The challenges ahead (Biden's America)

[N.E. Brigand]

The U.S. employment report for June is out with good news. Predictions had been that the report would find 265,000 jobs were added last month. The actual number was 372,000. Employment in the manufacturing sector has now returned to pre-pandemic levels. And the unemployment rate stays at 3.6%.

Even so, on TV today I saw reports saw this was a problem, because more people working might result in higher inflation.

The reports I saw were not on Fox News, but it's pretty impressive how Fox is spinning today's good news as bad (source):





So there are almost twice as many jobs available as there are unemployed employees to fill them?

Gosh, maybe the U.S. could use more immigrants!

[N.E. Brigand]

The world's second-wealthiest man got a lot of attention today after posting this image on the social media site he is in the process of buying:



In response, various commentators have noted other ways of looking at U.S. political positions:



[ ... More charts and analysis in my April post. ... ]

Elon Musk today informed the board of Twitter that he is withdrawing from the agreement by which he was to buy that company. Musk claims that Twitter is withholding information it was required to provide him. Twitter's CEO has replied to say they will fight in Delaware's Court of Chancery to force him to honor the deal. (If Musk pulls out without a valid reason, he owes Twitter something like $1 billion, I believe.)

Edit (July 12): Twitter now has filed a suit against Musk. The company is not asking to be awarded the $1 billion termination fee but for Musk to be forced to purchase the company (to "consummate the closing") at the $44 billion price to which he agreed.

The suit includes a word I've never heard before: tebibyte.

[RoseMorninStar]

Gosh, maybe the U.S. could use more immigrants!

I am not a business person or an analyst, but almost every place in our area has had 'help wanted' signs out for some time now. The post office sends emails looking for people, we get fliers in the mail about employment opportunities. Some businesses have closed due to lack of employees. When we went up North, some businesses were closed due to lack of help. They were begging retirees to fill in. Business in that area spikes in summer and they used to hire heavily from Eastern Europe; Czech republic, Poland, Ukraine, etc.. for seasonal help. COVID curbed some of that. The farmers are having trouble getting people to harvest. I don't claim to have answers, but restaurants, hospitality, and farming heavily relied on seasonal help usually coming from outside the US.

[River]

Yep. I know a couple people who've done that, actually. If you live in a poor country and save your money, a few months of no or low-skill seasonal work in the US can get you through the rest of the year in your home country. And the kids who do it on some flavor of J-visa also get a month to travel as part of the bargain. So if it's the end of the summer and you bump into a bunch of Central or Eastern European kids on an epic road trip, that's probably the back story.

I wonder, though, how much of the labor crunch is lack of immigrants and how much is people who either found new careers during the lock-down phase of the pandemic or were rendered dead or disabled by COVID.

[RoseMorninStar]

There were a lot of early retirements. Some people decided the (maybe) part time extra job wasn't worth the risk or that they preferred working from home or in a job with limited risk.

[N.E. Brigand]

Not sure where else to put this. Since 1982, the Siena College Research Institute has surveyed historians seven times (at irregular intervals) to poll their ranking of all U.S. presidents based on twenty categories (e.g., Integrity, Domestic Accomplishments, Relationship with Congress, Communication Ability). The results have been fairly stable over time (e.g., the top five have not changed, although the order within those five has). A new such poll has just been released. I bold the names of the five most recent presidents on the list:

1. Franklin D. Roosevelt (1933-45)
2. Abraham Lincoln (1861-65)
3. George Washington (1789-97)
4. Theodore Roosevelt (1901-09)
5. Thomas Jefferson (1801-09)
6. Dwight D. Eisenhower (1953-61)
7. Harry S. Truman (1945-53)
8. Lyndon B. Johnson (1963-69)
9. John F. Kennedy (1961-63)
10. James Madison (1809-17)
11. Barack Obama (2009-17)
12. James Monroe (1817-25)
13. Woodrow Wilson (1913-21)
14. Bill Clinton (1993-2001)
15. James K. Polk (1845-49)
16. John Adams (1797-1801)
17. John Quincy Adams (1825-29)
18. Ronald Reagan (1981-89)
19. Joe Biden (2021-)
20. George H.W. Bush (1989-93)
21. Ulysses S. Grant (1869-77)
22. William McKinley (1897-1901)
23. Andrew Jackson (1829-37)
24. Jimmy Carter (1977-81)
25. William H. Taft (1909-13)
26. Grover Cleveland (1885-89 & 1893-97)
27. James Garfield (1881-82)
28. Richard M. Nixon (1969-74)
29. Martin Van Buren (1837-41)
30. Gerald Ford (1974-77)
31. Rutherford B. Hayes (1877-81)
32. Calvin Coolidge (1923-29)
33. Chester A. Arthur (1882-85)
34. Benjamin Harrison (1889-1893)
35. George W. Bush (2001-09)
36. Zachary Taylor (1849-50)
37. Herbert Hoover (1929-33)
38. Millard Fillmore (1850-53)
39. John Tyler (1841-45)
40. William H. Harrison (1841)
41. Franklin Pierce (1853-57)
42. Warren G. Harding (1921-23)
43. Donald J. Trump (2017-21)
44. James Buchanan (1857-61)
45. Andrew Johnson (1865-69)

My apologies if some of the dates are incorrect; I added those from (possibly faulty) memory.

[Sunsilver]

Some of those are quite the surprise! I wouldn't have expected Johnson to be so high on the list, nor Clinton.
No surprise about Trump, though!

[N.E. Brigand]

Lots of Republican commentators pointed to Biden falling off his bike a few weeks ago as showing that he was too old to be President.

Is this Secret Service agent too old for his job?

[N.E. Brigand]

President Biden got to unveil the first full-color image from the Webb telescope:



Click here for a version you can zoom on.

Edit #1: NASA says: "This slice of the vast universe covers a patch of sky approximately the size of a grain of sand held at arm’s length by someone on the ground."

Edit #2: see also this short video which puts the image in context. Incredible. (And more images are due to be released tomorrow.)

[N.E. Brigand]

Here's video of a Fox News host suggesting that U.S. gas prices are falling too quickly for "small, independently-owned ... mom & pop gas stations" to manage their inventory: "it's a struggle for all of them."

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Here's an argument I can't possibly win, but I still think I'm right:

In a speech today, First Lady Jill Biden in a speech addressing members of UnidosUS (formerly La Raza) about its former president, Ambassador Raul Yzaguirre:

“Raul helped build this organization with the understanding that the diversity of this community—as distinct as the bodegas of the Bronx, as beautiful as the blossoms of Miami, and as unique as the breakfast tacos here in San Antonio—is your strength.”

Some journalists who picked up on the speech are reporting it in terms like this:

"FLOTUS, in her speech this afternoon, said the Hispanic community was as 'unique as the breakfast tacos' in San Antonio.'"

It's not a false quote, but I think it's misleading.

Following that, the National Association of Hispanic Journalists put out a statement:

NAHJ encourages @FLOTUS & her communications team to take time to better understand the complexities of our people & communities.

We are not tacos.

Our heritage as Latinos is shaped by various diasporas, cultures & food traditions.

Do not reduce us to stereotypes.

And NAHJ's president followed up with a tweet reading "1. We are NOT tacos! 2. San Antonio has THE BEST tacos and people, not the most unique."

I think NAHJ and its president didn't hear or read the whole quote. Because they didn't say "We are not bodegas" or "We are not blossoms." Are tacos more offensive than bodegas and blossoms? What would be a more acceptable metaphor? Or should you just not use metaphors to describe a people's diversity?

(I think the biggest problem with what Jill Biden said is her pronunciation of "bodegas.")

[RoseMorninStar]

(I heard) there was a guest on FOX news commenting on his recent visit to Monticello, Thomas Jefferson's ancestral home. Evidently he complained that the informational tour had 'gone woke' (implying that the tour information was something new) because the guide discussed Jefferson's views on slavery which (although he had owned about 600 slaves in his lifetime) he considered it a 'moral depravity' and a 'hideous blot'. Here is an article on this subject from the Monticello website which includes; he believed that slavery presented the greatest threat to the survival of the new American nation. 3 Jefferson also thought that slavery was contrary to the laws of nature, which decreed that everyone had a right to personal liberty. 4 These views were radical in a world where unfree labor was the norm. (etc..)

This tour has always contained this information and Jefferson's writings are obviously not new. What I'd like to point out (the purpose of my post) is that the term 'woke' is being used in a derogatory way intended to reprove and shame thinking that some feel is newfangled or foolish, which is often not the case at all. It is being used to disparage age-old ideas of equality, decency, and kindness. Those who use 'woke' as an epithet often do so as a cover term for the acceptance of bigotry. I can't recall which thread it was mentioned in, but we're still fighting the civil war.

[N.E. Brigand]

Here's an argument I can't possibly win, but I still think I'm right:

In a speech today, First Lady Jill Biden in a speech addressing members of UnidosUS (formerly La Raza) about its former president, Ambassador Raul Yzaguirre: “Raul helped build this organization with the understanding that the diversity of this community—as distinct as the bodegas of the Bronx, as beautiful as the blossoms of Miami, and as unique as the breakfast tacos here in San Antonio—is your strength.”
...

And NAHJ's president followed up with a tweet reading "1. We are NOT tacos! 2. San Antonio has THE BEST tacos and people, not the most unique."

I think NAHJ and its president didn't hear or read the whole quote. Because they didn't say "We are not bodegas" or "We are not blossoms." Are tacos more offensive than bodegas and blossoms? What would be a more acceptable metaphor? Or should you just not use metaphors to describe a people's diversity?

(I think the biggest problem with what Jill Biden said is her pronunciation of "bodegas.")

The First Lady has apologized. I completely understand why the White House, whether or not they agree with my take, would choose to move on. I did want to mention something I only belatedly noticed about that sentence (which was probably obvious to others): it's structured for alliteration -- bodegas, blossoms, breakfast tacos. Style probably got in the way of substance!

[N.E. Brigand]

Biden still has at least two years to make this 2020 prediction from the Trump campaign come true:

[N.E. Brigand]

Earlier this week, the publishers and top editors at several major media outlets met with the Dept. of Justice to push for better treatment of the press, in response to recent revelations about how DOJ had obtained subpoenas for reporters' records in the course of leak investigations (investigations that may have been politically motivated). There were some calls this week among other journalists for those media bigwigs to use the meeting as an opportunity to demand that the Justice Dept. drop its charges against Julian Assange, on the grounds that he too is a journalist deserving the freedoms afforded by the First Amendment.

I agree that sometimes, perhaps even usually, the work that Assange has done is legitimate journalism of the same basic kind as the New York Times publication of the Pentagon Papers, which were illegally leaked to them by Daniel Ellsberg in 1971, and I am concerned that successful prosecution of some of the crimes that the U.S. initially charged Assange with could have a chilling effect on the free press. But as shown in this analysis, which helpfully quotes from the relevant paragraphs of the decision a few months ago by District Judge Vanessa Baraitser in the U.K. (which denied the U.S. extradition request on compassionate grounds: the judge ruled that U.S. prison conditions are too harsh for a person in Assange's mental condition), Assange's actions went beyond just receiving and publishing materials. He provided potential hackers with instructions and tools. That would be like the Times in 1971 giving Ellsberg a stolen key to the file cabinet where the Pentagon Papers were stored, or the Times surveilling the office where the cabinet was located and telling Ellsberg that the night watchman took a coffee break away from his post each evening at 10:30 p.m.

Because it may become relevant to Julian Assange's case (it's nearly a certainty now that he will be extradited to the U.S.), I'm noting this new AP story here:

Ex-CIA engineer convicted in massive theft of secret info

The defendant, Joshua Schulte, is apparently a brilliant engineer who now has been convicted of stealing documents in 2016 and sharing them with Wikileaks, which dubbed them "Vault 7" when they were released in 2017. These documents reveal the tools (some developed in part by Schulte himself) that the CIA uses to hack phones, and the release thus severely undermined the CIA's information-gathering ability. Schulte was arrested in 2017. (It's possible that Donald Trump, either accidentally or in a fit of pique about the idea that Barack Obama tapped his phones, tipped Schulte off via comments made in an interview with Tucker Carlson.) Over the next three years, he apparently continued to leak information from jail that he had obtained from the government through the legal discovery process (that accounts for two of the charges he was just convicted of today). He first was tried in 2020, but the jury hung on most charges, voting to convict him only of making false statements and contempt of court. He chose to represent himself in the second trial -- and after the jury began deliberations, the judge said he did a creditable job of defending himself -- and he was convicted of all counts: eight counts of espionage and one count of obstruction. He will certainly appeal. (Schulte also faces yet another trial on an unrelated matter.)

Wikileaks claims to have another tranche of documents they call "Vault 8" in their possession, whose release (as Schulte himself has noted) would be just as problematic or worse for U.S. intelligence services, but they've never released those documents, and there is some suspicion that Wikileaks is trying to use that fact as leverage against the U.S. government, perhaps to reduce an eventual sentence should Assange be tried and convicted, but I don't know if that's anything but speculation.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

Manchin strikes again.

Manchin torpedoes Democrats' hopes for passing sweeping climate action and tax hikes

[N.E. Brigand]

Manchin strikes again.

Manchin torpedoes Democrats' hopes for passing sweeping climate action and tax hikes

Joe Manchin's behavior continues to be clownish -- e.g., after demanding that spending bills not include any temporary programs, his new demand is that ACA subsidies be extended for only two years* -- but Democrats have to work with him, so President Biden is quite right to tell the Senate to pass a bill tailored to fit Manchin's demands right away. As bad as it is compared with previous plans (already watered down to appease Manchin's stated goals), it's still better than nothing.

*Which means that the ACA subsidies, i.e., health coverage for millions of people, will expire just before the 2024 presidential election.

[RoseMorninStar]

This might be a case to keep an eye on: Held vs. State of Montana. I guess there are other states with such protections/provisions.

On March 13, 2020, 16 young Montanans filed their constitutional climate lawsuit against the state of Montana, asserting that, by supporting a fossil fuel-driven energy system, which is contributing to the climate crisis, Montana is violating their constitutional rights to a clean and healthful environment; to seek safety, health, and happiness; and to individual dignity and equal protection of the law. The youth plaintiffs also argue that the state’s fossil fuel energy system is degrading and depleting Montana’s constitutionally protected public trust resources, including the atmosphere, rivers and lakes, fish and wildlife.

[Eldy]

*Which means that the ACA subsidies, i.e., health coverage for millions of people, will expire just before the 2024 presidential election.

I really want to believe this would make a difference in voting behavior—not that an electoral advantage would be worth the human cost in stress and suffering for people who lose access to affordable health care, even temporarily—but the cynical part of me thinks people's minds are already made up based on their ideological leaning one way or another, regardless of whether they benefit from the subsidies or not.

[N.E. Brigand]

When Joe Biden announced his presidential candidacy in May 2019, he cited the events that took place in August 2017 in Charlottesville, Virginia. As you may recall, white supremacists protesting the removal of monuments to Confederate traitors marched with torches chanting "Jews will not replace us," and on the following day, one of their number deliberately drove through a counter-protest for racial justice, killing one person -- and then President Trump said there were "very fine people on both sides" of the protests. Biden said he was so appalled by that event and by Trump's apparent support of racist murderers that he felt called to run to replace him in the White House. (By the way, Wikipedia's article titled Joe Biden 2020 presidential campaign is maddeningly unhelpful.* It doesn't actually say when Biden officially announced his candidacy. I believe it was May 18, 2019 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.)

In 2021, the citizens of Virginia, despite having voted for the Democratic president in four straight elections, elected a Republican governor, Glenn Youngkin, who tried to present himself as a moderate. Some pundits feel his election was in part a backlash against the supposed teaching of Critical Race Theory in Virginia's schools, although the evidence for that (non-existent) action as voters' motivation is not clear. But I have to think those moderate voters who helped Youngkin win the governorship didn't intend for him to appoint to the state's Board of Historic resources someone who says this about Confederate monuments (many of which were erected in the 1950s-60s as a way of justifying Jim Crow): "The whole tragedy is that these statues were built to tell the true story of the American South to people 500 years from now." And what does she say that true story is? That the Confederacy fought for "the sovereignty of each state and constitutional law".

Remember, when people talk about "states' rights," they frequently mean the right to enslave African Americans. (That's what the Confederate states meant by the term.)

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*By contrast, Wikipedia's paragraph on the Biden's presidency in the Joe Biden entry is a pretty good first draft of history:

Biden and his running mate Kamala Harris defeated incumbent president Donald Trump and vice president Mike Pence in the 2020 presidential election. He is the oldest president and the first to have a female vice president. Biden proposed, lobbied for and signed into law the American Rescue Plan Act to help the United States recover from the COVID-19 pandemic and the resultant recession. He proposed the American Jobs Plan, aspects of which were incorporated into the bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, which was also signed into law. He nominated Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court. Biden proposed an expansion of the social safety net, but those efforts, along with voting rights legislation, failed in Congress. In foreign policy, Biden restored the U.S. into the Paris Agreement on climate change. He completed the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan, during which the Afghan government collapsed and the Taliban seized control of the country. He responded to Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022 by imposing sanctions on Russia and authorizing billions in foreign aid and weapons shipments to Ukraine.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

Biden has tested positive for Covid. Reportedly only mild symptoms.