Monday Reading

 

As always, please go to the links for the full articles/ op eds.

Fox "News" racist bombthrower Tucker Carlson (whose lawyers have argued no reasonable person would believe) also happens to be a gossipy leaker:

Mr. Carlson, a proud traitor to the elite political class, spends his time when he’s not denouncing the liberal media trading gossip with them. He’s the go-to guy for sometimes-unflattering stories about Donald J. Trump and for coverage of the internal politics of Fox News (not to mention stories about Mr. Carlson himself). I won’t talk here about any off-the-record conversations I may have had with him. But 16 other journalists (none from The Times; it would put my colleagues in a weird position if I asked them) told me on background that he has been, as three of them put it, “a great source.”

“In Trump’s Washington, Tucker Carlson is a primary supersecret source,” the media writer and Trump chronicler Michael Wolff writes in his forthcoming collection of essays, “Too Famous.” Mr. Wolff, who thanked Mr. Carlson in the acknowledgments of his 2018 book, “Fire and Fury,” explained, “I know this because I know what he has told me, and I can track his exquisite, too-good-not-to-be-true gossip through unsourced reports and as it often emerges into accepted wisdom.”

The art accompanying the article is pricelesss:

Heather Long writes about the post- pandemic emerging economy:

The U.S. economy is emerging from the coronavirus pandemic with considerable speed but markedly transformed, as businesses and consumers struggle to adapt to a new landscape with higher prices, fewer workers, new innovations and a range of inconveniences.

In late February 2020, the unemployment rate was 3.5 percent, inflation was tame, wages were rising and American companies were attempting to recover from a multiyear trade war.

The pandemic disrupted everything, damaging some parts of the economy much more than others. But a mass vaccination effort and the virus’s steady retreat this year has allowed many businesses and communities to reopen.

What Americans are encountering, though, is almost unrecognizable from just 16 months ago. Prices are up. Housing is scarce. It takes months longer than normal to get furniture, appliances and numerous parts delivered. And there is a great dislocation between millions of unemployed workers and millions of vacant jobs.

One of the more significant trends:

The high number of job openings has given Americans confidence to ask for higher pay and try out new fields, knowing they can likely fall back on restaurant or hospitality work if it doesn’t pan out. Workers are quitting their jobs at the highest rate ever recorded, and many Americans are launching start-ups they’ve wanted to do for years. New business applications jumped 24 percent in 2020, the biggest surge in history, and they remain at a much higher level then precrisis. These are signs that workers feel they have more power, a shift likely to endure.

Karen Tumulty looks at the recent decision by a group of bishops to draft guidelines for who can receive communion (hint: not if you believe in reproductive freedom):

... On Friday, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops — defying a warning from the Vatican — voted to create guidelines for receiving the sacrament of Holy Communion.

What is driving the move is a push by conservative bishops to declare that President Biden, who rarely misses Mass and is arguably the most religiously observant president since Jimmy Carter, should not be allowed to receive the Eucharist. It is also a reaction to the relatively liberal Pope Francis, who espouses a vision of making the church more inclusive.  [snip]

Catholics — and I am one — should be leery of those in the clergy who treat the Communion wafer as some kind of merit badge, rather than the spiritual sustenance that we were taught to believe it is. Francis himself said this month that Communion “is not the reward of saints, no, it is the bread of sinners. This is why [Jesus] exhorts us: ‘Do not be afraid! Take and eat.’”

They should also be suspicious of the political timing of this debate. The power to decree who is and isn’t eligible to receive Communion rests with the local bishop in each diocese, or the pope.

But if the 400-plus active and retired bishops who constitute the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops vote at their next meeting in November to declare that supporters of abortion rights should be denied Communion, their statement will no doubt become a cudgel against some Catholic politicians, mostly Democrats, in the elections of 2022 and beyond.

They seem determined to drive more people away ... good. 

The former guy/ Giant Toddler/ Dear Leader isn't going to like this:

Republican Florida Governor Ron DeSantis won over former President Donald Trump in a straw poll for 2024 presidential candidates conducted by the Western Conservative Summit, the poll's organizer reported Saturday.

DeSantis led the poll with 74 percent of voters saying they approved of him as a presidential candidate ahead of Trump's 71 percent. The poll was held online using the approval voting method, where voters selected multiple responses to each question.

COVID- enabler DeSantis may have to make a trip to Merde- o'- Lardo to kiss some ass soon.

We close by recommending a visit to Infidel 753's excellent link round- up for an impressive collection of interesting links to posts from around the Internet. You won't be disappointed.