Former S&P sovereign bond unit executive who participated in the Obama era 2011 credit downgrade basically calls Trump's America a banana republic, and DOGE not a proper government department

 WSJ: What about DOGE’s accessing the Treasury Department’s payment system?

Kraemer: We don’t have all the details of what they took and on what basis. It seems highly irregular. People from a department, which is not even a proper government department, that have gone and gotten access to data, that we have to assume is quite, I should say sensitive, which doesn’t belong in the hands of unelected individuals. 

WSJ: Have you ever seen anything like this before?

Kraemer: Yes, I think I have seen this. Regimes that don’t respect checks and balances. But they tend to be more in the emerging markets. This is exactly what sets rich and poor countries apart, right? It’s the qualities of institutions, the rule of law, the transparency of decision-making. 

So have I seen this? Yes. But have I seen it in an advanced economy, in an OECD member country? No, I have not.

The whole thing is here.

Obama appointed judge, Paul Engelmayer, issues sweeping order banning Musk and his allies from accessing the US Department of Treasury payments system

 Federal Judge Blocks Elon Musk’s DOGE From Treasury System: Order requires those who have accessed payment records without proper security clearance to destroy them

A federal judge in New York temporarily restricted the ability of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency to access the Treasury Department payment system, saying that doing so was necessary to prevent the potential disclosure of sensitive and confidential information. 

The early Saturday order by Judge Paul Engelmayer, an Obama appointee, precludes officials without proper background checks and security clearances from accessing the payment system through at least next Friday, including political appointees and special government appointees. It also orders any prohibited person who has had access to the records since President Trump’s inauguration to destroy them. The judge set a hearing for Friday.

Some 19 blue-state attorneys general filed the case Friday evening, saying that Musk’s DOGE initiative risks interference with the payment of funds appropriated by Congress. 

Engelmayer said the states were likely to win on arguments that the Trump administration exceeded its authority in allowing broader access to the payment system. He also said the states faced irreparable harm without court intervention for now, including “the heightened risk that the systems in question will be more vulnerable than before to hacking.” ...

Well thank God.

None of these people have security clearances. The say so of President Trump is not a security clearance.

A Democrat moves to the center: Ritchie Torres (NY-15) calls out AOC (NY-14) and Governor Hochul

 Here:

“I’m a controversial figure in Democratic politics,” he says. His affection for the Jewish state makes him “particularly radioactive to the far left. There’s no issue on which I face more hate, harassment, and even death threats.” Mr. Torres says there is “a deep strain of antisemitism on the far left.” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who represents the neighboring 14th District, has repeatedly accused Israel of “genocide.” ... On Jan. 16, two days after Gov. Kathy Hochul delivered her State of the State address, Mr. Torres accused her of failing to support the state’s Jews. “Antisemitic hate crimes have risen to historic highs in New York,” he tweeted. “Yet when I searched the Governor’s State of the State for the word ‘antisemitism,’ nothing came up.” He tells me the next day that “the governor had a 140-page policy document and there was not a single mention of antisemitism. Never mind that Jews are the target of more hate crimes than everyone else combined. None of that mattered to her.”

 

Pete Hegseth reportedly has had episodes of drinking to the point of passing out

 

 I get the drinking too much until you barf. I mean, that's pretty much been Freshman Life 101 forever and a day. Pete was a freshman in college in 1999-2000.

But it takes a special kind of excess to drink until you pass out.

Is it true? 

Who knows.

One incident was allegedly in 2013, when he was about 32, at which time he had earned an MA from Harvard. Another was when he was about 28, in 2009, when his first marriage ended. That's a long time after graduating from Princeton University in 2003.

The precise timeline is uncertain because his birth year isn't precisely known, and the new revelations come from a former sister in law, married to Pete's brother from 2011-2019, who can't remember the dates exactly.

Anyway, I don't get why the new SECDEF absolutely, positively must be this guy, with all this sooty baggage. No one is that indispensable.

From The Wall Street Journal here:

Pete Hegseth, President Trump’s pick to run the Pentagon, regularly abused alcohol to the point that he passed out at family gatherings, and once needed to be dragged out of a strip club while in uniform, according to an ex-relative’s account of his behavior that was given to U.S. lawmakers and reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.

The sworn statement, submitted in response to a request from Sen. Jack Reed of Rhode Island, the top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, was signed by Hegseth’s former sister-in-law, Danielle Hegseth. It states that she was with Hegseth when he passed out from drunkenness in the bathroom of a bar in Minneapolis in about 2013. It also describes another night, when she said Hegseth drank so much at a restaurant in Minneapolis that the Uber driver had to pull over on Interstate 94 so he could throw up.

In her sworn statement, Danielle Hegseth said she personally observed erratic and aggressive behavior by Hegseth, witnessing him abusing alcohol multiple times over the years. One Christmas in 2008 or 2009, he drank so much that he threw up and passed out, she said. ...

Neither of these guys won a tectonic election: I can't believe we're still talking about this

 

49.71%

50.73%

Oh, we'll have to wait . . . for pigs to fly

Inflation impact on low income households is more like 6.3% when weighing necessities higher, says retail expert Howard Jackson

The Wall Street Journal reports here, also saying low income wage growth now lags everyone else's:

 Howard Jackson, president of retail-focused firm HSA Consulting, estimates that inflation has actually averaged about 6.3% over the past 12 months for low-income households. Jackson said this estimate adjusts the consumer-price-index basket to weigh necessities—such as rent, utilities and food—higher than things they tend to spend less on, such as cars, furniture, clothes and consumer electronics. His estimate considers what items constitute the food basket, based on surveys of low-income consumers. “If you don’t have much money, you keep your pair of jeans a lot longer. Those are the purchases that get deferred,” Jackson said.

OMG, the NY Post/Karol Markowicz comparison of Pete Hegseth to Brett Kavanaugh is completely wrong, and now Pete Hegseth goes there to defend himself

 Where else? but in The Wall Street Journal here:

Like veterans returning from any war, we drank beers to manage the reality of what we had faced. But we never did anything improper, and we treated everyone with respect.

 

DeSantis is far and away better for DOD than Pete Hegseth, but it would be a step down for the governor, and a minefield which could blow up his chances for 2028, if he still has any

 Trump Mulls Replacing Pete Hegseth With Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis

Beside all that, Trump is just poaching again. 

Florida still needs Ron DeSantis, especially to appoint the replacement for the already poached Senator Marco Rubio. One bad decision leads to another.

Can't Trump find anyone else? Isn't this just more evidence of how few quality people find serving in this lame duck presidency an attractive prospect?

Ron DeSantis should also think long and hard about having to defend everything Trump for four years, quite apart from defending the United States, if he's still serious about a 2028 run. He ran against Trump in the primaries, after all, for reasons.

I think this story is more of a trial balloon, an advertisement: "Hey out there! Anyone interested in the job? Help! I gotta get rid of Pete! Please step up!"

The Wall Street Journal: Trump is leading Harris among whites by 22 points, among seniors by 8 points

The late swing among older and white voters jumps out in the Emerson College poll. On Aug. 15, less than a month after she became the Democratic nominee, Ms. Harris trailed Mr. Trump by 12 points among white voters and was tied with him among all voters 60 or older. Since then, these voters have fled from Ms. Harris. By Oct. 26, Mr. Trump led by 22 points among whites and 8 points among seniors. ... 

 

Prejudice can’t explain older whites’ recent flight from Ms. Harris, since she was already a black woman in August, when many more of them supported her. ...

 

Losing older whites is politically painful, since they tend to turn out at a high rate. They’re also overrepresented in key states like Wisconsin and Michigan.

More.

Kamala Harris is keeping quiet about climate change because the so-called Inflation Reduction Act's climate provisions are going to screw America good and hard for decades, to the tune of $3 trillion

 The climate policies she would offer promise huge costs for negligible benefits. It’d be one thing to ask for sacrifices that could save the planet. But even at a whopping official price tag of $369 billion over 10 years, the Inflation Reduction Act’s climate measures as written were likely to lower the projected global temperature in 2100 by less than 0.03 degree Fahrenheit. In reality, the IRA has turned out to be an even rawer deal. The cost has rapidly ballooned to somewhere north of $3 trillion over 30 to 40 years, even as emission cuts have been slower and smaller than predicted. No wonder Ms. Harris isn’t trumpeting it.

-- Bjorn Lomborg, here 

 

Kamala Harris was the tie-breaking vote in the US Senate twice to advance the bill into law.

 

 

By 2032 no more than 29% of new cars can be gas-powered, and Kamala Harris doesn't have to do anything to make it happen except get elected to protect the Biden EPA rule

 

That's one big reason why Kamala says she can't think of one thing she'd do differently than Joe Biden.

 The Environmental Protection Agency’s new greenhouse gas emissions rules require that battery-powered and plug-in hybrid vehicles make up 32% of auto maker sales in 2027. By 2032 no more than 29% of new cars can be gas-powered. Ergo, there will be only one gas-powered model for every two electric cars on dealer lots. ...

Auto makers must spend tens of billions of dollars to ramp up EV production to meet government mandates. The financial pain is growing for companies as sales of gas-powered cars decline, reducing profits available to invest in the EV “transition.” ...

A UAW study in 2019 projected that EVs would kill 35,000 jobs at its plants. “The workers who are making engines and transmissions today, their jobs will be eliminated when we make a transition to electric vehicles,” said UAW research director Jennifer Kelly.

More.

 

The New Way Forward is just another lie.

 

 

 

In April AP told us 650,000 were homeless in the US, The Wall Street Journal says the problem has grown about 10% largely on a surge in illegal aliens

The Journal’s count includes about 550,000 homeless people so far, up about 10% from what these places reported last year. The trend thus far means the U.S. is likely to top the roughly 653,000 homeless people estimated in 2023—the highest number since the government started reporting comparable data in 2007. The final count will depend on outstanding data from places that haven’t yet divulged their 2024 numbers, especially New York City, which reported the highest count last year.

 

More.

CNBC fact-checks Joe Biden, now that it doesn't matter

 But the article name-checks Donald Trump five times because he's an opponent of Fed decisions.

There's a whole movement out there that wants to End the Fed, composed of Republicans, Democrats, and libertarians, which CNBC is loathe to mention.

Many of them argue that the US 2-year Treasury Note should be the benchmark for the Federal Funds Effective Rate, not the whim of the Fed Chair and the Federal Open Market Committee, who are un-elected, well-connected, and VERY WELL PAID elites who watch out primarily for the interests of the banksters.

For example, despite the disastrous Zero Interest Rate Policy post-Great Recession, DGS2 resisted it and outran DFF throughout the period under Obama and Trump, and anticipated the recent inflationary outburst by starting to rise in the spring of 2021, a full year before the Fed moved to "combat inflation" by raising the funds rate in the spring of 2022. 

Similarly DGS2 also started to fall in November of 2023 despite no change to Fed policy, anticipating the recent decline of inflation rates by almost a year.

The role of the US Treasury Secretary, AS MUCH A CREATURE of the Executive as the Fed Chair, is also huge for interest rates because the Secretary decides how to divvy up the debt securities for auction by duration.

Biden's Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has been in the news for driving up the issuance in T-bills to 22% when 15% has been customary, which has contributed to longer rates falling and stocks rising, just in time for the election.

But the costs of this have been dramatic, financing deficit spending at the highest rates and driving interest payments on the debt to the third spot in the budget, behind only Social Security and Medicare.

Tim Walz is a conventional California lefty on immigration who rammed through his radical policies in Minnesota once Democrats got control of its legislature

Kamala Harris picked him because she went with her gut.

As the Democratic governor of Minnesota, Tim Walz signed into law initiatives allowing immigrants in the country illegally to apply for driver’s licenses, qualify for free tuition at state universities and enroll in the state’s free healthcare program for low-income residents. Walz’s actions on immigration—nearly all taken in the last two years, when Democrats had control of the state Legislature—put him squarely in the mainstream of his party. ...

Allowing those without a legal immigration status to drive legally, go to college at in-state rates and enroll in health insurance are pieces of a two-decade project by Democrats ...

“He’s more in line with what we’re seeing in states across the country led by a Democrat,” said Victoria Francis, deputy director of state and local initiatives at the American Immigration Council, a liberal-leaning national advocacy organization.

More.

Electric vehicle in South Korean underground parking spontaneously combusts, eight hour fire destroys vehicles, causes building evacuations for hundreds

 It took just seconds for an underground South Korean residential parking lot to be engulfed in flames. The culprit: a Mercedes-Benz EQE electric vehicle that hadn’t been charging. 

The blaze incinerated dozens of cars nearby, scorched a further 100 vehicles and forced hundreds of residents to emergency shelters as the buildings above the parking lot lost power and electricity. Nobody died, but the fire took eight hours to extinguish. ...

The country had already been on edge about battery-related fires, after a blaze at a lithium-battery factory in late June that killed nearly two dozen people. The Mercedes EV blaze, in the port city of Incheon, occurred last week. Then, on Tuesday, a Kia EV6 caught fire in a parking lot in a central South Korean town.

More.

Tim Walz locked down Minnesota for 15 months based on an hysterical projection of COVID deaths, and presided over $500 million of George Floyd rioting damage and $250 million of Somali COVID fraud

 

 On taking office in 2019, Gov. Walz was restrained by a one-seat Republican majority in the state Senate—until Covid hit in the spring of 2020. He declared a state of emergency on March 25, 2020, and ruled by decree for 15 months. He proclaimed the emergency on the basis of an allegedly sophisticated Minnesota Model projection of the virus’s course in the state. In fact, the projection reflected a weekend’s work by graduate students at the University of Minnesota School of Public Health. Relying on their research, Mr. Walz presented a scenario in which an estimated 74,000 Minnesotans would perish from the virus. The following week the Star Tribune reported that with the lockdown Mr. Walz ordered, 50,000 would die. Maybe it would have been preferable to address the virus through democratic means.

Having destroyed jobs and impeded life routines, including family get-togethers and church attendance, Mr. Walz finally let his one-man rule lapse on July 1, 2021. When the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center stopped counting in March 2023, the deaths of 14,870 Minnesotans were attributed to the virus. (In 2020 I successfully sued the administration for excluding me from Health Department press briefings on Covid.)

During the state of emergency, protests broke out in Minneapolis on Memorial Day 2020 following the death of George Floyd. That Thursday, rioters burned Minneapolis’s Third Precinct police station to the ground. Mr. Walz didn’t deploy the National Guard until the weekend. Riots, arson and looting throughout the Twin Cities caused about $500 million in damage.

Minnesota leads the nation in Covid fraud. Under the auspices of the Feeding Our Future nonprofit, its founder, Aimee Bock, allegedly recruited mostly young Somali men to seek reimbursement for millions of meals supposedly served to poor students and families. According to indictments handed up by a grand jury to U.S. Attorney Andrew Luger, Ms. Bock and others allegedly defrauded the state and federal government of $250 million. Ms. Bock has pleaded not guilty to the fraud charges.

Story. 

Oh yeah, and Tim Walz thinks Ilhan Omar is just wonderful.

Kim Strassel: the GOP needs to be engaged in a whole-of-election message reminding Americans of the ugly Biden policies of past and present, and Kamala’s promise to carry them into the future

 The libertarian-inclined in the GOP want the message restricted more or less to the economy, inflation, immigration, and crime.

Biden: Forgotten But Not Gone

Kimberley Strassel, Wall Street Journal

 

Strassel points out Biden is continuing or proposing the following to help cement support for Harris on the left:

Student loan giveaways

Nationwide rent controls

A plea deal for the 9/11 terrorists

$2.2 billion for farmers, ranchers, and owners of forest land who experienced discrimination

Million$ in new grants for women's health, state climate programs, tribal fisheries, youth skills programs

Signage everywhere thanking Biden's infrastructure law for road improvements

New rules protecting workers from heat

New prevailing wage rules for clean energy workers

New chemical and air toxin crackdowns

New regulations for wildlife refuges

New regulations on offshore drilling

Higher efficiency standards for commercial equipment and residential boilers

A crackdown on so-called junk fees for extras like family-seating on flights.

 

Polling has shown inflation and illegal immigration have been the top issues, which of course doesn't mean other things can't be issues.

 

Strassel doesn't seem to get that the green energy war on fossils fuels is the top problem for the economy, driving up the cost of everything, while the massive illegal immigration feeds competition for the housing no one can afford anyway, not to mention crime up and wages down for the bottom half of the country. 

 

And of course, the Trump tax reform disappears if Harris is elected, among other horribles. 

All it took for Trump to like electric cars was an endorsement from Elon Musk and his pledge of $45 million a month lol

 Trump in Grand Rapids, Michigan, yesterday, here: 

"I'm totally for them."

 

 Elon Musk Has Said He Is Committing Around $45 Million a Month to a New Pro-Trump Super PAC

Hurricane Beryl made landfall just before 5 AM on July 8th, four days later 1 million are still without power in Texas, mostly around Houston, mostly customers of Center Point Energy

 CenterPoint reported $867 million in profits for 2023, down 14% from 2022.

The company has asked state regulators to approve around $2.2 billion in resiliency investments for 2025 through 2027, during which time it will have to continue to focus on expanding the system as well. It expects to keep adding about 2% more customers each year.

More.

Democrat gaslighting in the headlines

 

Dems Gaslit America for 4 Years in the Name of 'Democracy'

Gerard Baker, WSJ

 

Debate Exposed the Dem Media's Fabrications

Victor Davis Hanson, American Greatness

 

American Voters Rightly Feel They've Been Lied To

Mark Hemingway, The Federalist

 

Voters Should Punish Democrat Mendacity Up & Down the Ticket

David Sacks, X

 

Biden's Debate Disaster Reveals a Campaign Built on Lies

Julian Epstein, NY Post

 

Debate Takeaway is Biden Hasn't Actually Been in Charge

Chamath Palihapitiya, X

 

Aides Have Shielded Biden Since Beginning of Presidency

Alex Thompson, Axios

 

The Ruling Class' House of Cards Crumbles

David Deavel, AMAC

 

Now the Entire World Knows What Liars Dems & Media Are

Sasha Stone, Substack

 

Rarely Are So Many Lies Dispelled in a Single Moment

Bari Weiss, The Free Press

 

Why Dems & the Media Lied About Joe Biden's Frailty

Brendan O'Neill, Spiked

 

Dear Dems: The Gaslighting Isn't Helping Matters

Tim Miller, The Bulwark