Today In Biden Land

[Kirkland Laing]

I can't understand how this guy working for this organisation would publish such a thing. He must be close to retirement and have his pension locked in.

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/ar...ans-better-not

The six hundred or so billion a year is actually a trillion dollars a year according to the guy currently running the IRS and this doesn't count all the tax being (legally) avoided. The trillion a year is illegal evasion.



Worth remembering as Republican start screaming about Biden spending. Even if all of Biden's three point five trillion in new spending gets passed it's over ten years and is only about one percent of the projected three hundred trillion in GDP in that period. Trump rang up five trillion in four years and not a peep from the GOP. Also, big difference between massive tax cuts for the top one percent and trillions invested in American infrastructure:

https://www.crfb.org/blogs/president...llion-debt-law

Trump spending is all pure debt and Biden's spending will be partly paid for, would be fully paid for if the GOP would agree to tax increases on top earners.



Jesus wept:

https://jabberwocking.com/finally-we...n-our-schools/



This is protected speech and the Biden administration is doing nothing about it. It's also getting thousands of people killed and giving tens of thousands of people long term serious illnesses:

https://twitter.com/BrendanNyhan/sta...46834955710468


Left wing media in action:

https://twitter.com/davenewworld_2/s...17445564047364



GDP:

https://twitter.com/jasonfurman/stat...32724474748928



More left wing media. British paper covers Trump family involvement in yet another con. Another settlement, admit no wrongdoing etc etc:

https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/world...edgdhp&pc=U531





Keep scrolling:

https://twitter.com/paulkrugman/stat...36112033665024





I haven't read this yet. Looks interesting though:

https://jabberwocking.com/the-secret...ng-america-is/




Finally this is not political but there's nowhere else to put it. It deserves some kind of award I think:

https://twitter.com/CHHNDLER/status/1419340550902272005

[palmerq]

Keep scrolling:

https://twitter.com/paulkrugman/stat...36112033665024

Good stuff in that short thread there...


I've been listening to krugman book at work(arguing with zombies) it seems to mostly be collections of his old blogs but I found one of the old articles amusing and slightly relevant to the Goings in this year..

https://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/20...d&login=google

The last paragraph of that post seems to work even 12 years later
......... Well I found it a bit funny anyway.

[TitoFan]

One good thing about Biden's subtle pot shots at "Former Guy" is that I personally find out about some of the hilarious things Former Guy did during his four years which I wasn't personally paying attention to.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/joe-b...b0048f3619d5a0

I guess I wasn't paying too much attention to all this "Infrastructure Week" car-crash hoopla back when it was happening, although it was duly reported by different news outlets.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/22/u...ture-week.html

Infrastructure week.....




Although I'm not a Biden fan... I do find some pleasure in any and all digs he manages to throw Former Guy's way. It's the least he can do.

[Kirkland Laing]

WASHINGTON — President Donald J. Trump pressed top Justice Department officials late last year to declare that the election was corrupt even though they had found no instances of widespread fraud, so he and his allies in Congress could use the assertion to try to overturn the results, according to new documents provided to lawmakers.
The demands were an extraordinary instance of a president interfering with an agency that is typically more independent from the White House to advance his personal agenda. They are also the latest example of Mr. Trump’s wide-ranging campaign during his final weeks in office to delegitimize the election results.
The exchange unfolded during a phone call on Dec. 27 in which Mr. Trump pressed the acting attorney general at the time, Jeffrey A. Rosen, and his deputy, Richard P. Donoghue, on voter fraud claims that the Justice Department had found no evidence for. Mr. Donoghue warned that the department had no power to change the outcome of the election. Mr. Trump replied that he did not expect that, according to notes Mr. Donoghue took memorializing the conversation.
“Just say that the election was corrupt + leave the rest to me” and to congressional allies, Mr. Donoghue wrote in summarizing Mr. Trump’s response.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/30/u...e=articleShare



https://twitter.com/davidfrum/status...00233700233217




https://twitter.com/TheAtlantic/stat...62460437925890




Bill Maher:

https://twitter.com/SteveSchmidtSES/...51192593735680






https://twitter.com/paulkrugman/stat...50658859913222

Keep scrolling with that one.








https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/ar...eat-depression

[Kirkland Laing]

That chart is per capita economic growth. Misleading for a ton of reasons. This is economic growth by president:




Much bigger version in the Bloomberg article.

[TIC]

why do they have the comments disabled on the youtube whitehouse channel?

[Kirkland Laing]

This is the guy Trump was going to appoint as AG when the AG wouldn't announce that the election was corrupt:

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/r...en-georgia-win




Ralph Neas has been involved in voting-rights battles since the nineteen-eighties, when, as a Republican, he served as the executive director of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights. He has overseen a study of the Arizona audit for the nonpartisan Century Foundation, and he told me that, though the audit is a “farce,” it may nonetheless have “extraordinary consequences.” He said, “The Maricopa County audit exposes exactly what the Big Lie is all about. If they come up with an analysis that discredits the 2020 election results in Arizona, it will be replicated in other states, furthering more chaos. That will enable new legislation. Millions of Americans could be disenfranchised, helping Donald Trump to be elected again in 2024. That’s the bottom line. Maricopa County is the prism through which to view everything. It’s not so much about 2020—it’s about 2022 and 2024. This is a coördinated national effort to distort not just what happened in 2020 but to regain the House of Representatives and the Presidency.”
Richard Hasen, a law professor at the University of California, Irvine, and one of the country’s foremost election-law experts, told me, “I’m scared shitless.” Referring to the array of new laws passed by Republican state legislatures since the 2020 election, he said, “It’s not just about voter suppression. What I’m really worried about is election subversion. Election officials are being put in place who will mess with the count.”

[...]


Gates says that Karen Fann, the Arizona Senate’s president, confided to him that she knew there was “nothing to” the fraud charges. (She didn’t respond to requests for comment.) Nevertheless, she buckled under the political pressure and authorized a subpoena of the county’s ballots, for the “forensic audit.” At one point, county supervisors were told that if they didn’t comply they would face contempt charges and, potentially, could be imprisoned. For a time, the official Twitter account for the audit accused the supervisors, without evidence, of “spoliation” of the ballots. “I get a little emotional when I talk about it,” Gates said. “My daughter called me, frantically trying to find out whether or not I was going to be thrown in jail.” Trump supporters set up a guillotine on a grassy plaza outside Arizona’s statehouse, demanding the supervisors’ heads. Inside, Gates recalled, one Republican member after another rose to denounce the county supervisors.


A representative for the national Republican Party tried to silence Gates when he spoke out to defend the integrity of Arizona’s election. He told me that Hoffman’s ally Tyler Bowyer, of the Republican National Committee, paid him a visit and warned, “You need to stop it.” According to Gates, Bowyer made it clear that “the Republican National Committee supports this audit.” Andrew Kolvet, a spokesman for Bowyer, denied that the visit was an official attempt at intimidation, calling it instead a “personal courtesy.”
Gates said that after he received death threats he fled with his family to an Airbnb. At one point, the sheriff sent two deputies to guard Gates’s home overnight. Trump supporters, Gates said, “are basically asking Republican leaders to bow before the altar of the Big Lie—‘You’re willing to do it? O.K., great. You’re not? You’re a RINO. You’re a Commie. You are not a Republican.’ It’s been incredibly effective, really, when you think about where we’ve come from January 6th.”

[..]

It would be tempting for Gates, a lifetime Republican with political ambitions, to blame only Trump for his party’s anti-democratic turn. But he has few such illusions. What’s really going on, he believes, is a reactionary backlash against Obama: “I’ve thought about it a lot. I believe the election of President Obama frightened a lot of Americans.” Gates argues that the fear isn’t entirely about race. He thinks it’s also about cosmopolitanism, secularism, and other contemporary values that make white conservatives uncomfortable. But in the end, he said, “the diversification of America is frightening to a lot of people in my party.”



https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2...al-type=earned