The Kiffness has a new short, I Took The Governor Erp

 

YouTube star Jackie the bald eagle died of the flu, CBS makes you click through

 Big Bear bald eagle Jackie's cause of death revealed

 

 

Well now, this is really bad publicity for this life insurance company and it would be a shame if everyone canceled their policies with it because it wouldn't pay out a measly $30k benefit on a COVID-19 victim from 2021

 

France caught four of last month's Renoir paintings thieves, but released them under judicial supervision even though the paintings were worth over $5 million and drug trafficking seems to be involved

 

Meanwhile Democrats are outraged that Trump would execute a guy in a wheelchair

 

This is your reminder that the Three Stooges Obama, Trump I, and Biden shut down about 148 gigawatts of coal electric generating capacity in the United States

 Obama 60

Trump I 52

Biden 35

 

 

Increasingly positive views of socialism at Gallup are mostly at the expense of the growth of corporate power in big businesses

 Increasingly positive views of socialism at Gallup are mostly at the expense of the growth of corporate power in big businesses.

There's an app for that, but we don't use it enough.

It's called antitrust law.

And of course since Citizens United on January 21, 2010, money has increased the political power of the speech of corporations, so it makes sense that positive views of big business have collapsed from 50 to 35 over the period of the survey. 

American patriots have hated the political power of corporations since before the Revolution of 1776, rejecting the argument meant to appeal to the Loyalists among us, that we are mere subjects of his royal highness, The Boss, The Man, The King:

An English colony is a number of persons, to whom the king grants a charter, permitting them to settle in some distant country, and enabling them to constitute a corporation enjoying such powers as the charter grants, to be administered in such forms as the charter prescribes. As a corporation, they make laws for themselves; but as a corporation, subsisting by a grant from higher authority, to the control of that authority they continue subject. ...  

-- Samuel Johnson, Taxation No Tyranny, 1775

 That's why we say . . .

 

 

Overall consumer prices in August 2026 are up 3.39% year over year, core up 2.44%

That's 78% worse than during Trump I, and 24% worse, respectively, mostly due to higher energy prices affecting overall prices this year but also due to tariffs which were worse last year than this year for core prices but remain an overall drag.

Not seasonally adjusted: 

CPIAUCNS January - August 2026:

2.38, 2.41, 3.25, 3.81, 4.24, 3.53, 3.36, 3.39

Trump I CPIAUCNS average 1.90

2025 Average 2.63

2026 to date 3.29 

 

CPILFENS January - August 2026:

2.50, 2.45, 2.59, 2.75, 2.85, 2.59, 2.47, 2.44

Trump I CPILFENS average 1.96

2025 average 2.83

2026 to date 2.58 

 

Trump voters be like:

 

Wei Tu Fast

 

These are the people we want in America, but Trump doesn't want them

 

Industrial production missed the consensus estimate yesterday, so they trotted out Larry Kudlow to tell you otherwise lol

 For month over month in July, the consensus estimate was for +0.3%. Instead we got +0.2%.

Meanwhile the big picture shows, like so many indicators, that industrial production hit the big brick wall of Reaganism in 1984.

Post-war industrial production grew handsomely and its growth rate trended upward from 1948 to 1984, but not after.

Why is that?

I think it's because the incentive to invest in domestic industry went away because of the Reagan tax revolution.

Up to that time, high ordinary income tax rates had pushed owners of capital to invest in America for decades because by doing so they could take advantage of relatively much lower long term capital gains tax rates when they wanted to take income. After the dramatic Reagan cuts to ordinary income tax rates, that arbitrage disappeared. From that time onward owners of capital, now flush with cash from taking income at low ordinary income tax rates year upon year, found it more advantageous to invest abroad where low labor costs and unregulated markets promised even more fabulous returns on investment as America hobbled itself with regulation at home. The exit of businesses of all sizes from the United States to East Asia which began from this time turned into a flood after China was admitted into the WTO in 2001.

But today J. D. Vance thinks the U.S. Dollar's status as the world's reserve currency is the cause of all our problems.

If you want to know what makes me despair, that's it.

The following news story was more accurate than Kudlow. 

US: Industrial Production Up Again in July as Modest Manufacturing Recovery Continues 

Well, who can hear anything over all the shooting in Lexington, Governor?

 Gov. Andy Beshear: I've Heard Nothing From Sen. McConnell

 

Historian Gordon S. Wood on America: a unique nation dominated by ordinary, Bible-toting people, violent and obsessed with consuming alcohol and making money, vulgar and vibrant, barbarous and boisterous ...

... one that awed and frightened some of its own citizens and many Europeans. It seemed to represent the future for all of humanity.

Here. 

Michigan, Texas, and New Mexico in the news feed tonight:

 

Well, it wasn't because she was hot

 'Why are you naked?': Officers arrest naked woman driving stolen Pleasant Prairie fire vehicle

 

Well well well

 Lettuce at Taco Bell in five states confirmed as source of a diarrhea-causing parasite outbreak

... lettuce from Mexico ... A Food and Drug Administration investigation identified a single supplier of the lettuce. ...

 

 

No good deed goes unpunished in the Democrat Party: Diana DeGette, House leader for the public option in 2009 instead of the Senate's Rube Goldberg Obamacare, defeated in primary after 15 terms

 

 It was Speaker Nancy Pelosi who abandoned the House progressives in 2009, bowing to the Senate plan.

DeGette was progressive before progressive was cool, but now you have to pass the anti-semitic litmus test, as her opponent has, to be a real progressive.

 

 DeGette loses reelection bid to DSA challenger in major upset for Denver-based House seat 

Rep. Diana DeGette (D-Colo.) lost her reelection bid to former attorney and current Ph.D. student Melat Kiros, marking the third time a democratic socialist has scored an upset in a competitive House primary this cycle, according to Decision Desk HQ. 

Kiros, who studies at the University of Denver, defeated DeGette, who’s served in Congress since 1997 — delivering a major blow to the Democratic establishment despite the fact that DeGette herself was a member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. University of Colorado Regent Wanda James also ran in the Democratic primary.

... Kiros was fired from her law firm after she wrote a letter directed at U.S. law firms on her Substack in November 2023 in which she disputed the notion that it was antisemitic to call for the state of Israel to be eliminated or criticize Israel’s government.

The former lawyer has also received criticism for declining to say whether or not a 2025 firebombing in Boulder, where protesters calling for the release of Israeli hostages by Hamas were injured, was an act of antisemitism, saying in a recent interview with 9News, “I don’t know what was in the heart of the perpetrator.” ... 

 

 

 

House Speaker Mike Johnson sends housing bill to Trump, starting 10-day clock

 

The communist New York Times favors State of Massachusetts dictation of minimum lot sizes, the very same idea bipartisan legislators are keen to impose on Michigan residents

 ... For decades, the state government has ceded control over housing policy to its 351 cities and towns. When it comes to housing policy, the state of Massachusetts is often a bystander, allowing town governments to impose classic “not in my backyard” policies. ... The initiative would prevent many towns from setting needlessly large minimums for lot sizes and effectively blocking the construction of middle-class homes. The campaign, Legalize Starter Homes, is now trying to gather the nearly 12,500 signatures it needs before June 17 to place the measure on the ballot. We endorse the initiative. ... The initiative would create a statewide minimum of 5,000 square feet, which is about the size of a basketball court, and bar towns from setting their own standards. ...

That's less than 1/8 acre lol.

The editorial is here. 

Yuri Zhivago once had his "too big" house taken away from him by the communists, too, to make room for thirteen families:

 

 

Mein Führer . . . I CAN WALK !!

 

 Elon Musk compares his company’s work to that of Jesus

... “It has enabled people who have completely lost their brain-body connection to speak again … and we believe it will enable people to walk again,” Musk said of Neuralink’s brain-computer interface, or BCI, technologies.

... “Restoring control of people who are tetraplegics and restoring sight I think are pretty big deals,” Musk said on Monday at the conference, adding: “They’re sort of what I might call Jesus-level technologies.” ...

 

 

 

Severe economic contraction incoming