The average level for 1Q2023 is 49.70%.
Full time usually peaks over the summer months.
First, Chicago.
Chicago is not the "Midwest".
Chicago remains firmly left-wing under new mayor Let's Go, Brandon Johnson.
It didn't just suddenly turn left this week.
The shit-hole will just get shittier under Johnson, instead of get slightly less shitty under Vallas.
As for Wisconsin, OK, the Wisconsin Supreme Court is now in the hands of four lunatic Democrat wymyn vs. three Republicans. Republican Dan Kelly was indeed resoundingly defeated, but by a nakedly partisan Democrat whose campaign may result in successful calls for her to recuse herself in certain future cases.
Abortion was indeed her campaign issue, but her main objective is rolling back former Governor Scott Walker's anti-government-union efforts.
But Kelly's defeat was a mixture of Republican stupidity combining with Democrat knavery.
Kelly was a Walker appointee, not a winner in his own right. He didn't win his seat in the first place, and he lost it in 2020. MAGA Republicans were STUPID to go with him a second time.
National Republicans: Note Well. Don't be STUPID in 2024 and go with an already defeated candidate.
And don't let Democrats select your candidate. Especially by putting him on trial.
The Wall Street Journal KNOWS Democrats spent $1 million to get the once-defeated Kelly nominated again in the primary instead of Jennifer Dorow, whose son became a political liability which unfortunately canceled her strong conservative record in the minds of enough voters.
Dorow, after all, had put away parade killer Darrell Brooks for life without parole. She is also allied with Chief Justice Clarence Thomas in her skepticism over Lawrence v Texas. But she gone.
Republicans in Missouri once let Democrat Senator Claire McCaskill select their candidate to run against her there. Now Republicans in Wisconsin have made the same stupid mistake and paid the same stupid price.
Meanwhile, Republicans more broadly in Wisconsin still firmly dominate its representation, the only state from Trump's 2016 Upper Midwest WI-MI-PA trifecta to do so.
They own the Assembly 64-35, and now the Senate 22-11. The GOP House delegation in Washington from Wisconsin is 6-2 Republican, the Senate 1-1.
Wisconsin's GOP is hardly on the ropes, but the Wall Street Journal seems to think a Wisconsin Senate going Republican 21-12 because Mequon could have just as easily narrowly voted Democrat in a special election would have been a catastrophe.
Yes, Republicans nationally would be wise politically to stand for abortion compromise where abortion absolutism would result in defeat as in Michigan, but note that Michigan's Senate and House are still only narrowly Democrat, 20-18 and 56-54. Politics is the art of the possible, but bad candidates like the Dan Kellys and Donald Trumps of the world are no longer possible.
The Wall Street Journal should just say so.
The Midwest is not going left, just anti-Trump because he did not follow through on his promises to the working class, about which The Wall Street Journal cares nothing.
And by the way, Democrats don't care either.
I hope Ohio's J. D. Vance is paying attention.
And people wonder why many Hispanics who were affected by these disasters are cooling on the Democrat Party.
Neither incident was much publicized by the media at the time because both were highly embarrassing to the media's Democrat men in power for the sheer scale of the incompetence on display, but there'd be no end of stories about these incidents had Trump been president.
Of the New Mexico fire I hardly remember any news a year ago.
A recent Slate story which attacks the religious groups actually making a difference in such disasters can't omit some details, they are so undeniable:
Wildfires ripped through the northern part of the state after a prescribed burn by the U.S. Forest Service grew out of control, tearing through nearly 350,000 acres and destroying hundreds of homes, farms, and irrigation canals that had sustained its rural communities for centuries. . . . the actions of the Federal Emergency Management Agency left New Mexicans infuriated. . . . Even after the Biden administration greenlighted $2.5 billion in wildfire recovery funds for New Mexico last summer—an unprecedented sum for an ongoing disaster—FEMA’s molasses-paced bureaucracy has kept much of that money from actually reaching those affected by the wildfires. Edwards said in an email that the agency is opening three new claims offices in New Mexico by late March [nearly a year later] and is developing new policies to “guide and simplify the claims process.” But while many New Mexicans have sympathy for FEMA and feel the agency is in an impossible position, they want relief now so they can rebuild their houses and lives.
Reuters in July 2022 said this in "After Starting New Mexico Fire, U.S. Asks Victims To Pay":
After the U.S. government started the largest wildfire in New Mexico's recorded history in April, it is asking victims to share recovery costs on private land, jeopardizing relief efforts, according to residents and state officials. The blaze was sparked by U.S. Forest Service (USFS) prescribed fires to reduce wildfire risk. The burns went out of control after a series of missteps, torching 432 residences and over 530 square miles (1373 square km) of mostly privately owned forests and meadows, much of it held by members of centuries-old Indo-Hispano ranching communities.
The gist of this story at the end of March is that an awful lot of people are still not made whole despite billions of dollars being allocated for them:
A lawsuit seeking unspecified damages was filed in June against the U.S. Forest Service in U.S. District Court in Albuquerque. Originally, about 50 plaintiffs were party to the suit, but hundreds more later joined. The lawsuit was dismissed after the Hermits Peak Fire Assistance Act was passed, which will help compensate people who suffered damages.
But hey, at least Donald Trump is being prosecuted, right?
Is not this a lamentable thing, that of the skin of an innocent lamb should be made parchment, that parchment, being scribbl'd o'er, should undo a man?
Unless it's REALLY REALLY IMPORTANT.
POLL: Majority oppose laws restricting drag...
But in that poll 92% were registered voters, and of those only 29% polled were Republicans when Republican votes for Congress in Election 2022 represented 50.6% of the votes cast (54.5 million) vs. 47.8% for the Democrats (51.5 million).
That's the trick with almost all polls, minimizing the size of the Republican opposition from the get-go in order to obtain a preordained result favorable to the left's side.
Same thing happened with this one from March 27th. Just 29% were Republicans.
POLL: Americans Pull Back from Values that Once Defined USA...
These information war operations wouldn't be necessary if Americans overwhelmingly agreed with the left on the issue du jour.
Here's Obama:
“With my successor coming in, I think he saw an opportunity because the U.S. president didn’t seem to care that much about a rules-based international system,” Obama said, the Daily Mail reported. "As a consequence, I think China’s attitude [is], 'Well, we can take advantage of what appears to be a vacuum internationally on a lot of these issues.'"
It was Obama who never cared about the rules, never challenged China's military expansion in the South China Sea under Xi, and telegraphed nothing but weakness to China.
Here's Xi Jinping as early as 2014:
Tabled by the popular ultranationalist blogger Zhou
Xiaoping, the plan would authorize the assassination of blacklisted
individuals—including Taiwan’s vice president, William Lai Ching-te—if
they do not reform their ways. Zhou later told the Hong Kong newspaper Ming Pao
that his proposal had been accepted by the conference and “relayed to
relevant authorities for evaluation and consideration.” Proposals like
Zhou’s do not come by accident. In 2014, Xi praised Zhou for the
“positive energy” of his jeremiads against Taiwan and the United States. ...
But the most telling moments of the two-sessions meetings, perhaps unsurprisingly, involved Xi himself. The Chinese leader gave four speeches in all—one to delegates of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, two to the National People’s Congress, and one to military and paramilitary leaders. In them, he described a bleak geopolitical landscape, singled out the United States as China’s adversary, exhorted private businesses to serve China’s military and strategic aims, and reiterated that he sees uniting Taiwan and the mainland as vital to the success of his signature policy to achieve “the great rejuvenation of the Chinese ethnos.”
In his first speech on March 6, Xi appeared to be girding China’s industrial base for struggle and conflict. “In the coming period, the risks and challenges we face will only increase and become more severe,” he warned. “Only when all the people think in one place, work hard in one place, help each other in the same boat, unite as one, dare to fight, and be good at fighting, can they continue to win new and greater victories.” To help the CCP achieve these “greater victories,” he vowed to “correctly guide” private businesses to invest in projects that the state has prioritized.
Xi also blasted the United States directly in his speech, breaking his practice of not naming Washington as an adversary except in historical contexts. He described the United States and its allies as leading causes of China’s current problems. “Western countries headed by the United States have implemented containment from all directions, encirclement and suppression against us, which has brought unprecedented severe challenges to our country’s development,” he said. Whereas U.S. President Joe Biden’s administration has emphasized “guardrails” and other means of slowing the deterioration of U.S.-China relations, Beijing is clearly preparing for a new, more confrontational era.
On March 5, Xi gave a second speech laying out a vision of Chinese self-sufficiency that went considerably further than any of his previous discussions of the topic, saying China’s march to modernization is contingent on breaking technological dependence on foreign economies—meaning the United States and other industrialized democracies. Xi also said that he wants China to end its reliance on imports of grain and manufactured goods. “In case we’re short of either, the international market will not protect us,” Xi declared. Li, the outgoing premier, emphasized the same point in his annual government “work report” on the same day, saying Beijing must “unremittingly keep the rice bowls of more than 1.4 billion Chinese people firmly in their own hands.” China currently depends on imports for more than a third of its net food consumption.
In his third speech, on March 8 to representatives from the PLA and the People’s Armed Police, Xi declared that China must focus its innovation efforts on bolstering national defense and establish a network of national reserve forces that could be tapped in wartime. Xi also called for a “National Defense Education” campaign to unite society behind the PLA, invoking as inspiration the Double Support Movement, a 1943 campaign by the Communists to militarize society in their base area of Yan’an.
In his fourth speech (and his first as a third-term president), on March 13, Xi announced that the “essence” of his great rejuvenation campaign was “the unification of the motherland.” Although he has hinted at the connection between absorbing Taiwan and his much-vaunted campaign to, essentially, make China great again, he has rarely if ever done so with such clarity.
One thing that is clear a decade into Xi’s rule is that it is important to take him seriously—something that many U.S. analysts regrettably do not do. When Xi launched a series of aggressive campaigns against corruption, private enterprise, financial institutions, and the property and tech sectors, many analysts predicted that these campaigns would be short-lived. But they endured. The same was true of Xi’s draconian “zero COVID” policy for three years—until he was uncharacteristically forced to reverse course in late 2022.
Xi is now intensifying a decade long campaign to break key economic and technological dependencies on the U.S.-led democratic world. He is doing so in anticipation of a new phase of ideological and geostrategic “struggle,” as he puts it. His messaging about war preparation and his equating of national rejuvenation with unification mark a new phase in his political warfare campaign to intimidate Taiwan. He is clearly willing to use force to take the island. What remains unclear is whether he thinks he can do so without risking uncontrolled escalation with the United States.
SVB will cost the DIF $20 billion. Signature will cost $2.5 billion.
These are enormous sums.
Combined they represent a 17.55% hit to the $128.2 billion balance of the Deposit Insurance Fund as of 12/31/22.
SVB will rank numero uno in this list ahead of IndyMac's $12 billion.
Signature Bank will probably rank fourth ahead of Colonial Bank's $2.4 billion. The final costs are yet to be determined.
Until these two recent failures there were just six institutions in the billion dollar or higher club for DIF bailouts.
FDIC member institutions fund the DIF through FDIC-imposed assessments.
It is received opinion that these bailouts will cost the taxpayers nothing.
It is a fact that the tax-paying customers of these banks end up paying, through high interest rates on loans and effectively zero return paid by the banks on deposits.
