Thursday, June 8, 2023

The Supremes still don't have the courage to void the tyrannical, unequal, racist, Northern neo-reconstructionism of the 1965 Voting Rights Act in the American South

 The Supremes are not colorblind and are as reprehensible in this as any college or business using racial quotas to exclude whites and Asians in favor of less qualified people of color, and they know it.

American liberalism is nothing if not hypocritical.


Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh, both conservatives, joined the court's three liberals in the majority.

In doing so, the court — which has a 6-3 conservative majority — turned away the state’s effort to make it harder to remedy concerns raised by civil rights advocates that the power of Black voters in states like Alabama is being diluted by dividing voters into districts where white voters dominate.

In Thursday’s ruling, Roberts, writing for the majority, said a lower court had correctly concluded that the congressional map violated the voting rights law.

He wrote that there are genuine fears that the Voting Rights Act “may impermissibly elevate race in the allocation of political power” and that the Alabama ruling “does not diminish or disregard those concerns."

The court instead “simply holds that a faithful application of our precedents and a fair reading of the record before us do not bear them out here,” Roberts added.

As such, the court left open future challenges to the law, with Kavanaugh writing in a separate opinion that his vote did not rule out challenges to Section 2 based on whether there is a time at which the 1965 law's authorization of the consideration of race in redistricting is no longer justified.

More.

Today's up-is-down headlines: Variety v The Hill, Drudge v Real Clear

 Tucker Takes Man Cave Rants to Social Media -- to Smaller Results... (Drudge)

First Episode of "Tucker on Twitter" Nets More Than 70 Million Views (Real Clear Politics)


 

Wednesday, June 7, 2023

Gold remains far more overvalued than US stocks, which is saying a lot

Gold is at least 167% overvalued relative to inflation since 1913. $600ish gold makes sense. $1600 gold does not, let alone $2067, the 2020 high.

Meanwhile stocks are off-the-charts overvalued, about 93% relative to the post-Great Depression median valuation of 81 through 2019, as of the latest GDP figures from late May.

Speculation in both gold and stocks, not to mention a host of other things, has been driven by Federal Reserve interest rate suppression since 2001.

How long elevated gold and stock prices can persist in the new higher interest rate environment is anyone's guess.

The Fed Funds rate still averaged a low 1.69% in 2022, so it's still early innings.


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May 25, 2023


Young Americans are too ignorant to blame the correct government entity for housing unaffordability for some reason

 . . . young Americans condemn their municipal and state governments for the current housing affordability problem.

More.

Tuesday, June 6, 2023

Quest for money overwhelms hypocritical PGA Tour as it merges with Saudi LIV Golf

 As usual that lyin' blue scumbelly Donald Trump is at the heart of this:


The agreement — the second stunning sports deal in just months, following World Wrestling Entertainment’s merger with Endeavor Group’s UFC — will require the approval of the PGA Tour policy board, Commissioner Jay Monahan said in a memo to players that was obtained by CNBC. ...

Family members of those who perished in the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks have protested the league, including outside of events. Fifteen of the 19 hijackers on Sept. 11 were from Saudi Arabia, and Osama Bin Laden, the mastermind behind the attacks, was born in the country. It has been concluded by U.S. officials that Saudi nationals helped fund the terrorist group al-Qaeda, although investigations didn’t find that the Saudi officials were complicit in the attacks.

The group 9/11 Families United said they were “shocked and deeply offended” by the merger in a statement on Tuesday.

“Mr. Monahan talked last summer about knowing people who lost loved ones on 9/11, then wondered aloud on national television whether LIV Golfers ever had to apologize for being a member of the PGA Tour. They do now – as does he,” said 9/11 Families United Chair Terry Strada, whose husband Tom died in the World Trade Center’s North Tower. “PGA Tour leaders should be ashamed of their hypocrisy and greed. Our entire 9/11 community has been betrayed by Commissioner Monahan and the PGA as it appears their concern for our loved ones was merely window-dressing in their quest for money – it was never to honor the great game of golf.” ...

Former President Donald Trump, who has hosted a number of LIV Golf events at his golf courses, has defended those events, falsely claiming that “nobody’s gotten to the bottom of 9/11.” Last year, Trump also said on Truth Social that a merger between LIV and The PGA Tour was inevitable.

On Tuesday, Trump weighed in on the merger on his Truth Social platform: “Great news from LIV Golf. A big, beautiful, and glamorous deal for the wonderful world of golf. Congrats to all!!!”

More.

On the contrary, 365k Union dead x $7.5 million each equals $2.7375 trillion in reparations blacks owe Uncle Sam, at minimum

 


Monday, June 5, 2023

St. Matthew's School in Newfoundland, Canada, hard at work grooming the children: The agenda is pride 365

 One month is not enough.





College dropout F. Chuck Todd calls it quits at Meet The Depressed while he's still ahead

Proving yet once again that you don't need a college degree to rise to the level of your incompetence in this great country of ours.

 


The left's campaign to make sure Trump is the GOP candidate gets more incoherent by the day

 Days ago we were told Ron DeSantis is too dumb to run his own messaging and had to rely on his wife.

Now his wife is a Walmart deplorable.

I'd say they've lost their minds but they never had any to lose.

 



Friday, June 2, 2023

Full time employment in May 2023 was a solid 50.47% of civilian population, similar to 2019 levels: Recession delayed

 The measure averaged 49.7% in 1Q2023, but climbed in April to 50.2% and to 50.4% now.

Full time usually peaks in the summer.



Debt ceiling compromise clears the US Senate 63-36, Republican Senators extract pledge from Chucky Schumer for more defense spending which amounts to a pig in a poke so 31 vote against it anyway

Hello, all spending bills must originate in the House.

Some Senate Republicans are pretending you don't know that.

What a joke.

 CNBC:

Majority Leader Chuck Schumer spent much of the day Thursday hammering out an agreement with a group of Senate Republicans who demanded that he pledge to support a supplemental defense funding bill before they would agree to fast-track the debt ceiling bill.

The current House debt ceiling bill provided $886 billion in defense spending for fiscal year 2024, an increase of 3% year over year. That figure rose to $895 billion in 2025, an increase of 1%.

But GOP Sen. Susan Collins of Maine called this “woefully inadequate” Thursday, arguing that a 1% increase did not keep pace with inflation, so in practical terms, it was actually a decrease in military funding. The solution came in the form of a rare joint statement from Schumer and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., which was read on the floor.

“This debt ceiling deal does nothing to limit the Senate’s ability to appropriate emergency supplemental funds to ensure our military capabilities are sufficient to deter China, Russia and our other adversaries and respond to ongoing and growing national security threats,” Schumer read. “Nor does this debt ceiling limit the Senate’s ability to appropriate emergency supplemental funds and respond to various national issues, such as disaster relief, combating the fentanyl crisis or other issues of national importance,” said Schumer.

The Hill:

The normally slow-moving chamber raced through a dozen votes in just over three hours. ...

A total of 31 Republicans voted against the measure ...

Just four Democrats voted against the measure: Sens. John Fetterman (Pa.), Ed Markey (Mass.), Jeff Merkley (Ore.), Elizabeth Warren (Mass.), along with Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.). ...

The legislation would provide $886 billion for defense, which negotiators described as a 3 percent increase, and $637 billion for non-defense programs, according to a White House summary. ...

Senate Republican Whip John Thune (S.D.) said McCarthy didn’t sign off on the agreement between Senate leaders and defense-minded GOP senators. ...

Asked how confident he is about a defense supplemental spending bill passing later in the year, Thune said, “hard to say.” 

“It was important for some of our members have folks on the record acknowledging there clearly could be a need, will be a need for our national security interests,” he said.

Wednesday, May 31, 2023

The US House passed the debt ceiling compromise 314-117 this evening

 

Seventy-one Republicans and 46 Democrats voted against the bill in the House — mostly liberals and conservatives protesting specific provisions of the bill. Their numbers, however, were never a threat to the bill’s passage because of a hodgepodge of moderates and leadership allies who — despite some acknowledging the bill wasn’t exactly what they wanted — threw their support behind the measure. ...

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) Tuesday estimated that the bipartisan debt limit deal could reduce projected deficits by about $1.5 trillion over the next decade, a meager assessment compared to the roughly $4.8 trillion the nonpartisan scorekeeper said the GOP bill would save. ...

While votes on rules, which govern debate over legislation, typically break along party lines, 29 Republicans broke from the GOP and opposed the rule on Wednesday as a way to boycott the debt limit bill. Shortly before the vote closed — as the bill was poised to be blocked — 52 Democrats threw their support behind the rule, bringing the final vote to 241-187 and allowing the debt limit bill to advance to the floor for a full vote.

More.

Lesbian couple still obsessively testing and masking, even outdoors, and up-to-date on their jabs, has COVID-19 land at their door anyway

 

In the past two years, my partner and I have taken more at-home COVID tests than we can count. After our first test in 2021, we obsessively checked every few seconds to see what the indicator would reveal. Longest 15 minutes ever.

We’re up to date on our vaccinations. We still mask up in stores and on public transportation. We recently attended our first concert in three years and though most of our fellow concertgoers at the outdoor venue weren’t masked, we were. Still we swabbed our nostrils a few days later. Both negative.

So it never crossed our minds as we were about to leave town for the Memorial Day weekend that we would get anything other than the desired result. My COVID test was negative. Hers was positive. A second test confirmed the first.

More.