellie Ohr planted the seeds of sourcing for the most explosive allegations leveled by the dossier against Trump, including the oft-cited notion that he and his campaign were engaged in a “well-developed conspiracy of cooperation” with the Kremlin. The dossier attributed this, falsely, to Millian. Durham found that the Belarusian-American realtor was never a source for the dossier and was simply invented as one, along with the allegations attributed to him.
In fact, Durham says that Millian initially wasn’t even on the radar of Steele and his dossier “collector" Igor Danchenko, a former Brookings Institution analyst who's admitted much of the information he provided Steele was alcohol-lubricated gossip. Millian was called to their attention by Nellie Ohr, who the prosecutor said “implicated" Millian through her own reports. Durham suggests Steele and Danchenko merely followed her leads.
Meanwhile, the prosecutor added, Bruce Ohr, an anti-Trump Democrat, pushed his wife’s reports that cited Millian — 12 in all — onto the Crossfire Hurricane team at FBI headquarters that was investigating Trump and his campaign for possible espionage. Agents used her reports as a source of corroboration for the Steele reports they received in the summer and fall of 2016, even though it was circular reporting. ...
In other words, Steele was not the catalyst behind the dossier’s central claims. Rather, it was Clinton's contractor Fusion GPS -- but more specifically, the wife of a senior DOJ official who worked for Fusion. So the FBI wasn’t really investigating "Crown reporting,” as officials referred to Steele’s dossier, implying it was British intelligence. More accurately, it was investigating information from inside its own department that was laundered through Steele and his dossier.
The Durham report shows that the FBI had the dossier reports in July 2016, two months before the time in September insisted upon by the FBI.
The Ohrs are ground zero for the Trump-Russia-collusion disinformation operation.
More.
Tuesday, April 18, 2023
Friday, March 17, 2023
Today's toxic assets, if you're a bank, are AAA-rated 30-year fixed rate mortgages from 2020-2021, and 10-year and 20-year US Treasuries of the same vintage
A bank would normally keep AAA assets happily, and hold them to maturity in many instances.
Having to sell them in a rising interest rate environment is where all hell can break loose.
No one wants to buy a UST paying 0.89% when T-bills pay 4.5%, so you have to sell it at a loss to raise cash.
A bank without cash is a failed bank.
Be kind to your banker. He's not having a good week. Even if he didn't pay you interest like he should have since 2008.
Sunday, March 12, 2023
The wizards of smart at Silicon Valley Bank loaded up on mortgage backed securities in the last few years, and when they needed to raise cash recently they had to sell some at a big loss
$1.8 billion.
That sparked the run.
The problems have been known for months by people like Chris Whalen.
This guy below actually tweeted out some particulars in January. This was no surprise.
Except to the federal regulators, who were completely asleep at the switch.
This is what happens when your bond portfolio is full of low-yielding securities. No one wants them when you have to sell them in the new higher interest rate environment. It's not a problem if you will "hold to maturity".
SVB wasn't very smart loading up on this stuff. Apparently they did not even hedge this otherwise foolish over-large position.
Hell, it's probably all California MBS, too. Think the outrageously overpriced homes, refinanced at rock bottom rates, of the very elite who have all their personal and business banking at SVB which is now blowing up. And all the second tier businesses and their employees dependent on them.
It's an inferno devouring their wealth from every side.
And they are screaming like stuck pigs for a bailout.
Tuesday, February 14, 2023
LOL WaPo, stroking Gen Z for not driving cars because of "significant effects on carbon emissions"
Here:
If Gen Zers continue to eschew driving, it could have significant effects on the country’s carbon emissions. Transportation is the largest source of CO2 emissions in the United States. There are roughly 66 million members of Gen Z living in the United States. If each one drove just 10 percent less than the national average — that is, driving 972 miles less every year — that would save 25.6 million metric tons of carbon dioxide from spewing into the atmosphere. That’s the equivalent to the annual emissions of more than six coal-fired power plants.
Six!
Oooh. Sounds like a lot.