Donald Trump is Marco Rubio's Thumos personified

 

... he grows worse from having power: he becomes and is of necessity more jealous, more faithless, more unjust, more friendless, more impious, than he was at first; he is the purveyor and cherisher of every sort of vice, and the consequence is that he is supremely miserable, and that he makes everybody else as miserable as himself. ...

-- Plato, Republic IX 

The Trump-Limbaugh dumb ass unemployment rate holds at 37.56% in November 2025

 103.165 million were eating but not working in November 2025.

Many of these people were over 65 and under 20, but I don't make the rules criticizing the lazy people of the United States. Rush Limbaugh and Donald Trump made that rule before the 2016 election. It is a dumb rule because elites like them screwed this economy for working people but they blame the people for giving up. The rule deserves to be trumpeted because those miserable hypocrites stopped talking about it as soon as Trump became president the first time. It continues to demonstrate how they have never understood what the hell they were talking about.

In Realville, the official unemployment rate rose to 4.6% from the recent low at 3.4% in April 2023 under Joe Biden, an historic low not seen since 1969. Rising unemployment off the lows like this is widely taken for a recession indicator, but initial claims for unemployment have averaged just 213k weekly in 2H2025, which is historically very, very low.

On the other hand, people not in the labor force but who want a job now has spiked, excluding the COVID episode, to levels last seen in 2016 during the long painful unwind of the Obama unemployment of the Great Recession, a level which before that was a rare outlier. That's an indicator of stress in the economy right now, which supports the view that we are building to a recession.

Meanwhile the country overall remains chronically underemployed with just 48.82% with a full time job, when as many as 9 million more full time jobs could easily exist if this economy were truly booming as it has in the past.

The shock of the November jobs report is that all of the full time jobs added since January, some 2.1 million, plus some, have simply evaporated, most of them in October and November.

Poof!

 

The weather forecast for Election Day 2024 looks pretty miserable in much of the country

 

Holy cow, Biden's teleprompter told him Jackie Walorski was dead at the Sep 2022 event where he called out to her weeks after she had died

 

THEY MUST HAVE PUT THAT IN THE TELEPROMPTER FOR A REASON PEOPLE.

Gee, what could it be?

AXIOS here:

Other instances of trying to explain away Biden's lapses have gotten renewed scrutiny as potential evidence that top aides were covering up Biden slipping mentally.

• In September 2022 at a speech on food insecurity, Biden tried to give a shout-out to Rep. Jackie Walorski (R-Ind.), who had worked on the issue — but who had been killed in a car accident weeks earlier.
• Biden had issued a statement of condolences. The White House flew flags at half-staff in honor of her death.
• "Representative — Jackie, are you here? Where's Jackie? I think she wasn't going to be here," Biden said at the event.

Biden's prepared remarks included a note that Walorski had recently passed away and thanked her for her contributions, two people familiar with the speech told Axios.

• Biden didn't remember she had died, and either ignored the Teleprompter or had trouble reading it.
• White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre deflected tough questioning the next day by CNN's Phil Mattingly, CBS's Steven Portnoy and others.
• Jean-Pierre refused to acknowledge Biden made a mistake, and didn't commit to releasing the original version of the remarks.
• She said at the briefing: "I don't think it's all that unusual to have someone top of mind, especially as there's a big event."
• The White House didn't respond to questions about this incident.

Stonks laugh again after Powell's miserable 75 basis point hike to fight inflation

 The rate is now 1.52% vs. CPI up 8.5% year over year and the all commodities Producer Price Index up 21.5% year over year.

This isn't being tough.

It's a joke perpetrated on an ignorant public like all the other jokes of our time, like George Floyd, Caitlin Jenner, and Jan 6.

 

CNBC won't tell the truth that Russian forces have invaded Ukraine: Gotta play it down so as not to spook the markets

 Russia "sends forces", "sends troops", lol.

Miserable cretins.

 

Year over year through Oct 4, 2021, the C19 vaccines have been a miserable failure, and Joe Biden hasn't shut down the virus

 Year over year through October 4, 2021, the C19 vaccines have been a miserable failure.

Year to date we've had 23.802 million cases and 0.357312 million deaths.

7.1% of the population has been infected, and 0.107% have died.

Population 332.809 million per the US Census clock.

 

For the same period in 2020 we had 7.445 million cases and 0.209606 million deaths.

2.2% of the population had been infected, and just 0.063% had died.

Population 331.868 million.

 

The full year 2020 comparison isn't much better.

There were 20.024 million cases in 2020, so 6% of the population of 332.084 million infected.

There were 0.346050 million deaths, so 0.104% of the population dead.

On October 4, 2021, we are already well past these 2020 full year benchmarks.

We already have 3.778 million more cases with 3 months left to go, and 11,262 more deaths. 

 

All C19 figures are from The New York Times.

 

 

 

Michigan is increasingly like a third world shit-hole: Day four without electrical power from Consumers Energy, over 81k still affected

My electric power went out Tuesday night at about 11pm.

It is still out.

Over 81,000 customers, just of Consumers Energy, remain without power four days after a line of storms came through.

The utility runs ads on the radio incessantly saying "Count on us"!

It spends more time and money trying to get consumers to curtail electric usage than it does providing it.

It decommissions coal fired generating capacity and then turns around and buys electricity from Indiana. Under Democrat Gretchen Whitmer we are increasingly like California. 

The utility is a cruel joke, especially this week as humidity levels soared with the heat. Indoor temperatures at night above 80 degrees F make for miserable sleeping, when sleeping occurs at all.

The air is full of the sound of generators, day and night. Lines are long at gasoline stations where people wait to fill their cans to get them through another night.

Green energy isn't green, and the power company doesn't provide it, green or otherwise.

 

 

Canned in the US

The alt-right, party of the mullahs.

Miserable cretin.

Horsecrap from The Washington Free Beacon: "The economy is gangbusters" when it's actually underperforming the post-war by over 50%

Here.

Through 3Q2019 the US economy over the last ten years as measured by the compound annual growth rate from 3Q2009 and using the government's own gross domestic product measure known as GDPC1 is underperforming the previous 62 year period from 3Q1947 until 3Q2009 by 29.39%.

We're growing at 2.33% now vs. 3.3% then, and that calculation removes the worst of the 2008 debacle from the now column and puts it in the then column.

If we measured as we really ought to from the previous peak in 4Q2007 and included the downturn in the now column, the picture is much much worse.

To keep it simple the full 12 years from 3Q2007 through 3Q2019 (third estimate just reported) comes in at a miserable 1.67% vs. the previous 60 year period at 3.47%. In other words, this so-called gangbusters economy is really underperforming the post-war by 51.87%.

We're not even half as good as we used to be.

The only thing that is going gangbusters right now is Trump cheerleaders from Andy Puzder to Rush Limbaugh and all the usual idiots in between trying to make a silk purse out of a sow's ear.

Thinking Americans are not fooled.

. . . commencing an orgy of profligate spending and debt from which we will never recover, you miserable harpies!

Hey Rush, you miserable grifting idiot, tell the British enemy in 1775 that the Continental Colors flag wasn't political

First hoisted on the colonial warship ALFRED in December 1775

31 Years of Donations to Worthy Causes by You, the People Who Make the Country Work:

And, see, we don’t think the flag is political. We don’t think the flag deserves equal time to people that don’t like it. We don’t think that Betsy Ross is political. We don’t think people need or deserve equal time to respond to Betsy Ross. These are symbols of our founding and our freedom and our liberty. They’re symbols. The left has politicized them, and they’re not political. They shouldn’t be by any stretch of the imagination. So we came up with the Stand Up for Betsy Ross T-shirt for people to push back — and in under three weeks, we sold enough $27 T-shirts to be able to donate $3 million and counting.

Hey Justice Kennedy: A generation of vipers can't be magically taught to use enlightened civic discourse

Anthony Kennedy, miserable cretin, quoted here:

"Perhaps we didn't do too good a job teaching the importance of preserving democracy by an enlightened civic discourse," he said. "In the first part of this century we're seeing the death and decline of democracy."

O generation of vipers, how can ye, being evil, speak good things? for out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh.

-- Matthew 12:34

Democrats put their boot on the neck of Republicans, blame them for not getting up

So Brian Beutler, here in "The Republicans Are Off to a Pitiful Start: They control the government, but their Faustian bargain with Trump has been a miserable failure thus far":

"By this time in 2009, Obama . . .."

"By February 17, he had signed . . .."

"Trump has thus far signed one bill . . .."

Thanksgiving weekend's big laugh: Ted Cruz calls Trump's cabinet "a team of all-stars coming together"

Here.

Real courageous there, Ted, waiting for Limbaugh to say so first.

What a miserable cretin.

Libertarian Megan McArdle is a miserable cretin, a female Henry F. Potter

Libertarian Megan McArdle's got hers, tough nuggies to you if you don't. What a miserable cretin she is.

Here:

"Whatever mistakes we made 20 years ago, we’re stuck with them now. ... I’m not stuck with them; I have a stable job, a lovely if somewhat decrepit row home in our nation’s capital, and a marvelously cheap smartphone manufactured in China. It’s someone else who got stuck with the decisions the elites made . . .."

Mr. Potter: [to George Bailey] Look at you. You used to be so cocky. You were going to go out and conquer the world. You once called me "a warped, frustrated, old man"! What are you but a warped, frustrated young man? A miserable little clerk crawling in here on your hands and knees and begging for help. No securities, no stocks, no bonds, nothin' but a miserable little $500 equity in a life insurance policy. 

Why no one cares Obama is a miserable failure

48.5 million prescriptions in 2013

41.4 million prescriptions in 2013

Prescriptions for the top 25 psychiatric drugs have soared almost 37% from 2009 to 429 million in 2013. Data here and here. 

Robert Kaplan either steals from Plato, or is simply ignorant of him

Here in "The Loneliness of the Tyrant", where he discourses at length on the psychological predicament of many strongmen past and present, but never once mentions Socrates' famous meditation on the soul of the tyrannical man:

"No one should envy a tyrant. His existence is miserable."

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Is not his case utterly miserable? and does not the actual tyrant lead a worse life than he whose life you determined to be the worst? ... 

He who is the real tyrant, whatever men may think, is the real slave, and is obliged to practise the greatest adulation and servility, and to be the flatterer of the vilest of mankind. He has desires which he is utterly unable to satisfy, and has more wants than any one, and is truly poor, if you know how to inspect the whole soul of him: all his life long he is beset with fear and is full of convulsions, and distractions, even as the State which he resembles: and surely the resemblance holds? ... 

Moreover, as we were saying before, he grows worse from having power: he becomes and is of necessity more jealous, more faithless, more unjust, more friendless, more impious, than he was at first; he is the purveyor and cherisher of every sort of vice, and the consequence is that he is supremely miserable, and that he makes everybody else as miserable as himself.

-- Plato, Republic, Book 9

Glenn Beck thinks we have an actual democracy to export

When the dim bulbs of our time start interviewing each other, you know it's almost over.

Here with Sean Hannity:

BECK: We don't have the resources to deal with it anymore. We should have gone in after September 11th, taken care of the bad guys, killed them, not rebuilt them. I think it's real hubris to think that we can bring our democracy and peace to a region that doesn't want it. Freedom is something I truly believe you have to earn.

-------------------------------------------------------

If freedom isn't the natural state of humanity, then there isn't any freedom anywhere. Someone who has to earn his freedom is a slave. And if someone is a slave, that someone is owned by someone else. And as the ancients taught us, the owner is but the slave turned inside out, who is as miserable as the one owned.

The real hubris is mistaking this oligarchy for a democracy in the first place, and that we have any freedom to export.

Matthew Continetti Thinks He Ought To Hear One Of The Oligarchs Complain About The Oligarchy

Here, in The Washington Free Beacon:

If the business editors of the [New York] Times were aware of the irony of lamenting the political influence of great wealth on one half of their page while handling it with kid gloves on the other, they gave no sign. “Mr. Cohen says he understands the criticism that he has access most citizens do not,” says the article, before handing Cohen the microphone. “But I also don’t believe in unilateral disarmament,” he said. Two paragraphs earlier, he had said, “My priorities in political giving are Comcast priorities. I don’t kid myself. My goals are to support the interests of the company.”

There you have it: A wealthy Democratic donor admits he funds candidates to improve his bottom line. And yet I hear from the Senate floor no denunciations of his attempts to buy American democracy, no labeling of him as un-American. I have not received a piece of direct mail soliciting donations to fight David L. Cohen’s hijacking of the political process, nor do I wake up every day to investigations of the Cohen political and charitable network. Why?

----------------------------------------------

Matthew needs to re-read that George Orwell line with which he starts the story, get his nose out of the Times and aim it in the direction of the Congress:

“To see what is in front of one’s nose,” George Orwell famously wrote, “needs a constant struggle.” 

I'll say.

The whole point of representation is that it be adequate to the task of balancing the influence of competing interests which all from time to time display the same shortcomings of human nature. Continetti's faith in the goodness of the Senate is shockingly naive. It especially misses the fact that the oligarchy it itself constitutes works hand in glove with the oligarchy of business by which it was captured long ago after state legislatures lost their right of electing them. The founders wanted the Senate to be an oligarchy of the interests of the states qua states, balanced by a House of the people which grew in size as the country did, but we willingly gave that up long ago when Senators became popularly elected and Congressmen fixed their number based on the population level of the 1920 US Census. Now every important issue hangs in the balance depending on what just one or two men or women can do in government, as when a Biden, a McConnell or a Boehner, a Pelosi or a Reid brokers some deal to get legislation passed. And almost always bad legislation.

Talk about oligarchy. Wherever two or three are gathered together in the name of government these days, there is one.

It is counterintuitive that in order for the people to have more control of their government, government has to be bigger, just not the part that's already too big, which it is precisely because the part that isn't anywhere near big enough is as small as it is.

Repeal the 17th Amendment, and expand the US House to its constitutional proportions: 10,566. It won't be perfect. It's not a panacea. Some measure will have to be taken to preclude the House and Senate from doing what they did before in concentrating power in their few hands. But there is no other alternative if we are to rescue ourselves from the miserable few who now tyrannize us routinely, as with ObamaCare. If we don't, the next step is a true tyranny of one.