The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly

 

The good:

The U.S. economy added 187,000 jobs in July, signaling a healthy gain but a cool-down in the labor market, fueling optimism about the economy’s ability to avert a downturn this year.

The unemployment rate fell to 3.5 percent, according to a Bureau of Labor Statistics report released Friday, near 50-year lows.

Combined with June’s downward revised jobs gain of 185,000, the past two months have marked the weakest level of job growth since December 2020, but the jobs numbers are still considered solid. May’s job gains also were revised downward notably in Friday’s report. That added to growing evidence that the labor market has softened in response to the Federal Reserve’s efforts to slow down the economy with more than a year’s worth of interest rate hikes.

The combination of continued solid job growth along with a marked easing of inflation, which was 3 percent in June, has pushed aside fears of a recession anytime soon.

What people "feel" about the economy and what the macro signs are indicating haven't been in sync for some time.  Work harder, Democrats;  think harder, voters.

The bad:

In an interview released on Thursday, John Eastman restated that he’s an unreconstructed believer that the 2020 election was stolen by the left.

Chairman of the Claremont Institute’s Board of Directors Tom Klingenstein conducted the interview, which was released in three parts, the last of which was published on Thursday.

Klingenstein asked Eastman whether he would have acted in the same way in 1960 as he did in 2020, referencing the belief on the right that John F. Kennedy stole that year’s election from Richard Nixon.

Eastman replied no, and added that the stakes of 2020 represented an “existential threat to the very survivability, not just of our nation, but of the example that our nation, properly understood, provides to the world.”

The Trump 2020 lawyer went on to reference the Declaration of Independence, saying that “our founders lay this case out.”

“There’s actually a provision in the Declaration of Independence that a people will suffer abuses while they remain sufferable, tolerable while they remain tolerable,” he said. “At some point abuses become so intolerable that it becomes not only their right but their duty to alter or abolish the existing government.”

“So that’s the question,” he added. “Have the abuses or the threat of abuses become so intolerable that we have to be willing to push back?”

Eastman (a.k.a., co-conspirator #2 in the Special Counsel's indictment) is facing disbarment in California, which will be the least of his problems once he's indicted for his role in the January 6 coup plot.  This little putschist power remora need to get some serious jail time.

The ugly:

... If enacted, the Republican-backed proposal known as Issue 1 would raise the bar for any future changes to the state constitution. Currently, constitutional amendments in Ohio—including the one on next week’s ballot—need only a bare majority of voters to pass; the proposal seeks to make the threshold a 60-percent supermajority.   [snip]

To prevent Democratic attempts to circumvent conservative state legislatures, Republican lawmakers have sought to restrict ballot initiatives across the country. Similar efforts are under way or have already won approval in states including Florida, Missouri, North Dakota, and Idaho. But to Democrats in Ohio and beyond, the August special election is perhaps the most brazen effort yet by Republicans to subvert the will of voters. Polls show that in Ohio, the abortion-rights amendment is likely to win more than 50 percent of the vote, as have similar ballot measures in other states. For Republicans to propose raising the threshold three months before the abortion vote in November looks like a transparent bid to move the proverbial goalposts right when their opponents are about to score.

“I don’t think I’ve seen such a naked attempt to stay in power,” a former Democratic governor of Ohio, Dick Celeste, told the church crowd in Toledo. As in Kansas a year ago, the Republican majority in the state legislature scheduled the referendum for August—a time when the party assumed turnout would be low and favorable to their cause. (Adding to the Democratic outrage is the fact that just a few months earlier, Ohio Republicans had voted to restrict local governments from holding August elections, because they tend to draw so few people.) “They’re trying to slip it in,” Kelsey Suffel, a Democratic voter from Perrysburg, told me after she had cast an early vote.

A gerrymandered Republican legislature doesn't want an issue enshrining abortion rights to pass in Ohio, so it wants to raise the bar for ballot initiatives from 50% to 60% before the election.  Sounds legit.

Monday Reading

 

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

E.J. Dionne, Jr.,  has some sound advice for Democrats:

Celebrate victory. Explain what you’ve achieved. Defend it from attack. Change the public conversation in your favor. Build on success to make more progress.

And for God’s sake, don’t moan about what might have been.

President Biden and Democrats in Congress are on the cusp of ending their long journey through legislative hell by enacting a remarkable list of practical, progressive programs.

This will confront them with a choice. They can follow the well-tested rules for champions of social change. Or they can repeat past mistakes by letting their opponents define what they have done and complain about the things left undone.

Republicans and the media will inevitably try to shape the negative narrative.  Don't let that be the dominant one.

Will Bunch looks at the trial of Kenosha killer Kyle Rittenhouse and sees it as part of a"55-gallon drum of highly flammable political rage" (may hit paywall):

In 2021, the post-and-possibly-pre-Trump American right has taken on many trappings of a violent cult — from the bullying, intimidating style of base conservatives who’ve screamed at or physically threatened local election officials or small-town school board members and even their families, to the Virginia crowd that seem to venerate a Trump flag from the Capitol on Jan. 6 shockingly similar to the Nazis’ worship of a “blood flag” from Hitler’s 1923 “beer hall putsch,” to the Trump-led effort to turn Ashli Babbitt — a Jan. 6 insurrectionist shot and killed by law enforcement as she attempted to lead the mob into the inner sanctums of Congress — into a worshiped martyr.

This is a 55-gallon drum of highly flammable political rage — not something that you want to come anywhere near with a lighted match. Unfortunately, Monday marks the launch of a Wisconsin murder trial with the potential for exactly that. It’s not just that the hotly disputed case of Kyle Rittenhouse — the now 18-year-old Illinois teen who picked up an AR-15-style rifle to join vigilantes during the August 2020 unrest after a police shooting in Kenosha, Wisc., and then killed two people and wounded a third during a series of altercations — could lead to near-term unrest, although there is surely that potential.

The greater risk to the republic is that a successful self-defense argument from attorneys for Rittenhouse — already a cause célèbre for the Trumpian right, which raised the $2 million to release him on bail — will be interpreted by all of the worst people as a sign from the U.S. justice system that it’s not only OK but heroic for citizens to take up arms for their perceived — and in too many cases invented — grievances.

Invented, indeed.  A lot of this has the unmistakable stink of an organized, radical movement that's being well- funded by the usual suspects, à la the Tea Party.  The Rittenhouse trial is the latest match, but not the only one, that has the potential to ignite violence.

CNN interviewed Virginia political pollster and guru Larry Sabato, who had this take on tomorrow's election in Virginia:

I'm ancient and I've been here in Virginia since the 1960s, and I've noticed one little thing. Every time a Republican is either behind or in a really close race, they find a way to drag race into the campaign.

Every time. Every time.

Sometimes it's immigrants. Sometimes it's blacks. Sometimes it's Latinos, or other groups.

This critical race theory discussion... it isn't in the ads, it's in the stump speeches.

"Critical race theory" is a way of speaking to whites and saying to whites: "Don't let the blacks take over." "They have already taken over. They have already taken over. Stop them. This is your chance to stop them."  

Tomorrow, in Virginia, is our chance to stop them.

Coup memo author John Eastman continues to prove he's an unrepentant insurrectionist:

In another awkward videotape “gotcha,” extremist Donald Trump team attorney John Eastman slammed “spineless” Republican state lawmakers who refused to reject the results of a legitimate presidential election.

Eastman boasted about a massive video conference call involving himself, Trump and Trump’s former personal attorney Rudy Giuliani with 300 Republican state legislators after Joe Biden’s victory, urging them to throw out election results.

“And they all spinelessly wouldn’t do anything,” complained Eastman, who authored the infamous “coup memos” on how to usurp American voters’ pick for president. “Even though we’d given them all the evidence ... they wouldn’t do it,” he added, apparently referring to nonexistent evidence of voter fraud.

“Look, I very much wish it were otherwise,” he said. “But these guys are spineless. If we take them out in the primaries in 2022, and the pre-condition for getting elected is we’re going to fight this stuff, maybe we’ve got an opportunity.”

Padded cell, stat!

The Glasgow summit on climate change (COP26) may well be the "inflection point" President Biden has called it.  Umair Irfan discusses what's on the agenda, what's at stake, and why all eyes are on the U.S.:

The US has the dubious distinction of being the only country to complete a 360-degree turn on the Paris agreement. It helped convene the accord in 2015, yet former President Trump withdrew the US in 2020. President Biden signed an executive order in January to rejoin and the US was formally back in the Paris accord in February.

Since the US is the wealthiest country in the world and the largest historical emitter of greenhouse gases, it plays a prominent role in climate negotiations and has an even greater obligation to act on the crisis. At COP26, the US not only has to make up for lost time, it also has to rebuild trust with other countries and show that it’s willing to be more ambitious.

“There is this sense of exhaustion about how long is it going to take for one of the biggest emitters in the world to do its fair share,” Rachel Cleetus, the clean energy policy director at the Union of Concerned Scientists, told Vox’s Rebecca Leber earlier this month.

Tell us about "exhaustion"!

Finally, you can find a far more eclectic and far more comprehensive link to posts from around the Internet over at Infidel 753's place.  Run, don't walk.