Wednesday, September 11, 2024

Trump v Harris - Conditioning Americans for War With Russia

 The longer I live, the more I read, the more patiently I think, and the more anxiously I inquire, the less I seem to know...”

― John Adams, The Letters of John and Abigail Adams


Trump paid Stormy $130K to spank him, Kamala did it today for free:

Czechoslovak Ivana and Yugoslovak Melania

ABC fact-checked Trump more often than Harris for the same reason that the police arrested Al Capone more often than Amelia Earhar

Lawrence O’Donnell reacts to Taylor Swift’s Kamala Harris endorsement: “This is the most important celebrity endorsement that I ever seen. The timing on it is absolutely exquisite, the wording of it is flawless. For someone who’s never been impressed by a celebrity endorsement, this is perfect and powerful.”

Trump: “In Springfield (Ohio), they’re eating the dogs, the people that came in, they’re eating the cats. They’re eating, they’re eating the pets of the people that live there.”

False.


Vice President Kamala Harris shook the hand of former President Donald Trump at the beginning of their first presidential debate Sept. 10 in Philadelphia, but the friendly vibes soon faded as Trump and Harris sparred over topics including abortion and immigration.

The fiery debate was hosted by ABC News moderators David Muir and Linsey Davis, who sometimes interjected with fact-checks in response to the candidates’ answers.

Harris often directly addressed Trump while answering moderators’ questions, while Trump stared straight ahead. Harris attacked Trump’s criminal convictions in New York and other indictments after he spoke about crime during the Biden administration. Trump said that Biden secretly hated Harris.

Moments after the debate ended, singer Taylor Swift said on Instagram that she would be voting for Harris “because she fights for the rights and causes I believe need a warrior to champion them.”



Creepy South African Leon: Imagine being a guy who most people admired or at least saw in a positive light, having taken electric cars to mass market, and created a company that is at the forefront of space travel, and then deciding to blow it all away by buying Twitter, firing more than half of the staff, promoting fascists and nazis, making fun of Pelosi’s husband after his skull was broken by a maga attacker with a hammer, endorsing and brown-nosing Trump, disowning your own child, and then making disgusting, sexist, dumbass tweets like this, directed at one of the most influential musicians in the world. Literally just burning every shred of goodwill and admiration you once had (in exchange for praise from fascist, nazi, incel-types). That’s Elon Musk for you.





Electrocuted Birds Are Bursting Into Flames and Starting Wildfires Gizmodo


Conditioning Americans for War With Russia Ray McGovern, Consortium News

Cats like to play fetch like dogs. The game is rooted in both species’ hunting instincts PBS


The pet-brain effect: How cats and dogs can save you from cognitive decline BBC



Journalist Olivia Nuzzi punished by Bloomberg for article about Biden health cover up.

Journalist Olivia Nuzzi had the rollout of her new show killed by Bloomberg after she published an article on Joe Biden‘s declining condition, according to a bombshell report.

The New York Magazine reporter was the target of an online campaign after she wrote about efforts by Democrats to conceal Biden’s deteriorating condition in a July article titled, The Conspiracy of Silence to Protect Joe Biden.

Semafor reports that Bloomberg had planned a splashy rollout for Nuzzi’s show, Working Capital, but abruptly cancelled them after the article came out and some Democrats demanded her firing.

Nuzzi’s critics called a racist, sharing tweets from the Obama administration where Nuzzi mocked those who questioned whether the former president was really born in the US.

Nuzzi confirmed Semafor’s reporting, telling the outlet she was not surprised, but nevertheless disappointed by Bloomberg’s’ decision.

 

 As Ed Banfield observed, the flight to the suburbs pre-dated the car because people prefer cheaper housing and more space: “The first elevated steam railroads were in New York in the 1870s, and twenty years later every sizable city had an electric trolley system. Railroads and trolleys enabled more people to commute and to commute larger distances; the farther out they went, the cheaper the land was and the larger the lot sizes they could afford. One- and two-family houses became common. …The ‘flight to the suburbs’ is certainly nothing new.”

Urbanists are the minority who prefer to live in dense cities and need to stop making car infrastructure the main villain in their narrative.

Here is the link.


Of what value is democracy when those in power ignore it? Funding the Future


The future is not all bleak: Poynter president Neil Brown talks about a new report on the state of journalism

The OnPoynt report addresses trends -- and some reasons for optimism -- in audience, revenue, local news, trust, AI and more



Another zero lower bound prediction bites the dust

Popular New Keynesian macroeconomic models predict that cuts in various types of distortionary taxes are contractionary when monetary policy is constrained at the zero lower bound. We turn to a long span of history in the United Kingdom to test this hypothesis. Using a new long-run dataset of narrative-identified tax changes from 1918to 2020, we show that tax cuts are expansionary in both low interest rate environments and in more normal times. We also do not find evidence of a deflationary spiral in the response of inflation or real rates at the ZLB, suggesting a limited role for intertemporal substitution. We highlight a number of alternative mechanisms that can help rationalize our findings. Our results suggest that tax cuts may still be a useful tool to stimulate economic activity during periods when monetary policy is constrained.

That is from a recent paper by James Cloyne, Nicholas Dimsdale, and Patrick Hürtgen, forthcoming in the JPE.