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Funny. But this remains my fave.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kx_G2a2hL6U

05/08/22 12:29 PM

#11090

Jim: When it comes to leaks, this one worried me far more that the other one we were talking about from the first moment I saw it.

Apparently this columnist agrees with me:

"Things are actually getting more dangerous by the day.

For starters, the longer this war goes on, the more opportunity for catastrophic miscalculations — and the raw material for that is piling up fast and furious. Take the two high-profile leaks from American officials this past week about U.S. involvement in the Russia-Ukraine war:

First, The Times disclosed that “the United States has provided intelligence about Russian units that has allowed Ukrainians to target and kill many of the Russian generals who have died in action in the Ukraine war, according to senior American officials.” Second, The Times, following a report by NBC News and citing U.S. officials, reported that America has “provided intelligence that helped Ukrainian forces locate and strike” the Moskva, the flagship of Russia’s Black Sea fleet. This targeting assistance “contributed to the eventual sinking” of the Moskva by two Ukrainian cruise missiles.

As a journalist, I love a good leak story, and the reporters who broke those stories did powerful digging. At the same time, from everything I have been able to glean from senior U.S. officials, who spoke to me on condition of anonymity, the leaks were not part of any thought-out strategy, and President Biden was livid about them. I’m told that he called the director of national intelligence, the director of the C.I.A. and the secretary of defense to make clear in the strongest and most colorful language that this kind of loose talk is reckless and has got to stop immediately — before we end up in an unintended war with Russia.

The staggering takeaway from these leaks is that they suggest we are no longer in an indirect war with Russia but rather edging toward a direct war — and no one has prepared the American people or Congress for that."

05/08/22 12:53 PM

#11091

Mike,

It probably is a sign of age but you are beginning to repeat yourself. Reference your posts #s 11086 and 11090!🙄

Jim

05/08/22 02:54 PM

#11092

05/08/22 02:59 PM

#11093

David Mitchell

Happy Mother's Day to all of you moms.

Lots of interesting stuff lately.

From Abortion to Ukraine and the Militay Leaks to Derby Winner 80 to 1 "Rich Strike". OMG! He came from 16th place on the final turn!

.. been wondering about those militay leaks myself lately - why on earth would we be disclosing any of our military information in public? Yikes? Didn't they get that memo in Security 101?

But it's Mothers Day and it's been a challenging week, so I'd rather enjoy a bit of rest.

Years ago, my kids were able to determine that my mental condition was quite out of balance as they observed me watching the likes of Second City TV (from Canada in the wee hours of Friday night/ Saturday morning), and this wonderfully wacky British show called Monty Python. (thanks to Mark and Mike for bringing them into the conversation).

But there was something from Brtish TV that pre-dated "Monty". I could only get it for about one or two seasons, but this one sketch still fills a memorable portion of my tiny and distorted brain cavity. A pair of guys who went by the name "The Two Ronnies" came close to being the cleverest pair of comedians I have ever seen.

05/08/22 10:19 PM

#11094

Jim:

Good diagnosis.

05/08/22 11:46 PM

#11095

In response to some of the comments made in post #11085..
https://twitter.com/kathy4truth/status/1521468253268320256?s=21&t=UsgA2SaSFYBYEJDS510cnQ

05/09/22 02:49 PM

#11096

If you'll pardon a humorous exchange on a deeply personal issue:

Gail Collins: Well, Bret, I have multitudinous thoughts, some of them philosophical and derived from my Catholic upbringing. Although I certainly don’t agree with it, I understand the philosophical conviction that life begins at conception.

Bret: As a Jew, I believe that life begins when the kids move out of the house.

05/09/22 10:35 PM

#11097

David Mitchell

More and more lately, I am comming to terms with the fact that I am aging. I am certain that my mental capacities are diminishing.

So, here's one that really has me baffled. Can someone please explain to me how Pope Francis can blame NATO for Russia's invasion of Ukraine?

I could have sworn those were Russian tanks we saw massed on the border for months, and later they were Russian tanks we saw entering into, and attacking Ukrainian civilians.

I guess as we get older we get more and more confused.

05/10/22 09:44 AM

#11098

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

David Mitchell

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