Showing posts with label Washington Examiner. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Washington Examiner. Show all posts

Sunday, June 1, 2025

Ah, so Republican pinhead Joe Concha thinks a Democrat win in 2026 would be a loss lol

Joe Concha never really does get to his point in this column, but he does spread a lot of nincompoopery about like so much manure on a field.

This is the guy who masked himself and his kids while outdoors during COVID-19 because his wife is a doctor and told him he had to, which is very amusing given Joe's interest in Democrats' inability to "connect" with young men.

Joe Concha lives in an imaginary world of fanciful creation and takes his marching orders, repeating stupid.

Trump's mandate, for example, "the greatest verdict in history" he says, in 2024 was actually smaller than W's in 2004.

Even Jimmy Carter's was bigger in 1976 than Trump's was in 2024.

Core pce inflation released this past week came in at 2.52%, not 2.1% as Joe says. Joe wouldn't know core if he ate an apple.

Just 49.6% had full time jobs in April 2025 vs. 50.4% in April 2023, 0.8 points lower than two years ago.

Also two years ago, unemployment was 0.8 points lower at 3.4% than Joe Concha's current "historically low" level, again having touched a level under Joe Biden not seen since May 1969.

Joe stealing glory from Joe. Tut-tut.

Democrats may have had trouble connecting with young men in 2024, but the Biden administration really did drop the bigger ball of communicating its record of historically low unemployment. The Wall Street Journal trumpeted it for them in 2023, but you'd hardly remember the fact.

Meanwhile Joe Concha's "respected" GDPNow model got 1Q2025 GDP wrong by 2.4 points lol.

With an actual negative print now at -0.2% for the first quarter, the set-up for a dead cat bounce in 2Q would seem obvious.

But you never know with Trump in charge, and for my money you have to bet against Mr. Unpredictable. 

If Jonathan Swift were here, he might say that it is the Republicans who are led by a changeable female mind, not the Democrats, which may be why Joe Concha likes him so:

The current of a female mind stops thus,
and turns with ev'ry wind;
Thus whirling round, together draws
Fools, fops, and rakes, for chaff and straws.

 

 

Wednesday, April 23, 2025

Pyrex glass plant in Charleroi PA closes after 132 years because of Chinese imports, Trump powerless to stop it


The casualties of America’s loss of glassware manufacturing to China

... Anchor Hocking took over the Charleroi plant in March of 2024 and announced they would close it and move operations to their plant in Lancaster, Ohio — it too was a company founded at the turn of the century by Isaac Jacob in Lancaster, Ohio. ...

 ... the U.S. glass industry lost almost 40,000 manufacturing jobs between 2000 to 2008. At the same time, China’s share of the U.S. market rose from 3% to 31%.

As U.S. glass and glassware plants closed, Chinese manufacturers expanded. China now leads glass production globally, exporting 28.7% of the world’s glass and glassware compared to the United States’ 6.6%.
That is a hard pill to swallow if you are from Charleroi, once known as the “Glass City” where PPG once had one of its major glass factories. ...

Saturday, October 19, 2024

Meanwhile Salena Zito tells us how it's going, and Zack Beauchamp is probably going to have himself committed

 

 

The fact that [18-year incumbent Democrat Senator Bob] Casey is running an ad highlighting how much he agrees with former President Donald Trump tells you everything you need to know about how Pennsylvania is going. ...

The latest Real Clear Politics averages have Trump with a slim lead over Harris, which is likely dicey not just for Harris but also for Casey.





Friday, August 9, 2024

Kamala Harris and Tim Walz are a threat to the First Amendment

 

Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN) may have been a social studies teacher, but he would have failed Constitutional Law 101, especially the part about the First Amendment.

“There’s no guarantee to free speech on misinformation or hate speech and especially around our democracy,” Walz said on MSNBC in December 2022, which would be news to the Supreme Court, which unanimously held as recently as 2017 that “speech that demeans on the basis of race, ethnicity, gender, religion, age, disability, or any other similar ground” is still protected by the First Amendment.

Walz’s impulse to censor speech he does not like is most definitely shared by his running mate, Vice President Kamala Harris, who pushed for Twitter and Facebook to censor then-President Donald Trump even before the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. In Iowa, on Oct. 19, 2019, Harris told Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, “This is not a matter of free speech. … This is a matter of holding corporate America and these Big Tech companies responsible and accountable for what they are facilitating.”

Harris’s anti-free speech position was so extreme that even Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) pushed back, saying she wanted to kick Trump only out of the White House, not off social media. But politburo secretariat officer Kamala did not back down. “I’m calling on everyone to join me,” she said.

By 2019, Harris already had a well-established history of using government power to silence voices she does not like.

Read how she, oopsie, published the private data she collected as Attorney General of California online here.

She's a doxxer.

Tuesday, July 23, 2024

The chaos and division Joe's bad debate spawned is the real force driving Democrats' headlong rush to settle for Harris and end the bad publicity of the drama

 

 

Democrats seem more intent now to cut out the drama before the convention and settle on Biden’s chosen successor, Harris. ... The DNC is still pursuing a virtual nomination of their presidential ticket ahead of the convention that begins in nearly a month, with a presidential candidate to be decided by Aug. 7.

More.

Wednesday, February 28, 2024

RFK Jr. is on the ballot in AZ, GA, UT, NH, and HI so far

 The states Kennedy remains focused on are Michigan, another key battleground state, Maryland, South Carolina, West Virginia, Indiana, Texas, Illinois, New York, California, and Massachusetts . . ..

More.

Saturday, February 17, 2024

Another town dies hard and no one gives a shit, right Joe Manchin?

 Cleveland-Cliffs Steel announced it was idling its tinplate production plant, a move that directly cost 900 people their jobs.

Salena Zito, here.

Friday, February 16, 2024

Good gridlock politics: Impeach 'em all

 

Wednesday, February 14, 2024

Alejandro Mayorkas finally impeached 214-213 for failing to keep out 6 million illegal aliens since 2020

 House Republicans have impeached Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas in a contentious vote Tuesday evening, making the Biden administration official the first Cabinet member to be removed in nearly 150 years. ...

Three Republicans joined all Democrats in rejecting the articles of impeachment: Reps. Ken Buck (R-CO), Mike Gallagher (R-WI), and Tom McClintock (R-CA). They were the same three as last week’s failed vote, but the return of Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-LA) from cancer treatment tipped the math against Mayorkas on Tuesday. ...

Since Biden took office, more than 7.5 million illegal immigrants have been encountered attempting to enter the United States, and 6 million of that figure entered illegally between ports of entry, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection data. The Biden figure far exceeds the number of illegal immigrants encountered during the Trump administration’s four years and the Obama administration’s eight years combined.

More.

Thursday, August 24, 2023

Ramaswamy's endless flip-flops

 Lose yourself: Vivek Ramaswamy's 2024 presidential campaign haunted by endless flip-flops:

on: his voting history
pardons for the Biden family
drug decriminalization
foreign aid to Israel
support for Taiwan
masking
Juneteenth
 


Tuesday, July 25, 2023

Well, well, well, close Biden family associate Alexander Mackler worked in the Delaware US Attorney's office 2016-2019

 

Assistant U.S. Attorney Lesley Wolf featured prominently in the testimony of two IRS agents who spent years working on the Hunter Biden investigation. Both Gary Shapley and Ziegler, the IRS whistleblowers, said Wolf intervened to stop multiple investigative steps from moving forward, including by preventing FBI agents from asking witnesses any questions about Joe Biden’s involvement in foreign business affairs and by tipping off Hunter Biden’s attorneys about a planned search of his storage unit.

Wolf worked alongside Mackler in the U.S. attorney’s office before Mackler’s departure. She and Mackler prosecuted a major case together, for example.

More.

Saturday, June 24, 2023

Influence-peddling WhatsApp message to Chicoms from Hunter Biden in July 2017 came from his father's guest house in Delaware

 Byron York, here:

Hunter Biden wanted something from Zhao — it appears it was a payment of some sort — and he wanted it immediately. "I am sitting here with my father and we would like to understand why the commitment made has not been fulfilled," Hunter Biden wrote. "Tell the director that I would like to resolve this now before it gets out of hand, and now means tonight. And Z, if I get a call or text from anyone involved in this other than you, Zhang, or the chairman, I will make certain that between the man sitting next to me and every person he knows and my ability to forever hold a grudge that you will regret not following my direction. I am sitting here waiting for the call with my father."

Shapley said the IRS team discovered the message in August 2020. Even for people who questioned the authenticity of the Hunter Biden laptop — and we now know the FBI had verified its authenticity in December 2019 — the WhatsApp message was worth investigating. "In August 2020, we got the results back from an iCloud search warrant," Shapley said. "Unlike the laptop, these came to the investigative team from a third-party record keeper and included a set of messages. The messages included material we clearly needed to follow up on."

No kidding. The July 30, 2017, WhatsApp message was the clearest evidence ever that Joe Biden, then the former vice president, knew about his son's business dealings. Now, maybe Hunter Biden was lying in the message. Maybe his father wasn't in the room. Maybe there's some other explanation. What was clear was that the WhatsApp message was evidence that needed to be investigated. But Shapley and the other IRS investigators soon ran into a brick wall at the Justice Department.

The IRS team wanted to execute a search warrant at the guest house and Joe Biden's house in Delaware, where Hunter Biden was staying at the time of the message. In discussions with the Justice Department, they were told that there was more than enough probable cause to get a warrant but that "optics" were a problem. A Justice Department official told them, in Shapley's words, that "a lot of evidence in our investigation would be found in the guest house of former Vice President Biden but said there is no way we will get that approved."

IRS team investigating Hunter Biden's alleged crimes never investigated the Ukraine-Burisma bribes allegations

Jerry Dunleavy, here:

Mykola Zlochevsky, the Ukrainian owner of Burisma, was the "foreign national" involved in the alleged "criminal bribery scheme" aimed at shaking an alleged investigation into Burisma by then-Ukrainian prosecutor Viktor Shokin, according to sources familiar with the FBI record who described its contents to the Washington Examiner.

The sources said Zlochevsky said he believed it would be difficult to unravel the alleged bribery scheme for at least 10 years because of the number of bank accounts involved.

Amid the threat of being held in contempt of Congress, FBI Director Christopher Wray allowed members of the GOP-led House Oversight Committee to review an FD-1023 form this month that contained redacted versions of the allegations from the paid FBI informant.

Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD), the ranking member on the House Oversight Committee, repeatedly claimed following a late May FBI briefing that Barr and his “hand-picked prosecutor” — Scott Brady, then the Trump-appointed U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Pennsylvania — ended the investigation into the bribery claims in 2020. But Barr quickly said that is false.

“It’s not true,” Barr soon told multiple outlets in early June. “It wasn’t closed down. On the contrary, it was sent to Delaware for further investigation.”...

Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) also revealed this month that a less redacted version of the form he has viewed says Zlochevsky claimed to have 17 recordings of his conversations with Joe Biden and Hunter Biden (two of the former and 15 of the latter) as an "insurance policy." 

Zlochevsky’s alleged reference to Joe Biden as the “big guy” appears independent of the apparent reference to the now-president as the “big guy” by a Hunter Biden business associate during negotiations with Chinese intelligence-linked businessmen. The China-related reference occurred in a May 2017 email not made public until October 2020.

Shapley said that Assistant U.S. Attorney Lesley Wolf instructed FBI and IRS investigators not to ask witnesses about “dad” (Joe Biden) or about “the big guy.”

Hunter Biden reached a plea deal on federal charges related to tax crimes and the illegal purchase of a handgun, Weiss’s office revealed in a court filing on Tuesday.

The IRS whistleblower claims detailing the politicization and slow-walking of the Justice Department investigation were made public on Thursday, including allegations that Weiss had sought special counsel status from the DOJ and sought to file charges in California and in the nation’s capital but was repeatedly denied. The whistleblowers also pointed to new apparent links between Joe Biden and his son’s China deals and that the FBI authenticated Hunter Biden’s laptop by November 2019.

 

Friday, June 23, 2023

So the Delaware Assistant US Attorney Lesley Wolf is the one who stymied the FBI investigation of Joe Biden's links to Hunter Biden's deals

[Whistleblower] Shapley said that, prior to the interview with [Hunter Biden business associate Rob] Walker, “we had obvious questions like who was H, who the big guy was, and why this percentage was to be held separately with the association hidden.” But the whistleblower said that Delaware assistant U.S. attorney Lesley Wolf “interjected and said she did not want to ask about the big guy” and stated that she did not want to ask questions about "dad."

The whistleblower said that “when multiple people in the room spoke up and objected that we had to ask, she responded, there's no specific criminality to that line of questioning.” Shapley said, “This upset the FBI too.”

“There were multiple times where Lesley Wolf said that she didn't want to ask questions about dad,” Shapley said. “We referred to Hunter Biden's father, you know, as dad.”

Shapley quoted the Delaware prosecutor as saying, “I don't want to talk about the big guy. I don't want to ask about dad. … Don't ask about the big guy.”

Shapley said, “The IRS and FBI agents conducting this interview [of Walker] tried to skirt AUSA Wolf's direction.” He added that the FBI agent tried to get Walker to talk about the email “while not directly contradicting” the direction by Wolf not to ask about “the big guy.”

The IRS whistleblower argued that “based on guidance provided by the prosecutors on a recurring basis to not look into anything related to President Biden, there is no way of knowing if evidence of other criminal activity existed concerning Hunter Biden or President Biden.”

The whistleblower said that “in August 2020, we got the results back from an iCloud search warrant” and that “the messages included material we clearly needed to follow up on.” Shapley said that “nevertheless, prosecutors denied investigators' requests to develop a strategy to look into the messages and denied investigators' suggestion to obtain location information to see where the texts were sent from.”

More.

Tuesday, May 30, 2023

The debt ceiling compromise freezes spending in the next fiscal year about $400 billion too high, and does nothing to pay for the $4.9 trillion added to the debt over and above "normal" deficit spending


The Washington Examiner, here:

In exchange for a two-year hike in the federal borrowing limit, the legislation roughly freezes next year's spending at fiscal 2023 levels, followed by a 1% increase in 2025. The legislation also imposes some changes to work requirements for food stamps and will speed the development of energy projects with permitting reform.

Fiscal outlays for 2023 are projected to hit $5.792 trillion. Adjusted for inflation since 2019 that should be more like $5.385 trillion.

 

 

 

Meanwhile, deficit spending since 2019 through fiscal 2023 has added, will add, $8.5 trillion to the debt, which has been the solution to, and the cause of, all our problems.

We are not governed by serious people.

We have the government we deserve.