Republicans started to ditch Catholic Mass after Francis became pope in 2013

 Data here.

 

Drudge relentlessly repeats the relentless lies of WaPo on a Tuesday in May, or any other day, that's how much the Republican victory in 2022 stung

 Six months after midterm losses, election deniers mount new efforts... 

As far as WaPo is concerned, all Republicans are election deniers and didn't win the House, dammit:

Among the more than 150 election deniers projected to have won by midnight: Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, Sen. Rand Paul (Ky.) and Rep. Greg Pence (Ind.), the brother of former vice president Mike Pence.

And:

At least 145 Republican election deniers running for the House had won their races as of Wednesday afternoon, ticking past the 139 House Republicans who objected to the counting of electoral votes following the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the U.S. Capitol.

 

 

 

Fidelity Investments: Average retirement account in 2022 fell to $104,000

 

 And most retirement nest eggs are much smaller now than a year ago. By Fidelity’s estimate, the average retirement account lost one-fifth of its value in 2022, dwindling from $135,600 to $104,000.  

More.

Naughty, naughty

 

Sen. Kyrsten Sinema: Biden Had Two Years To Prepare For The End Of Title 42 And Did Not Do So

Full time jobs rebound in April 2023

 Full time employment as a percentage of civilian population in April 2023 came in at 50.2%, smartly ahead of 1Q2023 at 49.7 and ahead of 2022 whole year average 50.1%. Full time peaks in summer.

Recession delayed again.

Catholic Biden's US military doesn't renew decades-old contract with Franciscan college at Walter Reed, hires for-profit secular firm instead

 Story.

Incompetent lab inspectors from CDC completely missed rusting wastewater system at Fort Detrick Army biolab which spilled 2,000-3,000 gallons of contaminated water into Carroll Creek, USAMRIID response took 6 days until photo emerged

 Unsterilized laboratory wastewater from the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick, Maryland, spewed out the top of a rusty 50,000-gallon outdoor holding tank, the pressure catapulting it over the short concrete wall that was supposed to contain hazardous spills.

It was May 25, 2018, the Friday morning before Memorial Day weekend, and the tank holding waste from labs working with Ebola, anthrax, and other lethal pathogens had become overpressurized, forcing the liquid out a vent pipe.

An estimated 2,000-3,000 gallons streamed into a grassy area a few feet from an open storm drain that dumps into Carroll Creek — a centerpiece of downtown Frederick, Maryland, a city of about 80,000 an hour’s drive from the nation’s capital.

But as the waste sprayed for as long as three hours, records show, none of the plant’s workers apparently noticed the tank had burst a pipe. This was despite the facility being under scrutiny from federal lab regulators following catastrophic flooding and an escalating series of safety failures that had been playing out for more than a week. ...

Lab inspectors from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had apparently failed to recognize the plant was in such disrepair. The CDC offered no explanation of how the problems were missed, but after the incident it created a new policy and task force for overseeing labs’ wastewater decontamination systems.

Samuel Edwin, director of the CDC’s select agent regulatory program, did not grant an interview. Two years before the plant flooded and failed, the CDC had hired Edwin from USAMRIID, where he had spent eight years as the biological surety officer and responsible official in charge of making sure USAMRIID’s labs complied with federal regulations.

The whole story is a comedy of incompetence which would be funny if it weren't so serious, here.

World Health Organization declares global public health emergency over today, a week ahead of the US

WHO declares end to Covid-19 global public health emergency

The spread of Covid-19 is no longer a global public health emergency, the World Health Organization declared Friday.

“For more than a year, the pandemic has been on a downward trend with population immunity increasing from vaccination and infection, mortality decreasing, and the pressure on health systems easing,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said at a news conference in Geneva.

“This trend has allowed most countries to return to life as we knew it before Covid-19,” Tedros said. “It’s therefore with great hope that I declared Covid-19 over as a global health emergency.”

Nearly 7 million people have died from the virus worldwide since the WHO first declared the emergency on Jan. 30, 2020, according to the U.N. organization’s official data. Tedros said the true death toll is at least 20 million.

The WHO’s decision comes as the U.S. is set to end its national public health emergency on Thursday.

Tedros said there is still a risk that new variant could emerge and cause another surge in cases. He warned national governments against dismantling the systems they have built to fight the virus.

“This virus is here to stay. It’s still killing and it’s still changing,” he said.

But the WHO chief said the time has come for countries to transition from an emergency response to managing Covid like other infectious diseases. ...

“Covid-19 has been so much more than health crisis,” Tedros said. “It has caused severe economic upheaval, erasing trillions from GDP, disrupting travel and trade, shattering businesses and plunging millions into poverty,” he said.

“It has caused severe social upheaval with borders closed, movement restricted, schools shut and millions of people experiencing loneliness, isolation, anxiety and depression,” Tedros said.

More.

The pandemic wraps on May 11

 US Covid Case Count to Go Dark as Public Health Emergency Ends

(Bloomberg) -- The US government’s count of new Covid-19 cases has been dropping for months. Soon, it will disappear entirely. 

Thousands of Americans are still contracting the coronavirus each week. But when the public health emergency ends May 11, laboratories across the country will no longer be required to report Covid test results to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That will eventually mean no more weekly infection, transmission and community-level numbers in CDC’s Covid Data Tracker. 

Concern about the pandemic is rapidly flagging as infection levels fall to those seen in the earliest months of the outbreak. The World Health Organization also moved to end its global health emergency Friday, lowering its alert level for the pandemic three years after the lethal disease was first seen in China. 

US infection data had already become increasingly unreliable as Americans began opting for at-home, rapid Covid tests — which most patients don’t report — rather than laboratory assays, like PCR. CDC will turn its attention to tracking severe Covid illness via hospital admissions, officials said on a call with reporters, while continuing to analyze wastewater and tests of international travelers to determine how the virus is spreading and evolving.

More.

Billionaire says Florida too expensive for him

 THIEL: Moving to Florida from Silicon Valley Now Too Expensive...

Moderna's stock price is down 73% from its Aug 9, 2021 high of $484.47 as of this morning

 

 

LOL, Moderna's surprise quarterly profit plunged 97% per share amid collapsing vaccine demand, comes from Covid shot revenue deferred from 2022, first quarter sales tank 69%, CNBC says 30%

CNBC, here:

Moderna on Thursday blew past estimates for first-quarter earnings and revenue, posting a surprise quarterly profit, despite lower demand for Covid vaccines, its only marketable product.

The biotech company generated first-quarter sales of $1.9 billion, driven by Covid shot revenue deferred from 2022. That’s down more than 30% from the $6.1 billion it recorded in the same period a year ago amid a resurgence of Covid cases.

Moderna posted net income of $79 million, or 19 cents per share, for the quarter. That’s compared with $3.66 billion in net income, or $8.58 per share, reported during the same quarter last year.

Seeking Alpha got it right, noting the inventory write-downs of "excess and obsolete COVID-19 products" nobody wants:

 

I'll just put this here for the record in the event CNBC later corrects their reporting without saying so:

Besides their bad character, what do Trump and Obama have in common in 2009 and 2020?

 Trump and Obama signed off on the two most fiscally irresponsible periods in post-war history, and Biden two years in looks set to join them.

The Executive is supposed to be a check on irresponsible spending. But both Trump and Obama went right along with it instead of vetoing the outrageous spending of the periods.

What else do they have in common?

Two crises, both of which plunged the country into hysteria.

The Great Financial Crisis did not begin to end until March 2009 when the FASB signaled its intent to suspend mark-to-market rules. The stock market bottomed almost immediately, but as with all cases of mass hysteria it took time for the panic to pass as other sectors recovered "one by one". 

The Pandemic Crisis gripped the country in March 2020, sending millions home from work, stocks plunging, toilet paper into shortage, businesses into bankruptcy, and on and on. With just about everyone vaccinated who was going to be by the end of 2021, the country gradually started to come out of it in 2022, eschewing jabs, masks, and social distancing as it became clear that the Omicron variant was infecting tens of millions despite all those measures.

2020 was the single most fiscally irresponsible year in the post-war since 1953. Federal expenditures, bloated by panicked bailouts, outpaced tax revenues by a whopping 216%.

Only 2009 comes close, at 210%, the second worst year on record.

Third, not shown, was 2010 at 196%, and fourth, not shown, was 2021 at 176%, each a part of the respective crisis periods.

Do you know what else those two years share in common?

Spending bills must originate in the House of Representatives.

In 2009 and 2020 its Speaker just happened to be the same person, as she was in 2010 and 2021.

Nancy Pelosi owns the four most fiscally irresponsible years in the entire history of the post-war. Her two speakerships literally busted out all over. 

As usual the media and the Democrats, but I repeat myself, are portraying the House Republican bill which lifts the debt ceiling by $1.5 trillion as a bill with "big spending cuts"

This is how NPR, who else?, frames the issue from the beginning:

The House of Representatives has narrowly approved a Republican bill to raise the debt limit. However, it ties the ability to raise that debt ceiling to big spending cuts. And this House bill rolls back several of President Biden's key policies.

The House Republican bill, now languishing in the Senate, rolls back spending levels to pre-COVID levels. That's not a spending cut. That's saying, as Biden himself says, the emergency is over.

If the emergency is over, the emergency spending should end, too.

Outlays in fiscal 2020 and 2021 ballooned because of the new pandemic spending. Deficits for just those two years soared to almost $6 trillion. Republicans seek to roll that spending back. Democrats want that spending to form the new baseline. If Democrats succeed, Katy bar the door. The national debt will absolutely explode.

NPR knows this. It just chooses to hide the facts about it all, how the pandemic spending created these massive deficits, and how that spending which flooded the economy with money contributed to the new inflation:

So it raises the debt limit by $1.5 trillion or through March of 2024, whichever comes first. It also sets spending levels for federal programs to those that were in place two years ago. It limits the growth of spending going forward to 1% annually. But as you said, it also targets a list of the president's policies. It repeals the president's student loan forgiveness program, which is tied up in the courts. It claws back unspent COVID relief money and rolls back key energy provisions that were in the Inflation Reduction Act. It also puts in place new work requirements for adults without children who receive federal assistance like food stamps or Medicaid.

Bank failure No. 3 of 2023: First Republic Bank of San Fran Freako, California

 

The FDIC estimates that the cost to the Deposit Insurance Fund will be about $13 billion. This is an estimate and the final cost will be determined when the FDIC terminates the receivership.

More.

The price of gold of $20.64/ounce from 1913 adjusted for inflation to today

 $647.22

Sucka.

The minimum wage of $0.40/hour from 1938 adjusted for inflation to today

 $8.71

Cry more.

Biden's doing the same thing as Obama in making the 2020 crisis spending the baseline for his future spending proposals

 Obama did it in 2009 and Republicans acquiesced, running trillion dollar plus deficits for four straight years until Republicans enforced some fiscal discipline in Obama's second term.

The author below, a Republican, doesn't mention that.

Will Republicans acquiesce again?

If they do, the national debt will easily swell to in excess of $51 trillion by 2033, from $31 trillion at the end of 2022.

From the story, "Trillion-dollar deficits: Biden’s new normal":

The president and his White House have taken the 2020 COVID-19, one-time-only crisis budget as his administration’s working baseline, rather than the pre-Covid 2019 budget, which had a significant $4.4 trillion price tag.

In 2020, because of the pandemic, the budget jumped 47 percent to $6.5 trillion, as both Democrats and Republicans supported the need for emergency funding. That COVID funding was to sunset as the country returned to normal — as it did last year. Apparently, Biden decided to ignore that crucial point.

Latest inflation reads show entrenchment, Fed will have to go higher and stay higher for longer but Congress must cut spending and raise revenues

 The Fed can do only so much, but a Fed Funds Rate of 4.83 is hardly adequate for current conditions.

The fiscal side in this, however, has been completely ignored.

Outlays for 2020-2022 alone have topped $19 trillion vs. receipts south of $12 trillion.

Fauci: "So many people cannot be completely wrong"

Fewer than 19 million Americans completed the initial vaccine protocol in 2022. Fewer than 25 million received at least one dose.