Thursday, June 22, 2023

Public school education in the United States continues its decades-long freefall, accelerated by pandemic closures and a system obsessed with sexual grooming

 The decline in math scores last year was the biggest in the past 50 years, according to newly released federal data. ...

The lowest-performing students scored at levels last recorded in the 1970s, when the assessment began. ...

Test results from earlier this year showed that U.S. history scores among middle schoolers are also falling — dropping to the lowest levels ever recorded since the assessment began in 1994. 

More.

Tuesday, June 20, 2023

LOL, Trumpworld catching on only now that Mark Meadows wasn't really one of them when it was obvious in 2017

 Months ago, Meadows and his lawyer severed communications with most of Trumpland ...

Meadows’ lawyer George Terwilliger this month offered only vagueness ...

That cryptic statement did not sit well with much of Trumpworld. In recent weeks, several lawyers and confidants had already discussed their unconfirmed suspicions with Trump that Meadows was being very useful to the feds in order to reduce Meadows’ own possible legal exposure, two other people familiar with the matter say. Both sources independently tell Rolling Stone that when the topic has come up within the past several months, Trump has at times said that he doesn’t know what Meadows is doing, adding that it would be a “shame” if the MAGAland rumors were true.     

More.

Meadows played key roles in mucking up both Obamacare repeal and immigration reform.

Trumpworld is a bunch of dimwits, and Meadows knows it better than anyone else.

LOL, Democrat named Wackerman, $400 donor to Lincoln Project, arrested for setting July 2022 "Oak Fire" in Yosemite National Park which Democrats blamed on global warming

 The so-called Oak Fire destroyed 127 homes and 66 outbuildings. Roughly 6,000 people were forced to evacuate as the inferno torched 30 square miles of land and smoke from the fire drifted more than 200 miles into parts of Nevada and the San Francisco Bay Area.     

Monday, June 19, 2023

Trump's Operation Warp Speed disappears into a black hole

 


Fewer than 1.7 million jabs have been administered in 2023 through May 9 in the United States, per Our World in Data.



Sunday, June 18, 2023

On the Sunday grill: My May 1984 33-cent hamburger should cost 96-cents in May 2023, instead it costs $1.24

 It's nearly 30% overpriced.

The inflation-adjusted pound of ground beef over the period should cost $3.82.

I buy the good stuff, however. My burger costs $1.50, washed down with a cheap pint of Hamm's Beer for 83-cents.

I'll be back to beans and rice on Monday.

A man's gotta do what a man's gotta do.

 



Saturday, June 17, 2023

Trump's greatest economy ever is simply part of the worst economy ever, now in its sixteenth year and third year of Biden

Something about some guy abandoning free market principles in order to save the free market system.



LOL Mexico soccer fans strike again, Las Vegas match called early because of Puto! chants

Things are really getting bad if you have to go to Mexico to escape the Nazis to practice the First Amendment.
 

The United States men’s match against Mexico was cut short Thursday night by the referee after the stadium devolved into echoes of homophobic chants from Mexican soccer fans. ... Four players were ejected in a testy second half of the game, which the U.S. won 3-0 for a spot Sunday in the CONCACAF Nations League final against Canada.

Wait for it.

Thursday, June 15, 2023

Congress went on a spending orgy since 2019 adding $8.77 trillion to the national debt and dimwits blame the Fed for being unable to control inflation

 Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon. Blame yourselves. You elected them.

 


The chief penalty is to be governed by someone worse if a man will not himself hold office and rule.

-- Plato, Republic, I, 346f.

The Fed left the Funds Rate unchanged yesterday, and no members of the Federal Reserve Board currently anticipate a rate lower than at present through the end of the year

 They anticipate higher, but not by much, which means more rate hikes this year.

The yield curve aggregate yesterday closed just 4 basis points lower than the current cycle high of 4.674% achieved on March 8th, at 4.671%. That's the sum of the basis points for all US Treasury securities marketed yesterday divided by 13 (ranging from 1-month securities to 30-year).

To say the Fed's response to inflation has been timid would be an understatement.

In the 1980s the Fed's response to core inflation such as we experience today at 5.3% year over year was a Fed Funds Rate in excess of 10%. We're at 5.08%. The yield curve is not steppin' and fetchin' when the big dog won't bark.

This is not a serious country, and is perversely more than willing to inflict the worst tax on all, namely inflation, mostly because the whole damn economy is predicated on 2% inflation, which halves your nestegg in 35 years.

At 5% it does that in just fourteen.

It's criminal.





The price of gasoline has fallen, but only to the level of Obama-era expensive, not Trump-era cheap

 


Wednesday, June 14, 2023

Trump did nothing wrong with his records: He knows it and they know it, but you don't, which is just the way they want it

 When Trump actually finds a competent attorney, the attorney should immediately file to have the case dismissed based on the Jackson ruling of 2012.

But will he?


Trump’s Boxes and Clinton’s Sock Drawer

A president chooses what records to return or keep and the National Archives can’t do anything about it.

... The National Archives and Records Administration was never given the recordings. As Mr. Branch tells it, Mr. Clinton hid them in his sock drawer to keep them away from the public and took them with him when he left office.

My organization, Judicial Watch, sent a Freedom of Information Act request to NARA for the audiotapes. The agency responded that the tapes were Mr. Clinton’s personal records and therefore not subject to the Presidential Records Act or the Freedom of Information Act.

We sued in federal court and asked the judge to declare the audiotapes to be presidential records and, because they weren’t currently in NARA’s possession, compel the government to get them.

In defending NARA, the Justice Department argued that NARA doesn’t have “a duty to engage in a never-ending search for potential presidential records” that weren’t provided to NARA by the president at the end of his term. Nor, the department asserted, does the Presidential Records Act require NARA to appropriate potential presidential records forcibly. The government’s position was that Congress had decided that the president and the president alone decides what is a presidential record and what isn’t. He may take with him whatever records he chooses at the end of his term.

Judge Amy Berman Jackson agreed: “Since the President is completely entrusted with the management and even the disposal of Presidential records during his time in office,” she held, “it would be difficult for this Court to conclude that Congress intended that he would have less authority to do what he pleases with what he considers to be his personal records.”

Judge Jackson added that “the PRA contains no provision obligating or even permitting the Archivist to assume control over records that the President ‘categorized’ and ‘filed separately’ as personal records. At the conclusion of the President’s term, the Archivist only ‘assumes responsibility for the Presidential records.’ . . . PRA does not confer any mandatory or even discretionary authority on the Archivist to classify records. Under the statute, this responsibility is left solely to the President.”

I lost because Judge Jackson concluded the government’s hands were tied. Mr. Clinton took the tapes, and no one could do anything about it.

More.

Tuesday, June 13, 2023

Permanently higher prices for the basics looks to be the future

 The simple egg is now 25% more expensive at Sam's Club compared with pre-Covid. I used to pay routinely $3.98 for two dozen like those shown below. Prices nationally have fallen only to the unusually high levels of 2015.

Whole chicken is up 23%, electricity 18%, and both appear to be stable or rising.

Avian flu is now only sporadic.

 






Core CPI inflation in the United States in May at 5.32% year-over-year has hardly come down from 5.58% in January

 



I remember when the orgies at the White House were at least kept indoors

 


The 47% is back

 


Nature has a self-cleansing mechanism

 


In 15 years we've gone from Obamagirl to a topless Biden girlyman at the White House

.

 
.