The challenges ahead (Biden's America)

[N.E. Brigand]

"‘I Bawled’: A Congresswoman’s 18-Month Fight For A Neglected Tribal School Just Paid Off -- A single sentence in the 4,155-page omnibus spending bill is everything that Rep. Melanie Stansbury (D-N.M.) came to Congress to do. ... It's the only line item in the bill under a section titled “Bureau of Indian Education, Education Construction.” It’s money to rebuild a K-12 school in TóHajiilee, New Mexico, a remote community about 35 miles west of Albuquerque. ... This school was built on a floodplain. For decades, walls of water have poured down from a nearby canyon and drowned the campus. School officials here routinely pull children from their classes and race to get them onto a bus to shuttle them to safety. Teachers scramble to move their cars to higher ground before they get washed away."

When I attended Mythcon in Albuquerque this past August, I was surprised to learn (1) that there are thunderstorms every afternoon at that time of year and (2) that the concrete drainage ditch adjacent to the convention site went from having a trickle of water most of the time to having a raging torrent several feet deep for an hour or two after each storm.

[Sunsilver]

N.E. building that plant makes a heck of a lot more sense than trying to revive coal mining in West Virginia, which is, of course what Trump wanted to do! The coal barons were the main reason behind the union movement in the 1920's - I don't think any industry in America has a worse record for the way they treated employees and damaged the environment!
Many of the problems the miners fought to remedy still exist today in the mines.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/ ... 180978520/

[River]

When I attended Mythcon in Albuquerque this past August, I was surprised to learn (1) that there are thunderstorms every afternoon at that time of year and (2) that the concrete drainage ditch adjacent to the convention site went from having a trickle of water most of the time to having a raging torrent several feet deep for an hour or two after each storm.

Yep. That's the Rockies for you. Around here it's less dangerous because we have enough moisture to grow forests...though in the areas where the forests burned down a big storm will trigger flash-flooding. I was honestly afraid of what the burn zone in my town was going to look like this summer, but they did a lot of work to stabilize the ground when they pulled out the charred remains of the houses. People who lived right next to a cleared lot had some things to say about the drainage but we didn't have the southern side of the mesa sliding down or the streets flooding.

[N.E. Brigand]

It's almost too ridiculous to mention, but more than 45,000 people "liked" this tweet by Fox News and talk radio personality Mark Levin, which claims that President "Biden’s not giving interviews because he has dementia. It’s the biggest media coverup and act of censorship ever. No in-depth stories. No exposes. No neurological experts. No demands for a list of his medicines. No direct press questions." Ten seconds on Youtube brings up a number of interviews with the president, such as this one from October:



(If the complaint is that there's nothing more recent, then I'll note that while this item posted eight days ago is only a softball piece with a celebrity interviewer, it still shows the president responding coherently to (admittedly fluffy) questions.)

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Meanwhile, the Supreme Court is requiring the Biden administration to keep in place Title 42 immigration restrictions that were imposed by the Trump administration due to the Covid-19 pandemic until the Court rules on the case, which will be presented in February. That presumably means the restrictions will stay in place until at least April. Strictly speaking, the case concerns whether states can intervene in a suit brought by third parties against the federal government to force it to abandon the policy, which the Biden administration had chosen not to defend. Two justices, Neil Gorsuch (appointed by Donald Trump) and Ketanji Brown Jackson (appointed by Biden) publicly dissented from today's order on the grounds that the cause of the restrictions is effectively over.

[N.E. Brigand]

The AP notes that President Biden has named more Black women and more former public defenders to the federal appeals courts than all previous presidents combined.

[N.E. Brigand]

In Cincinnati today, from left to right: Governor Andy Beshear (Democrat of Kentucky), Governor Mike DeWine (Republican of Ohio), President Joe Biden (Democrat), Senator Sherrod Brown (Democrat of Ohio), and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (Republican of Kentucky). Former Senator Rob Portman (Republican of Ohio), who retired as of noon yesterday, is on the stage but not visible behind President Biden. Fourteen months ago, all of those men supported (and voted for, in the case of Brown, McConnell, and Portman; and signed, in Biden's case) the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act that will rebuild the aging Brent Spence Bridge which connects Ohio and Kentucky over the Ohio River.



As noted here, President Barack Obama, standing at the same spot, unsuccessfully pushed for a similar infrastructure bill in 2011.

[N.E. Brigand]

The U.S. unemployment rate in December, announced today, was 3.468%, which is the lowest it's been since 1969.

[N.E. Brigand]

If you pay even a little attention to Republican statements on the issue of immigration, you will have seen many complaints that President Biden has not visited the U.S.-Mexican border since taking office. Just in the past month, I saw a reporter ask Karine Jean-Pierre, the White House press secretary, why Biden hadn't done so.

Today President Biden is at that border, so what you'll find Republicans saying now are complaints that it's "meaningless" for Biden to do so.

[N.E. Brigand]

The U.S. unemployment rate in December, announced today, was 3.468%, which is the lowest it's been since 1969.

President Biden himself noted the good news here.

If you read through the replies to that tweet, you'll see a lot of people arguing that the unemployment numbers aren't accurate, so I think it's worth noting that they are calculated in the same way they always have been. Except for 16 months during the pandemic (Apr. 2020-Aug. 2021), the U.S. unemployment rate has consistently been quite good -- at or below 5% -- since May 2016.* It has now been at or below 4% for 13 straight months in Joe Biden's administration, but before the pandemic, it was at or below 4% for more than two straight years of Donald Trump's administration (Mar. 2018-Mar. 2020). But I don't think those Biden detractors are claiming that the numbers were untrue while Trump was president.

*For most of my life that wasn't the case. The U.S. unemployment rate was above 5% in every month from Jan. 1974 to Apr. 1997 (with one very brief exception: it dropped to 5% in Mar. 1989 before rising again the next month). That's more than 23 straight years, including the entire presidencies of Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, and George H. W. Bush (except as noted above), and more than half the presidency of Bill Clinton. It was at or below 5% for more than four years from May 1997 to Sep. 2001 (including the first nine months of George W. Bush's presidency), then above 5% for more than three years from Oct. 2001 to May 2005, then at or below 5% for under three years from Jun. 2005 to Feb. 2008, and then it jumped to 10% due to the Great Recession, remaining for above 5% for the next eight years, except for six of the months form September 2015 to April 2016 (i.e., until nearly the last year of Barack Obama's presidency).

In other words, more than 34 of the last 50 years have had U.S. unemployment above 5%.

[N.E. Brigand]

AP: "DOJ reviewing potentially classified docs at Biden center."

"Special counsel to the president Richard Sauber said 'a small number of documents with classified markings' were discovered as Biden's personal attorneys were clearing out the offices of the Penn Biden Center, where the president kept an office after he left the vice presidency in 2017 until shortly before he launched his 2020 presidential campaign in 2019. The documents were found on Nov. 2, 2022, in a 'locked closet' in the office, Sauber said. Sauber said the attorneys immediately alerted the White House Counsel's office, who notified the National Archives and Records Administration — which took custody of the documents the next day."

The Archives referred the matter to the Dept. of Justice, and Attorney General Merrick Garland assigned the matter to John Lausch, the U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois. Lausch was appointed by Donald Trump. I didn't know any Trump-appointed U.S. Attorneys remained in office other than Special Counsel John Durham and David C. Weiss, the U.S. Attorney for Delaware (whom Biden left in place so as not to interfere with any investigation into his son, Hunter). Wikipedia says that the two Democratic senators from Illinois, Dick Durbin and Tammy Baldwin, asked Biden to leave Lausch in place "to complete sensitive investigations" -- I wonder what that refers to.

Here's what some pundits are saying:

Allison Gill: "This will likely end up like the two classified documents found in Donald Trump's West Palm Beach storage unit or the classified emails that Hillary Clinton had: no crime. Very unlike the ones found in Trump's desk, co-mingled with non-classified documents, after he lied about having them."

Bradley Moss: "If you can’t grasp the difference between finding improperly stored classified documentss that you immediately turn over to NARA vs. obstructing and lying in a federal investigation regarding improperly stored classified documents, I cannot help you."

Mark Said: "This should and will be investigated. This occurs commonly and usually results in administrative rather than criminal action. Trump and team would have fared exactly same way had he not delayed, obstructed and potentially lied about the existence of classified records at Mar-a-Lago."

Matthew Miller: "It's worth noting what former government officials have said since the Mar-a-Lago raid: classified documents get mistakenly removed from government facilities fairly frequently. You report it, turn in the documents, the government does a damage assessment, and that is the end of it. OR you cover it up, lie about it repeatedly to the government, and force them to raid your premises to retrieve the documents (i.e., act like a sociopath), in which case you can expect a criminal charge."

Marcy Wheeler: "The D.C. Press Corps gets a test about whether they can distinguish stolen documents from misplaced documents."

I guess we'll see.

[N.E. Brigand]

Weirdly, Sauber didn't argue that Biden declassified the documents in his mind.

[N.E. Brigand]

For the first time in nearly 18 months, a regularly conducted poll from The Economist / YouGov finds President Biden net positive approval rating (50%-47%). Weirdly 51% of the respondents believe that the U.S. is in a recession (not true) and that unemployment is too high.

As lately mentioned here, unemployment is below 3.5% and hasn't been this low in 54 years. As Dave Weigel of Semafor notes at that link, in 2012, one of Mitt Romney's campaign promises in 2012 was that as president, he would get unemployment below 6%. Unemployment did drop below 6% in 2014, during Barack Obama's second term.

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First Lady Jill Biden had surgery for a facial lesion today that turns out to be basal cell carcinoma, but doctors say they removed all cancerous cells.

[N.E. Brigand]

Donald Trump has sent cease and desist letters to the Republican National Committee and the GOP organizations that support Congressional candidates demanding that they stop using his name and likeness to raise money. It was just last week that Trump told CPAC that he wasn't planning to break from the Republican Party. But I guess they'll have to pay to keep him. I'm posting that news here to try to let the Trump's America thread drop back again. Biden has rightly said that he governs for all Americans, and that includes the Republicans whose party is squabbling with its most famous member.

And in that spirt, I'll note that conservative media has spent much of the last couple weeks focusing on minor cultural concerns rather than substantive issues. They spent a couple days complaining about Hasbro renaming the "Mr. Potato Head" brand as "Potato Head" (while keeping the two characters, Mr. Potato Head and Mrs. Potato Head), complaining that the Disney+ streaming service is putting content warnings on certain episodes of The Muppets, and most notably getting manipulated by the Dr. Seuss estate's decision to stop production of six little-known Suess books that include some racist imagery. In response to the estate's announcement, Fox and other conservative outlets essentially promoted Seuss's books, resulting in a few dozen other Seuss titles rapidly rising to dominate the best-seller list this week after coverage like this. That'll teach 'em!

And then there was outrage that the character of Lola Bunny in the Space Jam sequel will be more athletic and less sexualized than she was in the original 1990s film, which is indeed a choice made by the new film's creators. But as this commentator points out, the image of Lola Bunny being shared by many conservatives is not from the earlier film. It was actually created later by a fan artist with some minor, um, enhancements, and was originally posted on a somewhat salacious website.

Remember how Republicans were angry at the "woke" left for "canceling" Dr. Seuss less than a year ago?

You may recall that in March 2021, the estate of the late Theodore Geisel (aka Seuss) let it be known that they would no longer be publishing six lesser-known Seuss books because some of those books' imagery was or could be interpreted to be racially insensitive. Those books probably weren't selling all that well. I'd heard of four of them but had only read two -- McElligott's Pool and To Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street -- , and while I've browsed a fair number of bookstore kids' sections for my nephews over the past 15 years, I don't remember seeing those titles on the shelves, although "McElligott's Pool" is the title of a song in Seussical: The Musical.

As much as anything, this seems to have been a marketing ploy by the Seuss estate. It certainly had a salutary effect on their income, because when conservatives heard about the move, it quickly became a cause célèbre that liberals were "banning" Seuss, the result of which was that people began buying Seuss books at numbers not seen for years, pushing many titles well up the best-seller lists.

So who's really banning or at least censoring Dr. Seuss? Well...



Shame on that administrator. And if her defense is that she was only following district policy, she should quit rather than defend it.

[elengil]

As lately mentioned here, unemployment is below 3.5% and hasn't been this low in 54 years. As Dave Weigel of Semafor notes at that link, in 2012, one of Mitt Romney's campaign promises in 2012 was that as president, he would get unemployment below 6%. Unemployment did drop below 6% in 2014, during Barack Obama's second term.

Isn't the unemployment number based on applications for unemployment benefits rather than actual numbers of unemployed people? While I understand that there is *a* correlation, there isn't a 1:1 - maybe some no longer have access to benefits or have given up?

[River]

There's a monthly survey in which people are asked if they're employed or seeking employment. People dropping out of the workforce completely could skew that number BUT there's also an ongoing labor shortage so I don't think the issue is people dropping out of the workforce for lack of opportunities. They could be dropping out for other reasons, though. A good size chunk of the population is reaching retirement age. Another chunk decided that they were done after the pandemic hit and aren't going back. Also, I suspect that long-COVID might be a bigger issue than anyone openly admits.

The contraction and resulting lay-offs in the tech sector is grabbing headlines and probably warping people's perceptions of the national employment situation. Biotech is also quietly contracting/reverting to the mean now that the vaccine moonshot is pretty much complete.

[RoseMorninStar]

Hubby retired several years early due to the pandemic. While he was able to use up his vacation and sick leave he did not collect unemployment. It's not how he wished to end his career, but he won't be going back into the work force.

[N.E. Brigand]

As lately mentioned here, unemployment is below 3.5% and hasn't been this low in 54 years. As Dave Weigel of Semafor notes at that link, in 2012, one of Mitt Romney's campaign promises in 2012 was that as president, he would get unemployment below 6%. Unemployment did drop below 6% in 2014, during Barack Obama's second term.

Isn't the unemployment number based on applications for unemployment benefits rather than actual numbers of unemployed people? While I understand that there is *a* correlation, there isn't a 1:1 - maybe some no longer have access to benefits or have given up?

Yes, but...

The government has multiple ways of calculating unemployment and labor participation. The figures I'm citing are the ones that are almost always used. People tend to cite the others selectively. Back in the 1980s, my Dad complained that if only people knew the numbers calculated using one of the other methods, people would understand that unemployment during Ronald Reagan's presidency was worse than it appeared to be. In 2016, Donald Trump's supporters complained that the same numbers presented while Barack Obama's administration were misleading. During Trump's presidency, there were a few claims from the left that employment wasn't as good as it seemed.

I would certainly welcome a look into those other numbers, as long as it's done apples-to-apples.

[Frelga]

And not to put too fine a point on it, something like 270K people between 18 and 64 died of covid.

[N.E. Brigand]

The metaphor doesn't really work, but I couldn't not share it here:



For those who don't know the arcana of American monetary policy: there is a provision in U.S. law that allows the Treasury to mint a platinum coin in any denomination. The provision was meant to be used for collectible coins, but a lot of smart people believe that, in a pinch, it could be used to allow Treasury to mint a coin of sufficient value -- says $1 trillion -- to prevent the nation from defaulting on its debt. (To be sure, other smart people disagree!)

[N.E. Brigand]

An intruder broke into the home of Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and attacked her 82 year old husband Paul Pelosi with a hammer, injuring him significantly. While no motive has been established, it is reported that the intruder was yelling "where is Nancy" before attacking her husband.

https://www.cnn.com/politics/live-news/ ... index.html

Oh, that is simply horrible.

Media outlets have now posted police video of the attack on Paul Pelosi. The actual attack happens very quickly.

Edited to add: It's sad but not very surprising to see that the video isn't convincing the conspiracy theorists.