Biden Levies Sweeping Tariffs on China, Intensifying Trade Fight With Trump
The passing scene is hilarious, until it careens through the front yard and crashes into my living room.
“Between last fall and January,” Ohanian wrote, “California fast-food restaurants cut about 9,500 jobs, representing a 1.3% change from September 2023.” By comparison, overall employment in California during that period fell just 0.2%.
Michael Ojeda, a Pizza Hut driver for eight years in Ontario, Calif., received notice in December that his last day would be in February, according to a letter from his former employer. Pizza Hut franchisee Southern California Pizza offered $400 in severance if he stayed through February, but Ojeda, who said he made hundreds of dollars a week in wages and tips as a delivery driver, went on unemployment instead.
“Pizza Hut was my career for nearly a decade and with little to no notice it was taken away,” said Ojeda, 29, who previously supported his mother and partner on his Pizza Hut delivery wages.
Southern California Pizza didn’t respond to requests for comment. Pizza Hut said it was aware of some of its California franchisees changing their delivery services.
-- The Wall Street Journal reported.
Discussed here:
"As of last summer, 63% of new audits targeted taxpayers with income of less than $200,000," reports the Journal. "Only a small overall share reached the very highest earners, while 80% of audits covered filers earning less than $1 million." ...
Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen was a bit sassier. "Contrary to the misinformation from opponents of this legislation, small business or households earning $400,000 per year or less will not see an increase in the chances that they are audited," she wrote in a letter to Rettig. ...
Awkwardly, "revenue agent staffing had actually decreased by 8%, or more than 650 employees, between the end of fiscal 2019 and March 2023," per a previous watchdog report. And it's not just hiring that's in trouble: The agency has completed just 33 percent of its fiscal year 2023 milestones outlined in its strategic operating plan, which is…tough given that the year is over.
Utilities are shutting down "dirty" capacity without adequately replacing it. The law of supply and demand means only one thing: higher prices. OK, two: blackouts.
Meanwhile, tax credits under Biden's phony Inflation Reduction Act are masking the true costs of renewables.
From a Wall Street Journal op-ed "The Coming Electricity Crisis: Artificial-intelligence data centers and climate rules are pushing the power grid to what could become a breaking point" here :
Obama Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz last week predicted that utilities will ultimately have to rely more on gas, coal and nuclear plants to support surging demand. “We’re not going to build 100 gigawatts of new renewables in a few years,” he said. No kidding.
The problem is that utilities are rapidly retiring fossil-fuel and nuclear plants. “We are subtracting dispatchable [fossil fuel] resources at a pace that’s not sustainable, and we can’t build dispatchable resources to replace the dispatchable resources we’re shutting down,” Federal Energy Regulatory Commissioner Mark Christie warned this month.
About 20 gigawatts of fossil-fuel power are scheduled to retire over the next two years—enough to power 15 million homes—including a large natural-gas plant in Massachusetts that serves as a crucial source of electricity in cold snaps. PJM’s external market monitor last week warned that up to 30% of the region’s installed capacity is at risk of retiring by 2030.
Some plants are nearing the end of their useful life-spans, but an onslaught of costly regulation is the bigger cause. A soon-to-be-finalized Environmental Protection Agency rule would require natural-gas plants to install expensive and unproven carbon capture technology.
The PJM report cites “the role of states and the federal government in subsidizing resources and in environmental regulation.” It added: “The simple fact is that the sources of new capacity that could fully replace the retiring capacity have not been clearly identified.”
Meantime, the Inflation Reduction Act’s huge renewable subsidies make it harder for fossil-fuel and nuclear plants to compete in wholesale power markets. The cost of producing power from solar and wind is roughly the same as from natural gas. But IRA tax credits can offset up to 50% of the cost of renewable operators.
Baseload plants can’t turn a profit operating only when needed to back up renewables, so they are closing. This was the main culprit for Texas’s week-long power outage in February 2021 and the eastern U.S.’s rolling blackouts during Christmas 2022.
Israelis Questioning Their Nation's Dependence on USA...
The [UN] resolution called for a cease-fire as well as the release of hostages, instead of embracing the Israeli position that a cease-fire be predicated on the hostages’ release. ...
The U.S. has rarely used its leverage in the Security Council before to express dissatisfaction with Israel. The last time was in 2016, under the Obama administration, when the U.S. abstained from voting on a resolution that called for a halt to all Israeli settlements in the occupied territories.
It’s the great unexplored theme in the Robert Hur imbroglio. The decision to release the Hur report, with its portrayal of a confused and forgetful president, wasn’t mandatory and neither did it rest with Mr. Hur, despite the congressional grilling he received this week.
The decision rested with Attorney General Merrick Garland.
Everyone with a brain knows this. Even Molly Jong-Fast knows this. It was not unexplored. She jumped on it right away, like a chicken on a June Bug.
The question is Why did Garland do it? Molly thinks it's because Garland is a Secret Republican ™, which is ridiculous.
The great unexplored thing in all this remains The Context™, to which no one is paying attention, because Boring™: the DOJ policy which immunizes the sitting president from prosecution.
Is anyone talking about prosecuting Biden once he's out? Hello?
Hur tells you the policy right up front, then says all this bad stuff about Joe, which is really bad. But Garland chose to let you read that, despite the policy.
That's the point. It's a really big deal. Garland thinks what Biden did is really bad, and that Joe is incompetent to serve.
I still say it was a trial balloon by Garland, to see if Biden cabinet members would rise to the occasion to remove the befuddled old man.
Jenkins doesn't really appreciate that. It has to be more than all the personal attacks Merrick Garland has had to endure from the Bidens.
Garland has been running interference for this guy from day one. He's been Joe's wingman no less than Eric Holder was Barack Obama's.
But Joe is too incompetent to even appreciate it. That's what really stung Garland.
Pretty insane that every transaction in America is going to become a negotiation. It's a fucking hamburger, dammit, not a 2024 Honda.
This is not progress. This is America becoming a third world bazaar.
The Wall Street Journal reports:
Surge Pricing Is Coming to More Menus Near You
An estimated 61% of adults support variable pricing where a restaurant lowers or raises prices based on business, with younger consumers more in favor of the approach than older ones, according to an online survey of 1,000 people by the National Restaurant Association trade group.
These assholes are trying to sell this as analogous to "Happy Hour".
Happy Hour is happy because the normally COSTLY bar service is CHEAPER during Happy Hour, hello.
Just wait until the grocery store starts doing this, then see how you like it.
The Wall Street Journal reports:
Israel’s discovery of the Hamas operations below Unrwa offices is likely to put further pressure on the agency, which is facing international scrutiny after Israeli allegations that at least 12 of its employees had links to Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel, which authorities say killed 1,200 people.
More.
What happened on October 7th, Nancy?
Israel did not start this war.
Only 14.4% of registered Republicans participated...
. . . in 2016, some 187,000 people cast ballots, a record high equating to 29% of registered Republicans.
West's alignment with Hamas and Kennedy's openly stated purpose as a spoiler candidate combine to make them chiefly candidacies hurting the incumbent Joe Biden, but everything depends on them getting on the ballot in enough places.
Perot bled votes away from the incumbent George H. W. Bush in 1992, and from Republican Bob Dole in 1996, resulting in Clinton winning each contest but not with 50% of the popular vote.