Message Forum

Even if you do not have a description you can read the washington post's pulitzer prize winning investigation of the Jan 6 riot..

https://www.washingtonpost.com/pr/2022/05/09/pulitzer-prize-public-service/

05/10/22 11:25 AM

#11099

Mike,

Read it. I wonder if they (and the NYT) are going to return the Pulitzer they got in 2018 for the Russian Collusion stories.

Jim

05/10/22 12:57 PM

#11100

I'll have them alert you Jim. Don't stay up late waiting.

In the meantime just think how much better things would be going for Putin if Trump had landed a second term.

05/10/22 01:16 PM

#11101

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/as-crisis-grips-afghanistan-the-taliban-tightens-their-draconian-rule

I am thinking how much better things would be going for the Afghanistan women and children had Biden not been in the White House.

05/10/22 01:26 PM

#11102

Mike,

You are correct! Putin would not have dared to invade Ukraine and still have had the Moskva!

Jim

05/10/22 01:36 PM

#11103

Meanwhile:

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.

This is an era of great political division and dramatic cultural upheaval. Much more quietly, it has been a time of great financial reward for a large number of Americans.

For the 158 million who are employed, prospects haven’t been this bright since men landed on the moon. As many as half of those workers have retirement accounts that were fattened by a prolonged bull market in stocks. There are 83 million owner-occupied homes in the United States. At the rate they have been increasing in value, a lot of them are in effect a giant piggy bank that families live inside.

This boom does not get celebrated much. It was a slow-build phenomenon in a country where news is stale within hours. It has happened during a time of fascination with the schemes of the truly wealthy (see: Musk, Elon) and against a backdrop of increased inequality. If you were unable to buy a house because of spiraling prices, the soaring amount of homeowners’ equity is not a comfort.

The queasy stock market might be signaling that the boom is ending. A slowing economy, renewed inflation, high gas prices and rising interest rates could all undermine the gains achieved over the years. But for the moment, this flood of wealth is quietly redefining retirement, helping fuel Silicon Valley and stoking a boom in leisure and entertainment. It is boosting corporate profits by unprecedented amounts while also giving just about everyone the notion that a better job might be within reach.

More than 4.5 million workers voluntarily quit in March, the highest number since the government started keeping this statistic in 2000, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported last week. A few years ago, the monthly total was between three million and 3.5 million.

“Maybe it’s easier to focus on the negative, but a huge number of people, maybe 40 million households, have been doing pretty well,” said Dean Baker, an economist who was a co-founder of the liberal-leaning Center for Economic and Policy Research. “You’d have to go back to the late 1990s to find a similar era. Before that, the 1960s.”

This widespread wealth throws light on why the number of workers who say they expect to be working past their early 60s has fallen below 50 percent for the first time. It accounts for the abundance of $1 billion start-ups known as unicorns — more than 1,000 now, up from about 200 in 2015. It offers a reason for the rise in interest in unionizing companies from Amazon to Apple to Starbucks, as hourly workers seek to claim their share.

And it helps explain why Dwight and Denise Makinson just returned from a 12-day cruise through Germany.

“Our net worth has reached the millionaire level due to our investments, which was unfathomable when we were married 40 years ago,” said Mr. Makinson, 76, who is retired from the U.S. Forest Service.

The couple, who live in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, have company. There are 22 million U.S. millionaires, Credit Suisse estimates, up from fewer than 15 million in 2014.

The State of Jobs in the United States

The U.S. economy has regained more than 90 percent of the 22 million jobs lost at the height of pandemic in the spring of 2020.

April Jobs Report: U.S. employers added 428,000 jobs and the unemployment rate remained steady at 3.6 percent in the fourth month of 2022.
Trends: New government data showed record numbers of job openings and “quits” — a measurement of the amount of workers voluntarily leaving jobs — in March.
Job Market and Stocks: This year’s decline in stock prices follows a historical pattern: Hot labor markets and stocks often don’t mix well.
Unionization Efforts: Since the Great Recession, the college-educated have taken more frontline jobs at companies like Starbucks and Amazon. Now, they’re helping to unionize them.

“I used coupons to buy things. One of my daughters would say, ‘Mom, that’s so embarrassing,’” said Ms. Makinson, 66, a registered nurse. “But we believed in saving. Now she uses coupons, too.”

Image

Every economic transaction has several sides. No one thought home prices in 2000 were particularly cheap. But in the last six years, prices have risen by the total value of all housing in 2000, according to the Case-Schiller index. In many areas of the country, it has become practically impossible for renters to buy a house.

This is fracturing society. Even as the overall homeownership rate in 2020 rose to 65.5 percent, the rate for Black Americans has severely lagged. At 43.4 percent, it is lower than the 44.2 percent in 2010. The rate for Hispanics is only marginally better.

That disparity might account for the muted sense of achievement.

“It’s a time of prosperity, a time of abundance, and yet it doesn’t seem that way,” said Andy Walden, vice president of enterprise research at Black Knight, which analyzes financial data.

Shawn and Stephanie McCauley said the value of their house 20 miles north of Seattle had shot up 50 percent since they bought it a few years ago, a jump that was typical of the market.

“We are very fortunate right now given the situation for many others during the pandemic,” said Mr. McCauley, 36, who works for a data orchestration company. “Somehow we are doing even better financially, and it feels a bit awkward.”

Even for those doing well, the economy feels precarious. The University of Michigan’s venerable Index of Consumer Sentiment fell in March to the same levels as 1979, when the inflation rate was a painful 11 percent, before rising in April.

Politicians are mostly quiet about the boom.

“Republicans are not anxious to give President Biden credit for anything,” said Mr. Baker, the economist. “The Democrats could boast about how many people have gotten jobs, and the strong wage growth at the bottom, but they seem reluctant to do this, knowing that many people are being hit by inflation.”

The initial coronavirus outbreak ended the longest U.S. economic expansion in modern history after 128 months. A dramatic downturn began. The federal government stepped in, generously spreading cash around. Spending habits shifted as people stayed home. The recession ended after two months, and the boom resumed.

Jerome H. Powell, the Federal Reserve chair, recently warned that there were too many employers chasing too few workers, saying the labor market was “tight to an unhealthy level.” But for workers, it’s gratifying to have the upper hand in looking for a new position or career.

“Both my husband and I have been able to make job changes that have doubled our income from five years ago,” said Lindsay Bernhagen, 39, who lives in Stevens Point, Wis., and works for a start-up. “It feels like it has mostly been dumb luck.”

A decade ago, the housing market was in chaos. Between 2007 and 2015, more than seven million homes were lost to foreclosure, according to Black Knight. Some of these were speculative purchases or second homes, but many were primary residences. Egged on by lenders, people lived in houses they could not easily afford.

Now the reverse is true. People own much more of their homes than they used to, while the banks own less. That acts as a shield against foreclosures, which in 2019 were only 144,000, according to Black Knight. (During the pandemic, foreclosures mostly ceased due to moratoriums.)

The equity available to homeowners reached nearly $10 trillion at the end of 2021, double what it was at the height of the 2006 bubble, according to Black Knight. For the average American mortgage holder, that amounts to $185,000 before hitting loan-to-value tripwires. The figure is up $48,000 in a year — about what the average American family earns annually, according to some estimates.

Even very new homeowners feel an economic boost.

“We never had enough for a down payment, but then in summer of 2020, we got a good tax return, a stimulus check and had a little money in the bank,” said Magaly Pena, 41, an architect for the federal government. She and her husband bought a townhouse in the Miami suburb of Homestead.

Ms. Pena, a first-generation immigrant from Nicaragua, likes to check out the estimated value of her house and her neighbors on the real estate website Redfin. “Sometimes I’ll check it every day for three days,” she said. “It’s been crazy — everything has skyrocketed.”

In 2006, homeowners cashed in their equity. Sometimes they used the money to double down on another house or two. In 2022, there’s little sense of excess. One reason is that lenders and the culture in general are no longer so encouraging about that sort of refinancing. But owners are also more cautious.

Brian Carter, an epidemiologist in Atlanta, said he and his wife, Desiree, had about $250,000 in equity in their home but didn’t plan to draw on it.

“I was 27 in 2007 and watched a lot of people lose their houses because they couldn’t leave their equity alone,” he said. “That included my next-door neighbor and the family across the street. I don’t want to worry.”

05/10/22 06:23 PM

#11104

Jim,

Please spare us.

It was Donald Trump who denied acess to nuclear weapons for Ukraine. So he could save his buddy Manafort's deals with all his oligark buddies. It was Ted Cruz (not my favorite either) who wrote it into Trump's campaign platform that they would let Ukraine have nukes. But Trunp let Manafort talk him into removing that from the platform.

05/10/22 07:48 PM

#11105

Since we got into this - which was, let's face it, inevitable - I want to post an essay that touches on a part of the issue that I've always wondered about - which is the practical side. But "practical" doesn't do it justice. Maybe "humane" is a better word. Or "spiritually and emotionally challenging." Or "humanistic."

Ok I'll shut up now.

By Matthew Walther

Mr. Walther is the editor of The Lamp, a Catholic literary journal.

For years I have noticed a persistent inclination among my fellow opponents of abortion. Perhaps without meaning to do so, they downplay the possibility that the end of legal abortion will entail anything except the eradication of a great evil.

The post-abortion world they seem to envision outwardly resembles the one that we already inhabit, with its familiar social and economic structures intact. They are reluctant to consider that they themselves might have benefited from what those on the other side of the issue would hail as the societywide benefits of decades of legal abortion — allowing more women to engage in wage labor, for example, or all but eliminating the social pressures that once led to shotgun marriages.

This has always seemed to me a great failure of imagination. That failure must now be rectified. With the appearance last week of a draft of what seems to be the forthcoming majority opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, a decision that would overturn Roe v. Wade, Americans are being invited to consider what it would mean to live in a country in which abortion, though not illegal everywhere, is likely to be banned or heavily restricted in as many as 28 states.

For opponents of abortion, it is worth asking what might follow from overturning Roe — apart from the joyful fact of hundreds of thousands of additional babies being born — and how we should reckon with the arrival of any apparently unwelcome social or economic consequences.

American society as we know it today came into being during the 1970s, in the wake of Roe, amid rising crime rates, stagflation and the dismantling of the Fordist economic consensus in favor of deregulation and the breakup of stable, quasi-nationalized monopolies. It is not possible to conceive of our present way of life — the decline of heavy and textile manufacturing and the rise of the service economy, financialization, the collapse of traditional familial and other social structures, the subsuming of virtually every facet of our existence into digital technologies — in the absence of the estimated 63 million abortions that have been performed in America since 1973.

Exactly how abortion has affected the evolution of American society is a matter of some debate. Consider the economic implications. Twenty years ago, John D. Mueller argued in the pages of Family Policy, a conservative journal, that Roe was “perhaps the single largest American economic event of the past century, more significant than the Great Depression or the Second World War.” By reducing the size of the American population, he argued, abortion threatened both economic growth and innovation. Legal abortion, he said, had led to a reduction in living standards and trillions of dollars in lost net output.

In the years since the publication of Mr. Mueller’s essay, countless economists and social scientists have argued the opposite: that legal abortion is not only compatible with but also necessary for sustained economic growth. Among other things, reduced access to abortion is correlated with lower rates of labor force participation, reduced wages and increased job turnover.

If the actions of major corporations in states such as Texas, which recently banned abortion after about six weeks of pregnancy, are any indication, America’s business establishment agrees. The boards of corporations like Citigroup, with a fiduciary duty to their shareholders, have announced that they will subsidize travel for employees who seek out-of-state abortions.

Opponents of abortion should consider the possibility that these corporations are correct in their apparent assumption that abortion contributes to the maximization of shareholder value. Are we prepared to accept the converse proposition, to invite a reduction in shareholder value by banning abortion?

The scope of the problem is far broader than economics. Research over the years has suggested that an America without abortion would mean more single mothers and more births to teenage mothers, increased strain on Medicaid and other welfare programs, higher crime rates, a less dynamic and flexible work force, an uptick in carbon emissions, lower student test scores and goodness knows what else. If you sincerely believe, as I do, that every abortion means the deliberate killing of an innocent human being, is there some hypothetical threshold for negative growth, carbon dioxide levels or work force participation rates beyond which the protection of that life would be too burdensome?

For me, the answer is no. This is why, even though I find it unlikely that (for example) there is any meaningful causal relationship between access to abortion and academic performance, I believe that those who oppose abortion should not discount the possibility that its proscription will have consequences that some of us would otherwise regret. To insist, as opponents of abortion often have, that the economists John Donohue and Steven Levitt cannot be right about the correlation between Roe and the reduced incidence of crime two decades later strikes me as a tacit concession that if they were right, our position on abortion might have to be altered.

For the same reason, opponents of abortion should commit ourselves to the most generous and humane provisions for mothers and children (paid family leave, generous child benefits, direct income subsidies for stay-at-home mothers, single-payer health care) without being Pollyannaish. No matter what we do, in a post-Roe world many children who would not otherwise have been born will live lives of utter misery, and many of our fellow Americans will be indifferent to their plight. If we wish to dispel the noxious argument that only happy lives are worth saving, we will have to be honest about the limits of social policy and private charity in regulating the turbid ebb and flow of human misery.

In a letter written to a friend in 1959, Flannery O’Connor lamented that some members of the clergy, when arguing in favor of Catholic teaching on procreation, felt the need to assuage concerns about overpopulation. “I wish various fathers would quit trying to defend it by saying that the world can support 40 billion,” she wrote. “I will rejoice in the day when they say: This is right, whether we all rot on top of each other or not, dear children, as we certainly may.”

While the neo-Malthusian fears that animated many observers in the second half of the 20th century appear now to have been ill founded, one should see the wisdom in O’Connor’s blithe acknowledgment that things might have turned out otherwise. What is right is very rarely what is convenient.

05/10/22 10:08 PM

#11106

Dave M.,

Of course, no one can accurately predict what might have happened with Russia and the Ukraine if circumstances were different. The one thing that we do know is that the Russian invasion happened on President Biden's watch. If Ukraine had gotten nukes would they have used them? That would have been interesting. Or would the presence of them have prevented the invasion? If Biden had given conventional weapons to the Ukrainians would that have made a difference?.

It is all theoretical for a very complex, dangerous and disastrous situation that is causing so much destruction, death and human suffering.

Blame whomever you want but I would blame Putin.

Over and out,

Jim

05/11/22 12:35 AM

#11107

https://www.npr.org/2019/04/30/718883130/mueller-complained-that-barr-summary-of-trump-russia-probe-lacked-context

Some food for thought:
Question: Is ending the life of a pre-born child moral? Does the pre-born child have any intrinsic rights? Is it a scientific fact that the pre-born child is a human life? On what moral grounds does a mother alone decide the worth of her pre-born child under any circumstance, for any reason & at any time in her pregnancy? Does not society decide that the very second a child is delivered from the womb that life is protected from harm? What makes the child's life more valuable outside the womb vs inside the womb? Is the pre-born child not a separate body from the mother's? Would it be moral to abort a child in the womb solely because it is a female and the mother prefers boys? Is it moral to abort a pre-born child determined to have Down's Syndrome, or cerebral palsy, or missing a hand, or has a missing or an extra chromosome?

If we don't begin to debate these important questions to seek out the truth, society will never find common ground on this issue.

05/11/22 11:55 AM

#11108

John Jackson

Jim, are you really serious when you say “The one thing that we do know is that the Russian invasion happened on President Biden's watch”. Using this dubious logic, isn’t Trump responsible for the emergence of the coronavirus – didn’t that happen on his watch?

Trump spent his four years in office cozying up to dictators (remember his touching exchange of “love letters” with Kim Jong Un) and undermining our relationships with democracies around the world. He seemed to take particular delight with sticking his finger in the eyes of our NATO allies.

The exact timing Putin chose for the invasion is known only to Putin – maybe he bided his time hoping Trump would be re-elected and would pull the U.S out of NATO - which Trump had threatened to do in his first term and which John Bolton said was his plan during a second term.

Trump wouldn’t have lifted a finger to oppose this invasion by a man he obviously admires. And, unlike Biden, Trump would never have wanted or been able to orchestrate the coordinated response of the U.S and its NATO allies which has proven so crucial to the Ukrainians' ability to defend themselves.

And, Jim, I know it's a staple of right wing media that there was no collusion, but there is no doubt that Trump got serious support for his 2016 campaign from the Russians, so no need for the Washington Post to return their Pulitzers. And many of the stories they (and other responsible media outlets) ran were corroborated in the Mueller report.

But collusion in the legal/indictable sense has a very narrow and technical meaning (it requires evidence of extensive planning and advance coordination between the colluders) and the ever-cautious Mr. Mueller was not quite willing to go there (even though most of his top deputies thought that the standards had been met). And Mueller has said his decision was affected by a Justice Department ruling that holds that a sitting President cannot be indicted.

Mueller himself took issue with Attorney General Barr’s contention that the Mueller report exonerated Trump of collusion or obstruction of justice charges.

By the common, everyday understanding that most people have of the meaning of the word "collusion", Trump colluded.

05/12/22 10:41 AM

#11109

If I may just add: which is why the Washington Post isn't giving back its Pulitzer.

05/12/22 04:35 PM

#11110

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/04/2015-pulitzer-prizes-jack-shafer-column-117151/

Perhaps giving back the Pulitzer could be considered a badge of honor.

05/12/22 07:50 PM

#11111

MM,

Awards are nice and I am sure some Pulitzers are well deserved. What bothers me the most is that many awards are being issued for mediocrity and we are raising generations of children who are being rewarded for such. A good example is so called "participation trophies".

But such "honors" are not just limited to the young. I occasionally enter photo contests but have stopped doing so for those that have ridiculous rules. One such contest has a voting by any viewers for their favorite pictures. Sounds reasonable to me except that any individual may vote for the same image daily as long as the voting lasts, usually a month or longer.

We are, as a country, not just promoting but celebrating mediocrity.

Any other thoughts on this?

Jim

05/12/22 11:46 PM

#11112

Joseph D. McCarthy

Larry and Mike this one is for both of you. Do you remember that before Google, Twitter, Bing and all the rest of the Metaverse we used Prehistoric Googling. And it worked damn well,, with very little slow downs or service interruptions.

05/13/22 03:33 PM

#11113

John Maxwell

Dre Jim,
How about the whole concept of awards? What seems to be implied by such things is people need reinforcement of excellence by "expert" peerage. All it does is single out an individual person or group as the "best". Meanwhile all others are considered "losers". To me it's a bunch of hooey. But I have seen award shows and pagents, athletic contests, etc. So, is the real question why do they exist. Most athletic contests are based on elimination. But there can only be one winner. If for some reason society changes its mind about this absurd concept and just appreciate the skill, intelligence, uniqueness of the individual and anything else that appeals. Then I suppose there would be socialistic outcry by those who feel cheated that their desire of a super person to admire would disappear leaving them sad and cull of dispair. Besides awards are just used to make more money. More money for advertisers, TV execs, CEO's and all that can profit. That really enhances the BS factors and creates the most prestigeous award ever, The Intergalactic Award.

05/14/22 11:50 PM

#11114

Joseph D. McCarthy

An editoriol from todays Wall Street Journal that I found very interesting.

05/16/22 01:17 PM

#11115

Thank God for the voices of Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger. Kinzinger's "replacement theory" sounds like a winner to me.

The deafening silence you hear is the rest of the Repubilican Party. They are probably busy working on their next speech about defending the 2nd Amendment - or some plan to cut down on the number of voting machines in the South. Why don't they just legalize "fully automatic" weapons. I mean, why limit it to just "semi-automtic" weapons?

Meanwhile the "Left" is marching to defend the "right" for us to toss a few more thousands of babies into plastic trash cans.

In the immortal words of Yakov Smirnoff - "What a country!"

(new video shows there is at least one "Lyft" driver out there with some balls and a conscience)

05/16/22 01:36 PM

#11116

05/17/22 12:14 PM

#11117

https://twitter.com/i/status/1526336405663776768

"Because conservatives tolerate leftist speech and leftist won't tolerate the right, Twitter opts to censor the right as 'balance'". -Twitter employee

05/17/22 01:26 PM

#11118

Just seeing "conservatives" and "tolerance" in the same sentence makes me think there's been a misprint.

Whereas, if you go by the dictionary:

lib·er·al

/ˈlib(ə)rəl/

See definitions in:

All

Politics

Theology

Education

adjective

1.

willing to respect or accept behavior or opinions different from one's own; open to new ideas.
2.

relating to or denoting a political and social philosophy that promotes individual rights, civil liberties, democracy, and free enterprise.

Meanwhile more from my idol Garrison Keillor, this being the beginning of his new book:

Chapter 1:
I flew back home to Minnesota for my best friend’s funeral last spring over the objections of my wife who was leery of COVID, which was raging in Minnesota thanks to anti-vaxxers, many of them devout Christians like my cousins who put up “Prepare to meet thy God” signs along the road and who believed the virus meant a quicker trip to glory but Norm went down from cardiac arrest in his driveway, an easy death. He wanted to go in his sleep, but anyway it was quick. He was a big person in my life and so was his sister Arlene and to skip the funeral out of fear of infection seemed to me unworthy and a denial of reality even worse than the evangelicals’ resistance to medical science so I boarded Delta at Terminal D at LaGuardia and returned to my origins. He died on May Day and it was a shock but not a surprise: Norm always said, when asked how he was, “Never better,” but in March he switched to “Okay” and a few weeks later to “Not bad,” a rather steep decline.

I rented a car at the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport and drove north to Lake Wobegon and noticed, nearing town, that the “Prepare to meet thy God” sign was gone. I stopped and got out of the car. It lay in tall weeds by a barbed-wire fence. Someone had shot it with a shotgun and the Pre was gone and the stake was busted. I left it lying there but the phrase “Pare to meet thy God” stuck with me. Cut back on excess, trim the nonessential. A good motto for a man nearing 80. Set aside ego and the craving for widespread approval, ditch your bag of stupid regrets, abandon pleasures no longer pleasurable, love your neighbor, and you will find yourself in God’s presence. My cousin Rose, who was named not for the flower but for the Resurrection, sends me a birthday card every year: God is moving the waters. He is bringing this dispensation to a close. We may not be here tomorrow. I pray you are waiting on Him. It’s sweet. To think of someone waiting decades for Rapturization. I do appreciate her interest in me.

I called Giselle in New York and left a message that I love her and drove into town and noticed the ruins of the EZFreeze. Not much happened in the town of my youth and when something did, my dad would say, “It was the biggest thing since they got the bug zapper at the EZFreeze.” The zapper was a big neon ring under the eave that electro- cuted mosquitos. Now it’s gone, the symbol of progress.

So is the Lake Wobegon Maternity Hospital, the big white house where I was born in the summer of 1942, which caused no stir at the time nor does the fact that I’m still living. I am here as a result of good luck. As a kid, I stood on the front seat of the car, no seat belt, as Dad drove 80 mph on a two-lane road to get to Bible camp in the Badlands of South Dakota, driving at top speed so we wouldn’t need to stop at a motel. I survived it and also the preaching, which was all about imminent death, ships sinking, car crashes, furnaces blowing up, storms with lightning. We fundamentalists were grim, like people living in a coal mine, but if I looked grim, my cheerful mother would say, “What’s the matter? Did the dog pee on your cinnamon toast?” and that made me smile, and it still does, imagining a dog going to the trouble of getting up on the table to do that. Wobegonians were cheerful stoics and if you asked “How are you?” they said “Fine” unless they were lying on the ground and there was external bleeding. Lighten up. Life is good. It could be worse. Don’t feel sorry for yourself. Winter is not a personal experience: everybody else is just as cold as you are. Take it one day at a time. Make something of yourself. Don’t be a ten-dollar haircut on a 59-cent head. Find out what you’re good at and do it. That was our way.

05/17/22 03:40 PM

#11119

Mike.....liberalism is not what is being espoused in the current politically correct culture.

05/17/22 09:48 PM

#11120