Friday, February 14, 2025
Beer-swilling surrender monkey SECDEF Pete Hegseth stands by his original comments yesterday and doubles down on them today
No return to pre-2014 borders for Ukraine.
No NATO membership for Ukraine.
No US troops for Ukraine (like Biden ever wanted that).
J. D. Vance is proving himself to be a very intelligent imbecile
Earlier in the week there were no good guys nor bad guys in the Ukraine War:
Later in the week the Russian army is invading European countries en masse:
Everyday actually:
Holy cow, a seventh prosecutor resigns over the renegade DOJ attempt to toss the Eric Adams case
A seventh federal prosecutor resigned Friday over the Department of Justice’s controversial order to dismiss criminal corruption charges against New York Mayor Eric Adams.
The prosecutor, Hagan Scotten, in a blistering letter to top DOJ official Emil Bove, said “I expect you will eventually find someone who is enough of a fool, or enough of a coward, to file your motion” to dismiss the Adams case.
“But it was never going to be me,” wrote Scotten, who had been the lead prosecutor in Adams’ case for the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York.
On Thursday, Scotten’s boss, acting U.S. Attorney Danielle Sassoon resigned in protest over Bove’s order to toss the case. ...
Scotten is a Harvard Law School grad, who clerked for Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts after serving in the U.S. Army in Iraq in the Special Forces. He also served as a clerk to Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh when Roberts’ fellow conservative was sitting on a lower court.
More.
The new Attorney General Pam Bondi is really working overtime to accumulate obloquy.
Banana Republican Donald Trump denies meddling in New York Mayor Eric Adams case as 6 top prosecutors quit over DOJ dismissal order
... After Sassoon refused to dismiss the case Thursday, the matter was reassigned to John Keller, the acting head of the DOJ’s Public Integrity Section, who then also refused to dismiss the case and quit, NBC reported. ...
Acting DOJ criminal division chief Kevin Driscoll also resigned Thursday after refusing to accept the Adams case.
At least three other senior officials in the DOJ’s Public Integrity Section quit after that following a meeting with the deputy attorney general. ...
Sassoon had been the lead prosecutor at the fraud and conspiracy trial of Sam Bankman-Fried, the former head of the failed cryptocurrency exchange FTX. Bankman-Fried was sentenced last March to 25 years in prison.
More.
US District Judge Amir Ali orders resumption of foreign aid disbursements in place before Trump took office
. . . the latest blow to the administration’s sweeping efforts to halt international aid. ...
The judge said in his ruling that the administration has not yet “meaningfully contested detailed and credible evidence of harm to countless American businesses, ranging from shutting down programs, to furloughing and laying off employees, to shuttering altogether.” ...
More.
Thursday, February 13, 2025
A libertarian wants you to know that accumulated losses in a war are "not sensible", as if war were ever sensible
"Here, let's look at this completely irrational thing and apply some logic to it now that we're down 28 points in the fourth quarter".
Their tidy little world of dollars and cents makes no sense, either.
Imagine Winston Churchill saying this after Dunkirk.
Thirteen paragraphs in we learn that last month's wholesale price headline was, well, total fiction
Which means that this headline is what then?
Producer prices report points to softer Fed inflation measure than feared:
A gauge of wholesale prices rose more than expected in January ... Over the past year, the all-items PPI increased 3.5%, well ahead of the central bank’s objective. ...
“Wholesale price growth came in slightly higher than expected for January, and the read for December was adjusted upward,” said Elizabeth Renter, senior economist at personal finance site NerdWallet. “In other words, inflation at the producer level remains high, and one concern is that this inflation could ultimately be passed along to consumers.”
Revisions to the December numbers also complicated the inflation picture, with the gain now put at 0.5%, compared with the 0.2% increase previously reported.
Last month's headline: Inflation watch: Wholesale prices rose 0.2% in December, less than expected.
As usual, the truth is under the hood of the polished headline, or maybe next month's polished headline.
Nothing looks soft to me in the measures shown below, which are the not-seasonally-adjusted ones.
Overall producer prices are up 0.7% in Jan 2025, and 3.5% year over year. Core producer prices are up 0.5% in Jan 2025, and 3.6% year over year. At least until next month.
The billionaires never say, Raise taxes now or face an economic heart attack
The word "tax" appears nowhere in this story.
Ray Dalio is worth $19 billion.
Wednesday, February 12, 2025
Elon Musk is the biggest federal government teet sucker in history, the wealthiest man in the world on the backs of American taxpayers, and the biggest hypocrite about it
The hypocrite:
Over the last decade, Musk's companies SpaceX and Tesla were awarded at least $18 billion in federal contracts, according to spending data -- with SpaceX winning more than $17 billion worth of contracts since 2015.
And don't forget the benefit of the government coin in the till for every Tesla purchased:
The beer-swilling surrender monkeys of the Trump administration have just caved to Putin
The art of the cave.
The art of the deal would drop NATO membership for a return of the occupied lands, but no, let's concede EVERYTHING for . . . what exactly?
A cessation of hostilities?
These people are a joke and a disgrace.
In Jan 2025 the average price of utility natural gas is 49% more than the 2017-2020 average
The average price of utility natural gas was $1.04 per therm 2017-2020.
In Jan 2025 it costs $1.55, 49% more.
Since about 10% of natural gas production is diverted to LNG export for big profits, most of the increase is related to diversion of natural gas from heating to electricity production because of the lunatic policy of retiring massive amounts of coal electric generation capacity.
It makes heating your home much more expensive, and keeping the lights on much more expensive at the same time.
Thanks for nothing, green energy assholes. It's 22 degrees F and snowing in Grand Rapids, MI.
Nine basic foods posting new all time high average prices in January 2025 according to the St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank
Everybody's favorite food inflation indicator, eggs, made another new all-time record high average price in January 2025: $4.953/dozen
Sorting for the 100 largest flocks of egg-layers affected by H5N1 bird flu since 2022 which have had to be destroyed, as of this morning I count in excess of 21 million chickens destroyed to stop the spread so far in 2025 alone.

























