As always, please go to the links for the full articles/ op eds.
ICYMI, Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell was on "60 Minutes" last night and had this to say about economic growth and employment over the coming year:
Scott Pelley: What are your projections for growth and employment?
Jerome Powell: If you look at what private sector forecasters are saying or what forecasters who sit around this table who are on the Federal Open Market Committee, our rate setting committee, what they're forecasting is growth for this year in the range of 6% or 7%, which would be the highest level in, you know, 30 years. Or even maybe a little bit higher. And forecasting unemployment to move down substantially from 6%, where it is now, maybe to between 4% and 5%.
Scott Pelley: It seems like you're not expecting a recovery, you're expecting a boom.
Jerome Powell: Well, I would say that this growth that we're expecting in the second half of this year is going to be very strong.
If the Biden infrastructure bill is passed this year, this growth could be sustained for years.
E.J. Dionne, Jr., has a rebuttal to the argument against adding justices to the Supreme Court made by Justice Stephen Breyer, the Court's answer to Joe Manchin:
If I believed that today’s judicial conservatives shared Breyer’s inclination toward compromise and restraint, I might agree with his warnings last week against the movement to enlarge the Supreme Court.
Unfortunately, most right-wing judges are not who Breyer wants them to be, and the court on which he serves is not as apolitical as he wishes it were.
The Supreme Court faces a legitimacy crisis not because progressives are complaining but because of what they are complaining about: a reckless, right-wing, anti-democratic court majority, and a conservative court-packing campaign marked by the disgraceful Republican blockade against President Barack Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland in 2016 and the unseemly rush to confirm Justice Amy Coney Barrett just before President Donald Trump’s defeat last November. [snip]
In my ideal world, we would not have to worry about a thoughtful justice such as Breyer spending the rest of his days on the court. But that world no longer exists.
This is why many liberals are calling on the 82-year-old justice to resign. They want a Democratic president, backed by a Democratic Senate, to install his replacement. After Garland, only a fool (something Breyer certainly is not) would believe that a Republican Senate would give a Democratic president’s appointee, no matter how moderate or qualified, a hearing.
Breyer needs to be convinced to retire now, while Democrats hold a paper thin majority, but one that's dependent on several octogenarians staying alive for the next 2 years.
The more his political career is in danger, the more Bibi "Bomb Bomb" Netanyahu is willing to blow up the Middle East:
Iran blamed Israel on Monday for a sabotage attack on its underground Natanz nuclear facility that damaged its centrifuges, an assault that imperils ongoing talks over its tattered nuclear deal and brings a shadow war between the two countries into the light.
Israel has not claimed responsibility for the attack. It rarely does for operations carried out by its secret military units or its Mossad intelligence agency. However, Israeli media widely reported that the country had orchestrated a devastating cyberattack that caused a blackout at the nuclear facility. Meanwhile, a former Iranian official said the attack set off a fire.
The attack further strains relations between the U.S., which under President Joe Biden is now negotiating in Vienna to re-enter the nuclear accord, and Israel, whose Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed to stop the deal at all costs. Netanyahu met Monday with U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, whose arrival in Israel coincided with the first word of the attack.
Bomb Bomb is one of the most reckless, dangerous figures in the world right now, and he's putting his own survival ahead of that of the State of Israel.
Rep. Matt Gaetz, who's facing a federal investigation into sex trafficking allegations, was recently denied a meeting with Donald Trump at his Mar-a-Lago estate as the ex-President and his allies continue to distance themselves from the Florida congressman.
Two people familiar with the matter said Gaetz tried to schedule a visit with Trump after it was first revealed that he was being investigated, but the request was rejected by aides close to the former President, who have urged Trump not to stick his neck out to defend Gaetz. Harlan Hill, a spokesman for Gaetz, said the congressman did not request a meeting with Trump this week.
