It's okay to say that Biden is trash, but that we should still vote for him because he's better than Trump. That's a totally respectable position to take.
My argument is 23 straight months of positive job growth, coming out of the pandemic. My argument is steadily declining inflation.
Come on, man. You know better than this. The President just doesn't have enough control over macroeconomic stuff like this. Do you want to give Trump credit for rapid real wage growth and unemployment reaching the lowest level in 50 years?
But in this particular case, Biden actually deserves considerably less than no credit for these, because he really fished up spectacularly.
The credit for the quick recovery, which was already more than halfway complete by the time Biden took office, goes to the vaccine researchers and (ugh!) Trump administration for pushing to get it out so soon, not the Biden administration.
Then one of Biden's first major legislative "victories" was the ARP, a huge burst of deficit spending at a time when there was no macroeconomic justification for it, exacerbated by his unilateral decision---again, not even arguably justified by the economic circumstances---to extend the student loan payment pause until the Republicans forced him to end it 2 1/2 years later.
This huge burst of deficit spending at a time when the economy was already growing robustly and people still had plenty of pandemic savings to spend caused aggregate demand to increase at a rate far faster than real production could keep up, leading to rapidly rising inflation.
Yes, the fact that the Fed kept its foot on the gas didn't help, nor did temporary supply bottlenecks due to COVID and the Russian war, but Biden's reckless deficit spending really did make inflation worse, causing it to peak at 9% instead of perhaps 6%.
It's the Federal Reserve bringing inflation down, not the Biden Administration. Furthermore, because the Fed has to fight Biden's deficit spending, they've had to raise rates higher and longer, greatly increasing the interest on Federal debt, which is why we're on track for a $1.8 trillion deficit this year.
There's a national tax on capital gains income with a top rate of 23.8%, on top of corporate income taxes, on top of taxes paid on the labor income used to buy the stock, and with no allowance for inflation.
I get that leftists' sense of entitlement to other people's money cannot be sated, no matter how high the taxes, but would it kill you to be honest about the status quo?
In point of fact, both New Orleans and Baltimore have homicide rates roughly an order of magnitude above the national average. They have these reputations for a reason.
Yes, yes, the victims are mostly poor black people, and I understand that the consensus view is that black lives only matter when ended by police or white people, but I still think it would be good to get this under control. The fact that the shooters are mostly black doesn't mean that other black people deserve to have to live with that going on in their neighborhoods.
Portland, interestingly, has historically had a very low homicide rate, but after the Floyd riots it quadrupled, rising to nearly twice the national average. That was a policy choice.
Interestingly, the Bronx, despite its reputation, has had, at least until recently, a homicide rate only marginally higher than the national average.
And Gary Tan went on a public rant threatening death against the entire board of supervisors because how dare they not listen to him, a very rich person.
It was much worse than that. He quoted rap.
Looking up the story, it's clear that you've crammed at least three misrepresentations into that sentence, but I'm not really interested in going to the mat for a guy I've never heard of, so just...try to do better in the future.
The SFUSD had a noble goal to encourage more Black, Hispanic, and Low-income kids to take tougher math in high school.
As I allude to in my other comment, you can defend pretty much anything with "but they had noble goals!"
In reality, they made it harder for everyone to take advanced math classes in high school by holding back students who were clearly ready to go on to algebra in eighth grade. This was not an unforeseeable side effect of their plan. It was the plan.
Waiting until ninth grade to take algebra was already an option for any student who was not ready in eighth grade. It was the default! Taking away the option to take algebra in eighth grade only makes sense in light of their actual goal, which was to narrow racial academic achievement gaps by holding back the (disproportionately white and especially Asian) more advanced students, Harrison Bergeron style. Why? Because they had given up on getting black and Hispanic students algebra-ready by eighth grade at anything close to the same rate as white, let alone Asian, students. Maybe they're race realists!
I actually had this happen to me for reasons less related to ideology than to logistics. Sitting through a year of basic 8th-grade math after two years of algebra was awful, but it wasn't really anyone's fault. I too wish death on anyone who intentionally inflicts this on kids.
I don't agree with his methods, but you have to admire that Austrian gentleman's commitment to the noble goal of helping the German people recover from World War I.
Do you even read the stuff you link here, or are you just going off the headlines?
Miami-Dade School Board Member Steve Gallon said it all has to do with getting parental consent when individuals come on campus.
It sounds like the issue here is not black history, but outside presenters coming to class. It's hard to say for sure, because nobody in this story could be bothered to point out the actual law or rule that requires this.
Note that the district denies that parental permission is required for black history, which Florida's educational standards require be taught.
It's likely that at least some of these cases are intentional sabotage, with administrators who are opposed to these laws intentionally misinterpreting them in order to make them look bad. In other cases, they may be relying on misrepresentations of the laws that they got from the media and teachers' unions, who repeatedly told demonstrable lies about them.
I didn't say she was the median Democrat. I said she's not an extreme outlier. In the video she mentions partnering with Warren---who, let's not forget, had a great deal of establishment support from the media and academia---and Markey on this. Then there's that whole "Squad" clown car. The aptly-initialed CPC has 99 seats in the House, nearly half of House Democrats. In 2016, when he went head-to-head with Clinton, Sanders got 43% of the vote in the Democratic Primary.
How is this substantially more worthy of ridicule than, e.g., Biden b*tching at grocery chains for not lowering prices as inflation comes down (econ lesson: that's not how inflation works)?
There is very real risk of the Democratic Party being captured by its low-info left-wing populist wing, much as the Republican Party has been captured by its low-info right-wing populist wing.
In terms of getting actual legislation passed, even when they have a trifecta, the margin is generally so thin that the parties are constrained by their most moderate members, so the fact that Democrats haven't passed legislation doing something doesn't mean that there isn't substantial support for it among the base and/or elected members of Congress. Hypothetically, 80% of Congressional Democrats could be literal communists and 80% of Congressional Republicans literal fascists, and it wouldn't have much impact on legislative outcomes.
It's good that you feel inclined to roll your eyes at Pressley's antics, but I'm puzzled by your claim that this she's some kind of outlier. If you find this objectionable, a huge chunk of the Democratic Party has left you far behind.
I feel like there has to be more to this story, but I also think that if there was real meat to the claim of injuries, the Biden administration and media would be shouting it from the rooftops, and not just insinuating it.
Regardless of Constitutionality, the "just move" approach seems unworkable here, since DeSantis is currently the governor of Florida, and Trump is...not a team player. I can't see him moving just so DeSantis can be his running mate.
We went through this with Bush and Cheney in 2000; Cheney moved to Wyoming.
Like many things in the Constitution, the requirement that electors not vote for two candidates from their own states is woefully underspecified:
"The Electors shall meet in their respective states, and vote by ballot for two persons, of whom one at least shall not be an inhabitant of the same state with themselves."
It's not clear what "inhabitant" means, and notably there is no Constitutional requirement that an elector be an inhabitant of the state that appoints him, although some states do have such a requirement, e.g. Florida requires that electors be registered Florida voters.
As written, this clause has no real teeth, but presumably it wasn't just thrown in there just for kicks and giggles, so we're left to try to infer what exactly they meant. A good-faith interpretation of the Constitution should account for the fact that the framers didn't have nearly as much of a historical record of rules-lawyering to inform their drafting as we do; courts shouldn't allow the exploitation of clearly unintentional Constitutional loopholes. Contemporary commentary, or early case law, if any exists, might be illuminating.
There was a lawsuit about the Bush-Cheney issue in 2000, Jones v Bush, that I don't recall hearing about at the time. The federal appeals court ruled against the plaintiffs, and the Supreme Court declined to hear the appeal. Here's a paper arguing that while the reasoning behind the ruling was invalid because it rendered the inhabitancy requirement a nullity, it nevertheless reached the correct conclusion: Cheney's primary political affiliation was with Wyoming, as it was the only state in which he had ever been elected to political office.
This seems to me to get at the heart of the most likely intent of the inhabitancy requirement, although as noted in the paper, the reasoning can't easily be applied to those who have no history of holding political office, or, as in the unusual case of Trump, have only ever been elected to the Presidency. It's a long paper, and I'm egregiously oversimplifying, of course.
Few, if any, in either party can claim with a straight face to have upheld their oath to defend the Constitution, but it was the Roosevelt Democrats who started the tradition of acting with unveiled contempt for Constitutional limits on Congressional and Presidential power, and Democrats have continued to do so to this day, with your enthusiastic support.
You do not get to play the Constitution card, ever, so you need to wipe that shoot-eating grin off your face and sit your punk ass down.
East Palo Alto was the nation's "murder capital" in 1992, and only in 1992, which was an extreme outlier, per the chart in the article. It has historically had fairly high homicide rates, but other than a rough patch from 1988-1992, it was roughly what you'd expect given its demographics.
Even 3.6 murders per year (their average over the past 5 years) is not great with a population of 28k, giving 13 per 100k, about twice the national average over the same period. But certainly it's better than 30 per 100k (their average in the years after 1992), and much, much better than 80 or 170 per 100k. The huge drop from 1992 to 1993 probably had something to do with a gang war ending, possibly with a nudge from law enforcement, while the secular decline over the past 30 years is probably attributable to the city becoming much less black (from 40% down to 10%) and more Latino (currently up to 60%).
So in the mid 90s, East Palo Alto had a homicide rate typical for a city of its demographics at the time, and over the past 5 years, it has had a homicide rate typical for a city of its current demographics. The 0 for 2023 should be presumed a fluke for the time being. With a city that small, even with an above-average homicide rate, you're occasionally going to have years with 0 homicides. Assuming that East Palo Alto murders follow a Poisson distribution with a mean of 4 per year, there's about a 2% chance in any given year of 0 homicides. That's not all that likely, but not extremely unlikely, and if it hadn't happened we wouldn't be reading an article about East Palo Alto's homicide rate, so publication bias is at work.
I find the census stats a bit surprising. 40% of the population is foreign-born (mostly Hispanic, not Asian), only 71% of adults have at least a high school diploma, only 25% have at least a bachelor's degree, yet the median household income is $103k. It's not that Latinos can't do well, or that you can't succeed in America without a college degree, but the socio- and economic parts of "socioeconomic status" are diverging more than usual here. Maybe all the rich people in the other Palo Alto (median household income $214k, with smaller households) are driving up the cost of labor.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “Ivy League Bubbles: Dartmouth To Require Standardized Testing, Again”
The NYT is reporting that Yale has also realized the folly of its war on multiple-choice messengers.
On “Ponderings on Presidents’ Day”
It's okay to say that Biden is trash, but that we should still vote for him because he's better than Trump. That's a totally respectable position to take.
This is not.
"
Come on, man. You know better than this. The President just doesn't have enough control over macroeconomic stuff like this. Do you want to give Trump credit for rapid real wage growth and unemployment reaching the lowest level in 50 years?
But in this particular case, Biden actually deserves considerably less than no credit for these, because he really fished up spectacularly.
The credit for the quick recovery, which was already more than halfway complete by the time Biden took office, goes to the vaccine researchers and (ugh!) Trump administration for pushing to get it out so soon, not the Biden administration.
Then one of Biden's first major legislative "victories" was the ARP, a huge burst of deficit spending at a time when there was no macroeconomic justification for it, exacerbated by his unilateral decision---again, not even arguably justified by the economic circumstances---to extend the student loan payment pause until the Republicans forced him to end it 2 1/2 years later.
This huge burst of deficit spending at a time when the economy was already growing robustly and people still had plenty of pandemic savings to spend caused aggregate demand to increase at a rate far faster than real production could keep up, leading to rapidly rising inflation.
Yes, the fact that the Fed kept its foot on the gas didn't help, nor did temporary supply bottlenecks due to COVID and the Russian war, but Biden's reckless deficit spending really did make inflation worse, causing it to peak at 9% instead of perhaps 6%.
It's the Federal Reserve bringing inflation down, not the Biden Administration. Furthermore, because the Fed has to fight Biden's deficit spending, they've had to raise rates higher and longer, greatly increasing the interest on Federal debt, which is why we're on track for a $1.8 trillion deficit this year.
On “Open Mic for the week of 2/12/2024”
Chip reasons by vibes and argues by innuendo. Coherent arguments aren't really his style.
"
Or Jeffrey Epstein?
"
There's a national tax on capital gains income with a top rate of 23.8%, on top of corporate income taxes, on top of taxes paid on the labor income used to buy the stock, and with no allowance for inflation.
I get that leftists' sense of entitlement to other people's money cannot be sated, no matter how high the taxes, but would it kill you to be honest about the status quo?
"
In point of fact, both New Orleans and Baltimore have homicide rates roughly an order of magnitude above the national average. They have these reputations for a reason.
Yes, yes, the victims are mostly poor black people, and I understand that the consensus view is that black lives only matter when ended by police or white people, but I still think it would be good to get this under control. The fact that the shooters are mostly black doesn't mean that other black people deserve to have to live with that going on in their neighborhoods.
Portland, interestingly, has historically had a very low homicide rate, but after the Floyd riots it quadrupled, rising to nearly twice the national average. That was a policy choice.
Interestingly, the Bronx, despite its reputation, has had, at least until recently, a homicide rate only marginally higher than the national average.
On “The Big Game Sunday”
Let the record show that I was not watching the Super Bowl before it was a political thing.
On “Open Mic for the week of 1/29/2024”
It was much worse than that. He quoted rap.
Looking up the story, it's clear that you've crammed at least three misrepresentations into that sentence, but I'm not really interested in going to the mat for a guy I've never heard of, so just...try to do better in the future.
As I allude to in my other comment, you can defend pretty much anything with "but they had noble goals!"
In reality, they made it harder for everyone to take advanced math classes in high school by holding back students who were clearly ready to go on to algebra in eighth grade. This was not an unforeseeable side effect of their plan. It was the plan.
Waiting until ninth grade to take algebra was already an option for any student who was not ready in eighth grade. It was the default! Taking away the option to take algebra in eighth grade only makes sense in light of their actual goal, which was to narrow racial academic achievement gaps by holding back the (disproportionately white and especially Asian) more advanced students, Harrison Bergeron style. Why? Because they had given up on getting black and Hispanic students algebra-ready by eighth grade at anything close to the same rate as white, let alone Asian, students. Maybe they're race realists!
I actually had this happen to me for reasons less related to ideology than to logistics. Sitting through a year of basic 8th-grade math after two years of algebra was awful, but it wasn't really anyone's fault. I too wish death on anyone who intentionally inflicts this on kids.
"
I don't agree with his methods, but you have to admire that Austrian gentleman's commitment to the noble goal of helping the German people recover from World War I.
On “Don’t Whitewash Black History”
Do you even read the stuff you link here, or are you just going off the headlines?
It sounds like the issue here is not black history, but outside presenters coming to class. It's hard to say for sure, because nobody in this story could be bothered to point out the actual law or rule that requires this.
Note that the district denies that parental permission is required for black history, which Florida's educational standards require be taught.
https://socialsciences.dadeschools.net/#!/rightColumn/3107
It's likely that at least some of these cases are intentional sabotage, with administrators who are opposed to these laws intentionally misinterpreting them in order to make them look bad. In other cases, they may be relying on misrepresentations of the laws that they got from the media and teachers' unions, who repeatedly told demonstrable lies about them.
On “Open Mic for the week of 1/29/2024”
I didn't say she was the median Democrat. I said she's not an extreme outlier. In the video she mentions partnering with Warren---who, let's not forget, had a great deal of establishment support from the media and academia---and Markey on this. Then there's that whole "Squad" clown car. The aptly-initialed CPC has 99 seats in the House, nearly half of House Democrats. In 2016, when he went head-to-head with Clinton, Sanders got 43% of the vote in the Democratic Primary.
How is this substantially more worthy of ridicule than, e.g., Biden b*tching at grocery chains for not lowering prices as inflation comes down (econ lesson: that's not how inflation works)?
There is very real risk of the Democratic Party being captured by its low-info left-wing populist wing, much as the Republican Party has been captured by its low-info right-wing populist wing.
In terms of getting actual legislation passed, even when they have a trifecta, the margin is generally so thin that the parties are constrained by their most moderate members, so the fact that Democrats haven't passed legislation doing something doesn't mean that there isn't substantial support for it among the base and/or elected members of Congress. Hypothetically, 80% of Congressional Democrats could be literal communists and 80% of Congressional Republicans literal fascists, and it wouldn't have much impact on legislative outcomes.
"
Also worth noting that they're still doing dog-and-pronoun shows in class.
"
It's good that you feel inclined to roll your eyes at Pressley's antics, but I'm puzzled by your claim that this she's some kind of outlier. If you find this objectionable, a huge chunk of the Democratic Party has left you far behind.
"
New development in the evolution of rules regarding whether blocking people's movement is peaceful protest or a violent felony:
https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/6-activists-convicted-illegally-blocking-abortion-clinic-tennessee-106839905
I feel like there has to be more to this story, but I also think that if there was real meat to the claim of injuries, the Biden administration and media would be shouting it from the rooftops, and not just insinuating it.
"
Note that those majors haven't been eliminated under new management; it didn't have them in 2022 either.
https://web.archive.org/web/20220521055127/https://www.ncf.edu/programs/
"
Ayn Rand got a lot of things wrong, but her depiction of the left, as much as it feels like over-the-top caricature, was not one of them.
"
How many thousands of people have died needlessly because the Chicago City Council took this long to act?
On “MAGA versus Taylor Swift”
The statue of limitations on most of that has run out, but a grown man spelling "your" as "ur" is unforgivable.
On “DeSantis Drops Out”
Okay, that's enough fedposting for this thread.
"
Here's hoping!
"
Regardless of Constitutionality, the "just move" approach seems unworkable here, since DeSantis is currently the governor of Florida, and Trump is...not a team player. I can't see him moving just so DeSantis can be his running mate.
"
We went through this with Bush and Cheney in 2000; Cheney moved to Wyoming.
Like many things in the Constitution, the requirement that electors not vote for two candidates from their own states is woefully underspecified:
"The Electors shall meet in their respective states, and vote by ballot for two persons, of whom one at least shall not be an inhabitant of the same state with themselves."
It's not clear what "inhabitant" means, and notably there is no Constitutional requirement that an elector be an inhabitant of the state that appoints him, although some states do have such a requirement, e.g. Florida requires that electors be registered Florida voters.
As written, this clause has no real teeth, but presumably it wasn't just thrown in there just for kicks and giggles, so we're left to try to infer what exactly they meant. A good-faith interpretation of the Constitution should account for the fact that the framers didn't have nearly as much of a historical record of rules-lawyering to inform their drafting as we do; courts shouldn't allow the exploitation of clearly unintentional Constitutional loopholes. Contemporary commentary, or early case law, if any exists, might be illuminating.
There was a lawsuit about the Bush-Cheney issue in 2000, Jones v Bush, that I don't recall hearing about at the time. The federal appeals court ruled against the plaintiffs, and the Supreme Court declined to hear the appeal. Here's a paper arguing that while the reasoning behind the ruling was invalid because it rendered the inhabitancy requirement a nullity, it nevertheless reached the correct conclusion: Cheney's primary political affiliation was with Wyoming, as it was the only state in which he had ever been elected to political office.
https://digitalcommons.pace.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1225&context=plr
This seems to me to get at the heart of the most likely intent of the inhabitancy requirement, although as noted in the paper, the reasoning can't easily be applied to those who have no history of holding political office, or, as in the unusual case of Trump, have only ever been elected to the Presidency. It's a long paper, and I'm egregiously oversimplifying, of course.
"
Oh, hell no.
Few, if any, in either party can claim with a straight face to have upheld their oath to defend the Constitution, but it was the Roosevelt Democrats who started the tradition of acting with unveiled contempt for Constitutional limits on Congressional and Presidential power, and Democrats have continued to do so to this day, with your enthusiastic support.
You do not get to play the Constitution card, ever, so you need to wipe that shoot-eating grin off your face and sit your punk ass down.
On “Open Mic for the week of 1/8/2024”
East Palo Alto was the nation's "murder capital" in 1992, and only in 1992, which was an extreme outlier, per the chart in the article. It has historically had fairly high homicide rates, but other than a rough patch from 1988-1992, it was roughly what you'd expect given its demographics.
Even 3.6 murders per year (their average over the past 5 years) is not great with a population of 28k, giving 13 per 100k, about twice the national average over the same period. But certainly it's better than 30 per 100k (their average in the years after 1992), and much, much better than 80 or 170 per 100k. The huge drop from 1992 to 1993 probably had something to do with a gang war ending, possibly with a nudge from law enforcement, while the secular decline over the past 30 years is probably attributable to the city becoming much less black (from 40% down to 10%) and more Latino (currently up to 60%).
So in the mid 90s, East Palo Alto had a homicide rate typical for a city of its demographics at the time, and over the past 5 years, it has had a homicide rate typical for a city of its current demographics. The 0 for 2023 should be presumed a fluke for the time being. With a city that small, even with an above-average homicide rate, you're occasionally going to have years with 0 homicides. Assuming that East Palo Alto murders follow a Poisson distribution with a mean of 4 per year, there's about a 2% chance in any given year of 0 homicides. That's not all that likely, but not extremely unlikely, and if it hadn't happened we wouldn't be reading an article about East Palo Alto's homicide rate, so publication bias is at work.
I find the census stats a bit surprising. 40% of the population is foreign-born (mostly Hispanic, not Asian), only 71% of adults have at least a high school diploma, only 25% have at least a bachelor's degree, yet the median household income is $103k. It's not that Latinos can't do well, or that you can't succeed in America without a college degree, but the socio- and economic parts of "socioeconomic status" are diverging more than usual here. Maybe all the rich people in the other Palo Alto (median household income $214k, with smaller households) are driving up the cost of labor.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.