Biden hates the US hostages, lies about what he's done, and hangs Israel out to dry

American citizens have been held hostage by Hamas for seven months, and with Israel on the cusp of ending their ordeal, Biden pulls the rug out.

Israel wasn't even in Rafah when Biden decided to halt the shipments. He stopped them early last week. He's lying.

Biden's treachery to our allies in-country has been on display from the beginning of his career, abandoning them from Vietnam all the way on to Afghanistan, and now on to Israel.

He's told us who he is all his life, worse than Jimmy Carter. 

Biden says U.S. won’t supply weapons for Israel to attack Rafah, in warning to ally

“Civilians have been killed in Gaza as a consequence of those bombs and other ways in which they go after population centers,” Biden told CNN. “I made it clear that if they go into Rafah — they haven’t gone in Rafah yet — if they go into Rafah, I’m not supplying the weapons that have been used historically to deal with Rafah, to deal with the cities, that deal with that problem.”

 

Biden wants to build a port for Gaza for relief shipments even though Hamas is still holding American citizens hostage to this day

 Assuming they are still alive.

The conflict between the facts and this new proposal is jarring to say the least:

Here in the chamber tonight are American families whose loved ones are still being held by Hamas. 

I pledge to all the families that we will not rest until we bring their loved ones home. ...

Hamas could end this conflict today by releasing the hostages, laying down arms, and surrendering those responsible for October 7th. ...

Tonight, I’m directing the U.S. military to lead an emergency mission to establish a temporary pier in the Mediterranean on the Gaza coast that can receive large ships carrying food, water, medicine and temporary shelters.

I remember when Americans held hostage by Muslims in Iran was a crisis which toppled a president. Now hardly anyone gives a fig because they're Jews.

Never forget that the Baptist Jimmy Carter called for accepting the legitimacy of Hamas in 2014, but Hamas' solution has always been one state, not two

As if there were any doubt any longer.

Here:

And the US and EU should recognise that Hamas is not just a military force but also a political one.

It cannot be wished away, nor will it cooperate in its own demise. Only by recognising its legitimacy as a political actor – one that represents a substantial portion of the Palestinian people – can the west begin to provide the right incentives for Hamas to lay down its weapons. Ever since the internationally monitored 2006 elections that brought Hamas to power in Palestine, the west’s approach has manifestly contributed to the opposite result. Ultimately, however, lasting peace depends on the creation of a Palestinian state next to Israel.          

 

The president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, Albert Mohler, condemned Carter at the time.

 

The three year and five month embarrassment of core inflation higher than the 10-year Treasury yield finally ended in August

 Yield for the 10-year US Treasury rose to an average 4.17% in August 2023 while core inflation year over year fell to 3.87% in August 2023.

This ends the 3-year 5-month run where core inflation exceeded the 10-year yield, something which has never happened in the data.

The only time core inflation outran the 10-year previously for a comparable period was in 1974 and 1975 when core inflation averaged 7.91% and 8.35% vs. the 10-year yield which averaged 7.56% and 7.99% respectively.

That lackadaisical response to inflation by the Federal Reserve under Arthur F. Burns (1970-1978) prefigured the 1980 resurgence of core inflation to 9.19%. Under his successor Paul Volcker, interest rates were hiked to unprecedented levels to curb inflation. The 10-year yield rose to an average of 13.92% in 1981 as a result.

The current fear is that the Powell Fed has set up the economy for a repeat of this awful period of inflation.

Whatever is said about it, there is no question that inflation is a benefit to the Federal government because it depends on borrowing to finance deficit spending and consequently the debt, now at an unprecedented $33 trillion. Inflation simply reduces that cost to the government over time by making the dollars previously borrowed worth less.

It is true that new borrowing costs much more, but the debt mountain mammoth in the living room is the more pressing problem. This is why the cognoscenti teach that inflation is a good thing.

Extending the duration of inflation at the currently relatively low level has been in the government's interest. The costs born by the public in the form of higher prices for goods, services, and borrowing are becoming routinized so that the voters are becoming inured to the deleterious effects for them while clueless of the benefits for the debt mongers. 

This is particularly the case for voters who have no memory of that horrible inflation which gave rise to the backlash represented by Ronald Reagan's election in 1980, and who now vastly outnumber those who still remember.

It should not be forgotten that Jimmy Carter got elected in 1976 anyway, after the Burns' inflation. The voters then took it all in stride, too, until they didn't.

Same as it ever was.

 

You'd think Trump could spell his name correctly after all that's passed between them, but why congratulate North Korean ascendancy to the WHO?

It's all just weird.

And Jimmy Carter level bad.

 

Jimmy Carter may very well be as upset as the next guy from Tehran that Sir Ahmed Salman Rushdie [Ibn Rushd] has survived the knife attack

 Jimmy Carter doesn't have to work too hard to be unlikable, but he does it anyway.

Rushdie for his part, like Rush Limbaugh, is a serial monogamist who can't seem to find a wife he likes, or who likes him.

Or maybe the wives just couldn't stand living under the cloud of the Ayatollah's 1989 fatwa, after which Rushdie divorced three times.

Carter threw gasoline on the fatwa fire with this piece in the paper of record not even three weeks after the fatwa was issued.

 

Things you do when Democrats get elected president 2.0

 Time to update this.

 

Things You Do When Democrats Get Elected President

 

 

John Kennedy: Build a bomb shelter.

 

Lyndon Johnson: Keep an eye on your shoes.

Jimmy Carter: Change your religion.

Bill Clinton: Buy a pistol.

Barack Obama: Upgrade to Life Member in the NRA.

 

Joe Biden: Renovate the bomb shelter.

Jimmy Carter will always be remembered for majoring in the minors, from the White House tennis court schedule to its thermostat settings

 Jimmy Carter, at 97, Steps Into Big Fight Over Small Road in Alaska...

Welcome to February 2022 CIVPART data at 62.3%, otherwise known as September 1977

 

The 2020 average was revised to 61.8 and the 2021 average is 61.7.

One way to grow the participation rate, as seen in the first chart, which is monthly, is TO NOT HAVE TO COUNT PEOPLE.

How do you do that?

The economy sucks so bad you drop out of the labor force, which instantly shrinks its size. So as jobs recover a little bit the participation rate looks better because more people compared with the smaller underlying base are working again.

 

Not in labor force on an average basis hit an all time high in 2021 of 100.24m, pushed mostly by the 2008 catastrophe for older workers, while growth in the labor force has been anemic to flat because people aren't having enough kids.

People who remember the malaise of the Jimmy Carter era who are still alive today can relate. 

CIVPART hovering on the 63% line was the Trump era's "greatest economy ever", lol.

Click any graph to enlarge.

 

Joe Scarborough's not wrong about the economy just because he's Joe Scarborough

Joe Scarborough: Trump’s So-Called Great Economy is WORSE than Jimmy Carter’s ‘Year of Malaise’

Trump real GDP is averaging 2.5% after three years, Obama averaged 1.6% over eight, and Bush 43 1.9% over eight.

Things are better under Trump, but compared to the post-war up to the year 2000, we're still in big doo doo.

The compound annual growth rate in the post-war up until Bush 43 clocked in at 3.46% per annum on average.

Since 2007 we're struggling to put up 1.7%.

Sumting wong.

Speaking of poor, Obama's new house cost $12 million, Jimmy Carter's is worth $200,000

These payroll headlines boosting Trump are embarrassing: Trump is way underperforming the hype

We've had exactly 19 months in 19 years where payrolls hit 300,000 or better, and they are crowing about 266,000 this month.

For crying out loud, Jimmy Carter racked up 18 such 300k+ months in just 4 years in office.

266,000 is ridiculous and pathetic given that 41,300 were strikers returning to work.

How come the Democrats are too stupid to figure this out?

Neither party cares about American jobs. All they care about is selling the country out to the highest bidder and profiting themselves and their friends off the deal.

YOU ALL MAKE ME SICK.

Looks like the invasion of the body snatchers came for more than just Donald Trump

It's hard to escape the conclusion that US GDP has been highly dependent on fertility

Peak Baby Boom 1952-1957 when births per 1,000 of population averaged 25.17 (graph 1) is probably the simplest explanation for outsized GDP performance during the years when this generation turned 22 from 1974-1979. More babies in the 1950s equaled more GDP come the late 1970s.

We only wish for that GDP now.

Jimmy Carter, elected in 1976, still owns the best 4-year GDP record in the post-war, despite everything you've been told (graph 2). It's nothing special he did really, it's just that in 1975, the year before his election, you had the very peak of the Baby Boom turn 18, those born in 1957 when births per 1,000 hit 25.3 for the second and final time in the post-war. They and the rest of their cohort were ready to consume in numbers never seen before. Their era spanning from Nixon/Ford from 1972 when the first of them turned 20 through Reagan in 1984 when they turned 32 represents the coming of age of America's most powerful economic demographic and the period when America's GDP performance hit its highest levels (average 46.3%).

Their failure to have enough children themselves, however, is also a big part of the explanation for the GDP trend heading south after their time. They consumed, but they did not at all produce children like their parents had. In fact, the nadir of births per 1,000 before the current period occurred from 1972 to 1977, precisely the period exactly 20 years after peak Baby Boom 1952-1957. Births per 1,000 averaged just 14.92 during this period, a rate nearly 41% lower than their parents' era. So the most prolific fruit of the Baby Boom had gone on to become themselves the least prolific, having the fewest children ever.

Not surprisingly, without enough bodies the economy inevitably began to run out of gas starting about two decades after that. Clinton era GDP performance was never as good as Reagan's, and the era was marked by various warnings, not the least of which were the bond debacles of 1994 and 1999. The great Reagan bull market ended in August 2000, a recession ensued in 2001, average S&P 500 return has been reduced to 5.2% per annum over the last 17 years, and the GDP growth rate after Clinton has averaged just half what it averaged before Carter (16% vs. 32%). No wonder the trend is down so dramatically (graph 3).

The solution?

Have LOTS more kids, and wait 20 years, if you want America to still be America, that is. Otherwise, let in even more than the 1 million immigrants we already let in annually, and prepare to kiss your country goodbye.

But don't hold your breath. Births per 1,000 have fallen to an average of just 12.5 for the five year period 2011-2015.

They don't call it the suicide of the West for nothing.

graph 1

graph 2

graph 3

The Reagan GDP miracle is a complete myth: It was all government spending (on defense)

And it set a horrible precedent for the dramatic overspending of George W. Bush and Barack Obama, which has sent us on a course to oblivion. You can argue it was necessary to defeat the USSR, but you can't argue that baseline spending (in black) has done anything but go up, up, up to dangerous new levels as a result (notice the baseline Jimmy Carter inherited from liberal Republicanism, for which he got the blame from Ronald Reagan, which wasn't very nice of the old man who went on to bequeath a similar giant new baseline to his successor, G.H.W. Bush).

No, the real miracle was the pathetic loser in Iran, Jimmy Carter, who spent the least in the post-war for his additional GDP, followed by Bill Clinton.

Of course, the spending is all the prerogative of the Congress. The president proposes but the Congress disposes, as the saying goes.

Beware libertarian politicians preaching balanced budgets, as well as utopian infrastructure spending enthusiasts promising the moon and liberal Republicans selling government spending as security to senior citizens at the expense of younger Americans in a time of protracted war. They have delivered little beyond $20 trillion in debt.

The much maligned Jimmy Carter is the hero of the post-war for paying the least for GDP

Of course Trump had the biggest electoral win since Reagan because no one expected the Hillary defections

Just as America turned its back on incumbent Democrat Jimmy Carter in 1980, so did America to Hillary Clinton, heir apparent, in 2016.

Trump was expected right up to the eve of the election to lose by between two to four points, and did end up losing by two points, except that he won enough states to win in the Electoral College 306-232 before faithless electors had their say.

The magnitude of that was overwhelming because it was unexpected. We even had people predicting Trump would win the popular vote but end up losing to Hillary in the Electoral College.

It turned out exactly the opposite. Every honest person who stayed up until three in the morning watching it all unfold knows how unexpected was Trump's win in the Electoral College. Everyone on our side expected the worst . . . a decisive Hillary victory.

The fact remains: Hillary underperformed Obama 2008 in 39 states because the people disliked her more than they disliked Trump.

And that's quite an accomplishment.

The 9th Circuit, loaded with Jimmy Carter appointees, was reversed 107 times 1999-2008 by the Supreme Court, no other circuit came close

Data here.

Presidents ranked by average per annum real GDP growth rates

JFK/LBJ: 4.8%

Truman: 4.7%

Clinton: 3.8%

Reagan: 3.4%

Carter: 3.2%

IKE: 2.9%

Nixon/Ford: 2.7%

Bush 41: 2.2%

Bush 43: 2.1%

Obama: 1.5%


And we thought Jimmy Carter was bad.

He would have been a 113% improvement over Obama.

Rush Limbaugh justifies Ted Cruz' failure to endorse Trump by comparing it to Ted Kennedy's failure to endorse Jimmy Carter in 1980!

Rush's theatre of the absurd marches on.

I'm sure Republicans and Cruz-bots are just THRILLED that a so-called conservative plumbs the depths for acceptable in the party of scoundrels.

Rush better be careful. If he goes too deep he might bump in to Mary Jo Kopechne.