Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Jack Smith: “Why did you start campaigning in the middle of my investigation?!”

You cannot shame the shameless.

“woke” is the new caravan.

Another missed opportunity for Jamie Dimon to just shut the fuck up.

It looks like winning debates is a black job!

There is no right way to do the wrong thing.

Days Since JD Vance Insulted Women Across America: Zero

Nothing says ‘pro-life’ like letting children go hungry.

Putin dreamed of ending NATO, and now it’s Finnish-ed.

If you are still in the gop, you are either an extremist yourself, or in bed with those who are.

Let’s delete this post and never speak of this again.

It’s pointless to bring up problems that can only be solved with a time machine.

A thin legal pretext to veneer over their personal religious and political desires.

We know you aren’t a Democrat but since you seem confused let me help you.

Since when do we limit our critiques to things we could do better ourselves?

Tick tock motherfuckers!

One of our two political parties is a cult whose leader admires Vladimir Putin.

Baby steps, because the Republican Party is full of angry babies.

There is no compromise when it comes to body autonomy. You either have it or you don’t.

Consistently wrong since 2002

Fight for a just cause, love your fellow man, live a good life.

Let me file that under fuck it.

I’m starting to think Jesus may have made a mistake saving people with no questions asked.

Let’s finish the job.

You are here: Home / Open Threads / Friday Morning Open Thread: President Joe Hit *All* the Bases

Friday Morning Open Thread: President Joe Hit *All* the Bases

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I could do a dozen aggregating posts like this, and I suspect I won’t be the only front-pager posting about last night…


Reader Interactions

133Comments

  3. 3.

    lowtechcyclist

    @Baud:

    “Despite fiery rhetoric, Biden ends speech older than when he started it.” /NYT

    As good as a DougJ original!

  4. 4.

    RandomMonster

    If Biden brings that kind of fire to a debate, Stinky will look like he went to a gunfight armed with a rubber chicken.

  6. 6.

    OzarkHillbilly

    Wow Republicans just made the same mistake they made last year allowing Biden to box them in during his speech

    He didn’t spend all those years in the Senate just twiddling his fingers.

  7. 7.

    Frankensteinbeck

    I have been saying for the last year that polls and public opinion have been based on the fact that the public doesn’t know Biden.  They only know news pundits talking about whether Biden is old and a failure.  When the campaign gets going, people will see the actual Biden and remember the guy who was so great in 2020.

    Okay, I was thinking about ‘fun uncle Biden’, but performances like this count, too.  The spotlight of a presidential campaign is revealing Trump to be a withered Gollum, and Biden to be an intelligent, passionate, witty leader.

  15. 15.

    Betty

    Perfect encapsulation of the speech

    Eta: this was in response to Clay’s comment re: the final tweet

  16. 16.

    Sanjeevs

    I see Rupert Murdoch has found love again. He’s engaged to Elena Zhukova, whose daughter was married to Roman Abramovich.

  17. 17.

    Ceci n est pas mon nym

    @Baud:

    @John S.: Ah ok. That’s what I get for assuming.

    There was a moment last year where they loudly objected to being told they were against something they’d all spent months speaking against, and Joe said “oh you’re for it now? Great!”

    I thought the immigration moment was where I heard the identical dynamic. So like a common pundit, I wrote a reaction to something I hadn’t even watched.

  18. 18.

    Jesse

    Watch it. Loved it.

    I actually get it when people say that the speech was “political” — I agree! — but IMO this statement reflects the expectation that Democrats have to be the rule-following adults, Republicans are allowed to be the unhinged rule-breakers.

  19. 19.

    Jesse

    I appreciated that Biden tried to push the immigration issue. He’s the adult here: do you want to do something, or do you want to just pound the table? I think this is a framing that any normal person understands. It makes clear that there are proposals on the table. Rs even helped to craft those! But they can’t get their s**t together enough to actually do anything.

  20. 20.

    Kay

    I just voted – OH. Biden v Dean Phillips. Sherrod Brown, unopposed and Marcy Kaptur, unopposed
    We have a contested primary for OH SC – I voted for the endorsed candidate, Forbes.

  22. 22.

    SFAW

    @Baud: ​
     
    I really enjoyed Madame VP’s expression during the “oh, you want to give another $2T in tax cuts to the rich?” segment. It looked like she wanted to laugh her ass off at the RWMFs, but knew she couldn’t and still maintain decorum.

  23. 23.

    Kay

    Our new mantra should be “not a poll, a real number”

    It will drive political media crazy :)

  24. 24.

    Jackie

    Off topic, but another win for Democrats!

    Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ) “will not run for re-election in November, although he still refuses to hand in his resignation,” the New York Postreports.

    Bye bye! And good riddance!

  25. 25.

    Frankensteinbeck

    I’m still thinking about that story saying Trump skipped out on his nomination victory part to beg for money from Republican megadonors.  What a situation those donors are in.  They don’t want to pay off Trump’s fines.  If they did, they’d have done it already.  They sure as Hell don’t want the money they are trying to spend on electing Republicans instead being spent on Trump’s fines and lawyer bills.  Every penny given to every organization that Trump controls (even indirectly) will go to those fines.  They also don’t want the Republican nominee going friggin’ bankrupt.  What do they do?

    Plus, the clock is ticking.  Trump still hasn’t paid the deposit.  Can he even pay this first one?  Yeah, he claimed he could pay $100 million, but inflating his wealth is what Trump does.  When does the second deposit come due?  Because he sure as Hell can’t pay it.

  26. 26.

    Another Scott

    re Marshall’s “so sad” tweet – Cruz has evil policies, but he’s not a stupid automaton like the rest of them.  He doesn’t feel the need to wear Trump’s uniform (dark blue suit, white shirt, red tie).

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  27. 27.

    comrade scotts agenda of rage

    John Harwood amazes me. Years ago, he was just another example of a white, conventional wisdom media stenographer. Maybe not as obnoxious and bloviating at Tweety but you could count on him to provide the same rephrasing of GOP talking points.

    I know, he’s not a firebreather but the difference between then and the last several years is pretty amazing but the low standards I set for Our Failed Corporate Media.

  30. 30.

    PST

    @Kay: I just got back from visiting my 99.8 y.o. mother-in-law in Toledo. She is angry that gerrymandering has deprived her of the opportunity to keep voting for Marcy Kaptur for the rest of her life. Glad you’re there to help keep Kaptur in Congress. Every Biden triumph helps her and her colleagues.

  34. 34.

    Jackie

    @Baud: You mean like George Santos declaring he’s running agaIn? I guess he thinks he can campaign while being in court like TIFG can!

  35. 35.

    H.E.Wolf

    @Jesse: ​I appreciated that Biden tried to push the immigration issue.

     A note for all of us: let’s not fall into the NYT-esque habit of saying that Biden “tries” to do things. That’s a framing that implies failure and/or weakness.

    In his SOTU speech, Biden pushed the immigration issue. Or whatever verb seems appropriate.

    (“There is no try. Do, or not do.”)

  37. 37.

    HumboldtBlue

    The biggest tell to me were all the reports that gops were telling reporters they were mad because Biden was too partisan

    That was the tell all night reading reactions. That, and “he’s yelling and sounds so angry,” because as Mike Moses of the dipshits put it, “we couldn’t agree on policy so we just complain about tone.”

    Fucking losers.

  42. 42.

    HumboldtBlue

    Trump sure has a hold on the GOP.

    GOP Senator Todd Young rips Donald Trump: “He consistently loses. In fact, he has a habit of losing not just his own elections, but losing elections for others… I can’t think of someone worse equipped to bring people together to pass legislation and advance our collective values than the former president. I don’t think conservatives would be well served by electing someone whose core competency seems to be owning someone on Twitter.”

  43. 43.

    Soprano2

    This is the kind of thing that makes me insane. NPR watched the SOTU with an undecided female voter – her daughter is a teacher and her son is in the military. She said she thought the speech was uninspiring, because Biden didn’t address how he would keep her son in the military safe! She’s pro-choice and thought teachers getting a raise was a good idea. She wants to take “bits and pieces” from both candidates and make the perfect candidate. She thinks Joe Biden is “a nice guy”. She wanted more details (she claims she listens to the SOTU every year, does she know what this speech is for?). It feels like she knows she agrees with Biden on most issues, but there’s something nagging at her that keeps her from wanting to vote for him. Who knows what it is, NPR didn’t try to figure that out. I wish they would have asked her what it is about TFG that she likes. I suspect this is either “he’s weak on the border” or unease about Kamala Harris as VP, because otherwise it doesn’t make sense.

  44. 44.

    JAFD

    Happy International Women’s Day !
    WQXR.org is playing 24 hours of classical music by women composers today.

  45. 45.

    geg6

    @Sanjeevs:
    Heh.  Was seeing commentary on CNBC (accidentally when switching to MSNBC for the SOTU) that said today was going to be a bad day for the labor numbers because there were so many layoffs this past month and that this would be bad for Biden, however well he did with the SOTU.  I am unaware of large layoffs, so thought I’d missed something.  Apparently, it wasn’t me missing something.​

  46. 46.

    Kay

    @PST:

    I really like Kaptur. Smart as a whip and hard working.

    Toledo is booming, btw. It’s the most prosperous I’ve ever seen it and I lived in City of Toledo during Clinton.

  49. 49.

    JML

    “Joe Biden was energetic, commanding, and presidential. Here’s why that’s bad news for Democrats” – NY Times, probably.

  54. 54.

    Hoodie

    @geg6: It’s weird how so many in the financial media are invested in failure because they cling to a fairly simplistic model of the economy.   The financial world is so saturated in Chicago School economics that many of them simply can’t contemplate that the economy might act in ways their model doesn’t account for.   I was explaining my oldest son (a finance guy) that Milton Friedman totally distorted the legal and historical rationale for the creation of the corporation and it was like a light bulb came on.   He called me a few days later and said “you know, this whole thing about maximizing shareholder value is bullshit.”

  56. 56.

    JML

    @Dorothy A. Winsor: It’s like the fetishization of being an “independent” rather than being affiliated with one party or the other that really started in the 90’s. As if it made someone superior by not having enough convictions to be part of a political party. We’ve certainly seen how much voters can come to love the attention: it’s one of the reasons Iowa and NH (NH especially) have tried to desperately to hand on to their “first in the nation” caucus and primary status. Those voters used to get catered to on an individual level and I’m sure they loved the attention and ability to say “I had 5 presidential candidates in my living room last month!”

  58. 58.

    Steeplejack

    @Hoodie:

    I was explaining [to] my oldest son (a finance guy) that Milton Friedman totally distorted the legal and historical rationale for the creation of the corporation [. . .].

    Can you recommend a book or source that breaks that all down?

  59. 59.

    Hoodie

    @OzarkHillbilly: Those seem to happen every week.  I suspect a lot of it is just churn to shed dying projects.  Companies don’t invest long term in employees any more, everyone is pretty fungible.

  60. 60.

    Brachiator

    Mike Johnson on President Biden’s State of the Union address that included supporting IVF, ending cancer, raising teacher pay, defending democracy, and securing the border: There was nothing Republicans could agree to

    Biden boxed the Republicans into a corner. He could point out the power of bipartisanship and highlight areas where the GOP should be in agreement with the Democrats, and then nail the GOP on their obstructionism.

  61. 61.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @Hoodie: ​ Somebody opined after the announcement that layoffs seem to be the latest “fad” in SV.

    At any rate, the tech industry is not the US economy

  63. 63.

    Hoodie

    @Steeplejack: Any law school class on corporate law might touch on some of the basics.  A lot of the original corporations were state-sanctioned conspiracies to enable scaling investment for things like separating indigenous peoples from their land, resources and lives.  Before that, everything was either a sole proprietorship or partnership with joint and several liability.  The corporation allowed for scaling capital in return for limited liability.  That your capital investment would be maximized at all costs was not part of the original tradeoff, e.g., you had to make sure the Crown got its cut and that your efforts were in line with state foreign policy.

  64. 64.

    Hoodie

    @OzarkHillbilly: IIRC, there used to be a similar churn in the US defense industry when I worked in it.  People would go from contractor to contractor as programs finished or got canceled.  I think there’s less of that in defense now because the industry is so consolidated.

  65. 65.

    geg6

    @OzarkHillbilly: ​
     
    Maybe those people in Silicon Valley should consider a career change into something like…maybe manufacturing! That sector is booming!! Oh wait…they’d actually have to work.

  66. 66.

    OzarkHillbilly

    “On the Democrat side, they wore white. On the Republican side, they were white.”

    -Stephen Colbert.

  68. 68.

    Brachiator

    @Soprano2:

    She wants to take “bits and pieces” from both candidates and make the perfect candidate.

    I don’t know that this is uncommon, even though it might be unrealistic. Strongly political people want their party to dominate. Regular people just want Congress, both parties, and the president to get stuff done.

    But overall there was not enough information to get a good reading on this “undecided” voter. Maybe they didn’t want to pry or she didn’t want to reveal too much about her previous voting record. I don’t think they said how she voted in 2020 or in the midterms. She might not really be all that undecided.

    But it was also a single voter. CNN had a panel of Democrats, Republicans and Independents watch the SOTU address. At the end, 65 percent felt that Biden had made a strong case. This group was not a random selection of voters, but their views should still make Republicans nervous.

  69. 69.

    UncleEbeneezer

    @JML: I don’t think it started in the 90’s.  I saw all my family members proudly identifying this way in the 70’s-80’s.  Bragging about how they didn’t vote for either side, etc.  I think it just started to get some Media and Electoral attention in the 90’s, but those people and that dumb-ass sentiment, were always there.

  70. 70.

    HumboldtBlue

    1. Go to Google
    2. Search cat
    3. Touch the paw icon
    4. Touch anywhere

    You’re welcome 🐾

  71. 71.

    sdhays

    @Frankensteinbeck: I am so here for “scared, depressed, dejected Trump”. With a side of “poopy pants Trump” and “Nikki Haley was in charge of Capitol security on January 6th Trump”.

  73. 73.

    Mr. Bemused Senior

    @Hoodie: @OzarkHillbilly: @geg6:

    Somebody opined after the announcement that layoffs seem to be the latest “fad” in SV.

    This is not new and far from unique to Silicon Valley. Jack Welch of GE was famous for instituting a system of annual layoffs of the employees evaluated in the bottom 10%. We can see from the record of GE how that worked out.

    Cisco adopted a similar though less draconian version. In my experience it is corrosive, especially to engineers.

  74. 74.

    sdhays

    @Soprano2: Biden didn’t address how he would keep her son in the military safe

    What the fuck kind of expectation is this? The military is there to kill and be killed if the shit hits the fan. It’s not bean bag. Biden said he was firm on not sending American troops to Ukraine and, in general, making sure the world doesn’t become engulfed in war and violence. What the fuck more does she fucking expect? What’s Biden’s predecessor’s plan for “keeping her ‘loser’ (Trump’s words!) son safe”??

    I stopped listening to NPR long ago because I just couldn’t take their attempts to “cover” politics

    ETA: It should be enough that saying “I don’t want to burn the existing world order down and green light Russia’s invasion of Europe” to reassure someone that the President wants to keep American troops as safe as possible.

  77. 77.

    trnc

    Trump tells Putin “do whatever the hell you want,” he actually said that. It’s outrageous, dangerous, and unacceptable

    I wonder how many wingnut heads have exploded from Biden accurately quoting DT.

  78. 78.

    Soprano2

    @sdhays: Lots of people are proud that their child is in the service but also terrified when they get deployed. I’m not sure what she expected, since the reporter never asked her. A president can’t promise to never send troops into harm’s way; that’s what they’re for! It’s unrealistic, and perhaps for her an excuse to be able to say she still isn’t sure who she wants to vote for.

  80. 80.

    Hoodie

    @Brachiator: Johnson’s behavior suggests that.  Apart from the psychotic lunatics (e.g., MTG, Gaetz, etc.), I get the sense that  a lot of these people are just really scared.  They really can’t deal with the modern world and desperately don’t want to be challenged to do anything that upsets their curated lives.  That leads people like McConnell to endorse an asshole that uses racists epithets to describe his wife, because McConnell is scared shitless that the GOP will be overwhelmed by the liberals and their allied black and brown hordes and destroy his carefully constructed fortress of conservative political power.  He knows that Trump and his gaggle of knuckleheads are his only currently available hope for keeping that intact.   That leads someone like Johnson to sit on his hands even when Biden is making the most anodyne references to things like education and child safety.  He can’t even acknowledge that these are things that might need to be addressed and just argue about how to fix them because he lacks any confidence to offer alternatives.  The Reagan and W things just didn’t pan out.

  82. 82.

    Another Scott

    @Hoodie: I’m pretty sure that some type of explicit “serve the public good” was present in many/most corporate charters.  If it exists now, it’s mostly lip-service.

    This came up in a quick search:
    Context.org:

    Market ideology today conveniently sweeps these distinctions under the rug. At a very basic level, it has become a form of cosmological buck-passing that blames abstract “market forces” for the behavior of individuals. The corporation is the institutionalized form of this shirking of responsibility. The primary purpose of the corporate form is to insulate a certain class of people from responsibility for actions taken on their behalf.

    When I was a law student in Philadelphia, I was hired by the owner of a small local radio station to look into the original corporate charters of the Penn Central Railroad (originally the Pennsylvania Railroad). The Penn Central was in the process of ending its passenger service, and the man who hired me wondered if the railroad didn’t have a legal duty of some kind to continue it. What I found truly surprised me. The charter spelled out clearly that the corporation had an obligation to serve the public by providing passenger service. That was the condition for the privilege of operating in the corporate form, and also for the generous grants of land it received from the legislature.

    (Emphasis added.)

    Similarly with things like shoveling money and power into oligarch’s pockets for new sportsball complexes… We have a right to tangible public benefits (not just trickle-down market mumbo-jumbo) in exchange for exclusive public grants and largess – this should not be controversial.

    Thanks.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  83. 83.

    Another Scott

    @HumboldtBlue: Hehe.

    After that, click anywhere on the same page.

    !!!

    [eta:] I see you said that last bit.  (Not enough caffeine yet…)

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  84. 84.

    Mr. Bemused Senior

    @Hoodie: He [Johnson] knows that Trump and his gaggle of knuckleheads are his only currently available hope for keeping that intact.   That leads someone like Johnson to sit on his hands even when Biden is making the most anodyne references to things like education and child safety.  He can’t even acknowledge that these are things that might need to be addressed and just argue about how to fix them because he lacks any confidence to offer alternatives.  The Reagan and W things just didn’t pan out.

    The GOP made their deal with the Devil long ago. They signed the Contract with [on] America. Now they have tied themselves to the anchor of Trump. I hope they all sink to the bottom

    [ETA Yeah, I know, there is no bottom.]

  86. 86.

    Ken

    @Frankensteinbeck: What a situation those donors are in. […] What do they do?

    Get together with Trump, point out all those issues you did, and get him to relinquish the nomination?

    March 15 is coming up, I understand it’s a traditional date for transfers of power.

  87. 87.

    rikyrah

     

    NoelCaslerComedy🌙 (@caslernoel) posted at 9:20 PM on Thu, Mar 07, 2024:
    Do younger people understand we watched SOTU’s for decades and nobody yelled stuff out? It’s f*cking embarrassing GOP is so low class. Just pure trash.

    Trust Black women *We tried to tell you* (@NicolasEdny) posted at 6:26 AM on Fri, Mar 08, 2024:
    Everything changed when a Black man became President.
    He broke their brains forever.
    (https://x.com/NicolasEdny/status/1766078093536469070?t=c54q6iNTpeViMCJoLNPpbg&s=03)

  89. 89.

    Miss Bianca

    @Baud:

    “Despite fiery rhetoric, Biden ends speech older than when he started it.” /NYT

    Oh, Baud – I am SOOOOO glad I had put down the coffee cup before I read that!

  92. 92.

    Hoodie

    @Mr. Bemused Senior: I had forgotten about Welch’s annual culls.  That was only one of GE’s problems.  Like a lot of corporations, management turned them into a finance firm instead of a technology firm.  I worked at Westinghouse in the 80’s and similar financialization essentially killed them when they lost billions in the S&L crisis on bad margin loans for commercial real estate.   For decades they had been a key player in the electrical, nuclear and defense industries, e.g., role in the Manhattan Project, the first all American designed jet engine, the Apollo moon landing camera, etc.  The tech pieces other than nuclear got sold off to others and are still somewhat intact.   All these guys eventually want to turn into banks because that’s really the only thing the MBAs understand.

  93. 93.

    Ken

    @geg6: Sounds like what the NYT did, according to this bluesky post from Timothy Burke.  Big “February Jobs Report is Expected to Show Cooling Growth” story put up, and quietly yanked when no such thing happened.

  94. 94.

    Miss Bianca

    @Hoodie:

    He called me a few days later and said “you know, this whole thing about maximizing shareholder value is bullshit.”

    That has to rate as one of the Proud Moments of Parenthood for you!

  95. 95.

    Captain C

    @rikyrah: The one guy who said they could have had Vance, Hawley, or Tuberville made me laugh.  I mean, Tuberville?  Obviously the dude had some leftovers from Ronny Jackson’s White House drug dispense-o-rama.

  96. 96.

    Frankensteinbeck

    @rikyrah:

    Trust Black women *We tried to tell you* (@NicolasEdny) posted at 6:26 AM on Fri, Mar 08, 2024:
    Everything changed when a Black man became President.
    He broke their brains forever.

    YUP.  I repeat it over and over when people talk about how crazy things are.  When Obama was elected someone here* said that White America would lose their shit.  They did.

    *It might have been you!

  97. 97.

    citizen dave

    Economist by education here.  Oh how I remember watching Friedman’s “Freedom of Choice” documentary economy-explaining series on PBS in the mid 1970s.  (The parts from around the world to make a pencil for 10 cents)

    Anyway, maybe I’m different but when I saw the question about which books debunk Milton F, I googled “milton friedman is bullshit book”.

  98. 98.

    Mr. Bemused Senior

    @Hoodie: Yeah, financialization was another “brilliant” idea. It worked well for a while for GE but again was not a successful long-term strategy.

    Once upon a time executives were admired and rewarded for taking a long-term view. Lately not so much.

  101. 101.

    MisterForkbeard

    The media really wanted this to fail, too. NPR was posting mean girl takes on it all night while it was in progress until it was clear that Joe had done a fantastic job. But things like “Biden clears very low bar of expectations – for now” or “Biden displays some energy in the beginning of his speech, but worries abound that he won’t last the whole speech” and “Biden pushed back, but critics warn his approach is unlikely to win over Republicans”

    Just garbage-tier analysis. The facebook comments were all over them for it, at least.

  104. 104.

    Citizen Alan

    @Mr. Bemused Senior:  Well said. I would only add that the deal with the devil was made in 1968, when the democrats finally exorcized the evil spirit that had possessed it since before the Civil War just in time for Nixon to cast the dark spell that summoned it into the heart of the GOP.

  105. 105.

    Frankensteinbeck

    @MisterForkbeard:

    “Biden displays some energy in the beginning of his speech, but worries abound that he won’t last the whole speech”

    Thank you.  This is useful information to me.  It tells me they’ve bought their own hype.  Part of the reason we’re seeing feeding frenzies about hints Biden is Old is because the national press have convinced themselves he’s about to start drooling from senility any minute now and they’re eagerly waiting to capture it.

  108. 108.

    Soprano2

    @rikyrah: The press has normalized this. It didn’t take long, just a couple of years, and now they act like it’s normal for the opposition party to act like that.

  109. 109.

    catclub

    @Hoodie: That your capital investment would be maximized at all costs was not part of the original tradeoff, e.g., you had to make sure the Crown got its cut and that your efforts were in line with state foreign policy.

     

    ‘Policy’   The corporation is licensed by the government, so whatever it does should not harm the commonwealth or oppose domestic policy either.

  110. 110.

    mrmoshpotato

    @Frankensteinbeck:

    I’m still thinking about that story saying Trump skipped out on his nomination victory part to beg for money from Republican megadonors. What a situation those donors are in. They don’t want to pay off Trump’s fines. If they did, they’d have done it already. They sure as Hell don’t want the money they are trying to spend on electing Republicans instead being spent on Trump’s fines and lawyer bills. Every penny given to every organization that Trump controls (even indirectly) will go to those fines. They also don’t want the Republican nominee going friggin’ bankrupt. What do they do? 

    Oh, I don’t care.  We laugh our asses off though.

  114. 114.

    Hoodie

    @Thor Heyerdahl: That’s a good encapsulation of the issues.  My understanding is more informed by learning corporate law, which involves the reading of early case law that brings out some of the history and why it was never the simple concept that Friedman sold to America.  Of course, it sold to corporate management because it’s what they wanted to hear.

  115. 115.

    RaflW

    275,000 new jobs in the latest report! Huge.

    The NYT of course calls it “exceeding expectations”. Any Republican president with the sustained jobs record Biden has would be getting lavish praise day after day for this.

    But Biden used classical Democratic economic theory to acheive this, and the overlords at the NYT, WaPo etc hate that. They want trickle-down and punish-the-poors to be the only policy preference. And it really shows.

  116. 116.

    West of the Rockies

    @Soprano2:

    I read that NPR bit, too.  Ludicrous.   Somehow, after years watching the difference between Biden and Trump, she just can’t decide.   She is an attention rhymes with bore.

  117. 117.

    Peale

    Since we’re late, I just want to be that guy and say you don’t hit the bases. You “touch all the bases” after you “hit a home run”. Although if you don’t quite hit a home run you probably should “hit the base paths running” if you want to be safe.

  118. 118.

    EarthWindFire

    @Frankensteinbeck: I think Obama’s re-elect was the point of no return. Before that, they could tell themselves that W wasn’t conservative enough or their excuse du jour.

    Having a majority demonstrate that we didn’t actually mind having a black man lead us just pissed all over their self-image of White America’s unquestioned exceptionalism. They can’t get over it. Getting over it would require recognizing how much they’ve been lied to, and how willing they’ve been to swallow those lies.

  119. 119.

    JoyceH

    Someone up thread mentioned debates. Does anyone genuinely believe there will be presidential debates this year? I sure don’t.

  120. 120.

    matt

    So the Republicans are pivoting from saying Biden is old and feeble to saying Biden is partisan and mean…

  122. 122.

    Eolirin

    @Hoodie: The scope and scale of these layoffs are atypical. A lot of it is contraction following a pandemic fueled boom in revenues that has now returned to earth. 

    But they also don’t happen all at once for the most part. There’s often 6-12 months before the headline numbers are reached on layoffs, and these are frequently multinational companies and the layoffs aren’t all in the US.

    So the immediate impact is somewhat lessened and spread out over time, and the boom in manufacturing work is almost certainly swamping tech sector contraction.

    There have also been a large amount of layoffs of journalists recently, and given how bad most of them tend to be at basic mathematics, I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of reporting on the job market and health of the economy is driven by availability bias.

  124. 124.

    Chris Johnson

    @JoyceH: How can there be? Trump would piss all over himself and start raving. He can barely handle spouting talking points for a safe audience.

    Joe would absolutely confront him, in ‘come on, man!’ style. No chance Trump could handle that.

  125. 125.

    Uncle Cosmo

    @topclimber: ​I wonder how many SV layoffs are designed to cut out employees just reaching their vesting rights in corporate stock.

    When I worked in “defense” I was in the first tranche of layoffs when the once highly respected contractor I worked for began to self-destruct. I was one of the youngest – at age 41. It was abundantly clear that the corporation was specifically targeting older workers in order to “get rid of the dead wood” and shed salary. For awhile I was a member of a class action alleging age discrimination, but after a few years and two more job changes I’d landed on my feet, so I let my participation drop.​

    (ETA: Just FTR, while I was an employee there, I never bought a single share of the corporation’s stock, though I did participate in the 401k and took advantage of matching funds.)

  126. 126.

    citizen dave

    @JoyceH: On debates, I’m with you and have thought that for a long time.  They may not ever return…

    For this year at least, I’d like to see everyone watch Biden and Orange Man talking–not at a rally, but just to folks–even their handpicked audience, for about an hour.  Orange Man cannot deviate from nonstop BS and himself as the primary subject, ever.

  127. 127.

    dirge

    @geg6: Maybe those people in Silicon Valley should consider a career change… wait…they’d actually have to work.

    Like most industries, in technology 20% of the employees do 80% of the work.  That’s often inversely correlated with what they get paid or who gets laid off.  I assure you, I hate the overpaid useless people in the industry much, much more than you do.  I can also assure you that they’re not the ones looking for jobs right now.

    But for those actually doing the work, it is very much real work.  Please refrain from suggesting otherwise.

  128. 128.

    Uncle Cosmo

    @Hoodie: ​I worked at Westinghouse in the 80’s —

    Well shake my hand, fellow former inmate of the Circle-W-Bar Dude Ranch! I was a Senior Engineer at ILSD in Hunt Valley – what the radar types in Linthicum called “The Country Club.” (We called them, quite simply, “Down Below.”)

    and similar financialization essentially killed them when they lost billions in the S&L crisis on bad margin loans for commercial real estate.

    IIUC, Westinghouse wanted to be even bigger than they were, and hired a British financial “geenyuss” who got them into junk bonds and real estate just before both crashed, leaving them holding the bag to the tune of ~$3bn. Add to that the cancellation of a couple of key contracts** and what was once the largest private employer in the state of MD (~17,000 employees) got sliced, diced and sold off til there was nothing left but the nuclear division.

    ** (1) The Advanced Tactical Aircraft, where they were building the radar after Norden screwed the pooch – canceled by Darth Cheney when he discovered the prime [General Demonics] had lied to him. (2) SQQ-89, the US Navy integrated undersea warfare suite analogous to AEGIS for aerial combat, which could have been worth ~$750m – also cancelled in early 1991 after the USSR had that bad taste to disintegrate and the sailors realized they could already hear the Chinese subs…​​

  129. 129.

    dirge

    @Mr. Bemused Senior:  Jack Welch of GE was famous for instituting a system of annual layoffs of the employees evaluated in the bottom 10%… In my experience it is corrosive, especially to engineers.

    POSIWID

    It’s supposed to be corrosive to engineers.  That’s helpful for a management team trying to suppress dissent and consolidate control.  Works even better if employee evaluations are arbitrary and capricious.

  131. 131.

    Paul in KY

    @sdhays: We’ll give him an M-1 Abrams tank to ride around in. If you’re a tanker, it’s about the best you’re gonna get. Can still be blown to bits, though.

  133. 133.

    rikyrah

    @OzarkHillbilly:

    I have been thinking that the Infrastructure Bill is what’s saving us.

    I believe strongly that these corporate layoffs, after all these muthaphuckas are posting profits..

     

    were done to create a recession so that they can get Dolt45 back in.

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