Gross domestic product increased at a 2% annualized pace for the January-through-March period, up from the previous estimate of 1.3% and ahead of the 1.4% Dow Jones consensus forecast. This was the third and final estimate for Q1 GDP. The growth rate was 2.6% in the fourth quarter. read more
The right-wing Supreme Court majority continues to shift enormous power away from Congress and the executive branch to itself. Justice Elena Kagan narrates in her student loan forgiveness dissent the majority relies heavily on the major questions "doctrine." This Court continues to impose itself on that process, deciding that Congress didn't meet some vague standard of specificity in its delegation and knocking down agency actions it doesn't like. read more
In Thursday's ruling, Chief Justice John Roberts and all of the Republican-appointed justices, make a simple - and simplistic - point: There is no real difference between the centuries of racial discrimination against Black people and targeted race-conscious efforts to help Black people. The problem is that, as a matter of history, it's not true. The 14th Amendment, ratified in the aftermath of the Civil War, was expressly intended to allow for race-conscious legislation. The same Congress that passed the amendment enacted several such laws, including the Freedmen's Bureau Acts, which helped former slaves secure housing, food, jobs and education. read more
His name is Tom Stuker and he's the biggest mistake United Airlines ever made. In 1990, United offered a lifetime pass for $290,000. Stuker jumped on it and has pretty much lived in seat 1B - his favorite - ever since. read more
"If your best defense is bravado,' in essence you're saying my defense is that I was lying,'" former U.S. Attorney Joyce Vance told MSNBC. "That's a terrible defense, certainly for a former president and for anyone to make in front of a jury." read more
#10
When Trump was President this same SCOTUS said this:
Lawmakers, as well as ordinary citizens, do not have standing to sue to challenge unconstitutional spending.Now balance that, with this.
"Among the reasons is that the Government has made a sufficient showing at this stage that the plaintiffs have no cause of action to obtain review of the Acting Secretary's compliance with" the provision that authorizes the transfer of military funds, they said by a 5-4 vote in Trump vs. Sierra Club. This suggests that because Congress did not specifically authorize lawsuits over this part of the military spending law, no one may go to court to contest an allegedly illegal transfer.
www.latimes.com
When Congress passed the Heroes Act, it made a very clear and explicitly articulated decision to give the secretary broad and flexible authority in national emergencies, to allow the secretary to bypass ordinary constraints on policymakers, to permit the secretary to provide loan relief to many borrowers at once, and to forbid the federal courts from reading other statutes to narrow this authority.Perhaps precedence and the clear reading of the Court's own ruling led the Administration to do what they did. The Court made it clear that it had no role in "unconstitutional spending" so why did it now rule of exactly that - even when the statute itself made clear that the Courts had no role in interpreting how the act was administrated?
www.vox.com
I saw reporting almost immediately after the Rust tragedy which told EXACTLY how live ammo ended up on set.
Gun that killed Halyna Hutchins used by crew off-set for fun: reportIf you're skeptical of that one, here's a report from Vanity Fair.
The gun, which was fired by Alec Baldwin on the set of the movie "Rust," may have even been loaded with live rounds when it was used for what was essentially target practice, TMZ reported.
Multiple sources connected to the production of the film told TMZ that the gun was fired at off-the-clock gatherings " which could explain how a live round found its way into the gun's chamber.
Another source who was on set told the outlet that when cops arrived they found live ammo and blank rounds stored in the same area, where the fatal mix-up could have occurred.
Officials have not confirmed the claims, TMZ said.
Immediately after the shooting, reports suggested members of the crew were putting real bullets into the prop guns and shooting at bottles and cans during downtime.
www.vanityfair.com
The misery index is a crude but effective way to measure the health of the economy. You add up the inflation rate and the unemployment rate. If you're a president running for re-election, you want that number to be as low as possible.
When Ronald Reagan won re-election, it was about 11.4, when George W. Bush did so it was 9, for Barack Obama it was 9.5, and today, as Joe Biden runs for re-election, it's only 7.7.
Biden should be cruising to an easy re-election victory. And that misery index number doesn't even begin to capture the strength of the American economy at the moment. There are a zillion positive indicators right now, as the folks in the administration will be quick to tell you. The economy has created 13 million jobs since Biden's Inauguration Day. According to the Conference Board, a business research firm, Americans' job satisfaction is at its highest level in 36 years. Household net worth is surging.
We learned Thursday that the U.S. economy grew at an annualized 2 percent rate in the first quarter of this year, well above the economists' expectations of around 1.4 percent. The best part of it is that the new prosperity is helping those who have long been left behind. In the four years of Donald Trump's administration, spending on manufacturing facilities grew by 5 percent. During the first two years of Biden's administration, such investment more than doubled and about 800,000 manufacturing jobs were created.
This is not just coincidence. It's a direct outcome of Biden policies: the Inflation Reduction Act, with its green technology provisions, the infrastructure bill, the CHIPS Act.
Biden's stimulative spending did boost the inflation rate, but inflation is now lower than in many other developed nations and our economy is stronger.
So Americans should be celebrating. But they are not.
David Brooks www.nytimes.com
Let me share a few brief and general thoughts on today's decision.This.
First, on its internal logic, the decision can appear compelling. But step back and you see that a specific class of Americans who were enslaved for two centuries and then mostly lived under a system of legal apartheid for another century somehow still remain largely excluded from social and economic preferment. And we're told that the constitution not only bars the government from doing anything about that but also bars private institutions from attempting to do anything about that. Judged from that more holistic perspective it's very hard to see how that can possibly be right whatever the internal logic of "color blindness."
Second, the same people who wrote the amendments that undergird this decision also passed various laws specifically to raise Black social and economic power to the level of white people. So the Court's definition of "color blindness" simply cannot have been the intent of the authors of the amendment. The history is open and shut.
Third, the question of whether the constitution requires or looks favorably on racial diversity is a complex question and it's not entirely clear that it does, at least if we're limiting our analysis tightly to the intent of the people who wrote the relevant amendments. But if originalism or history plays any role in your jurisprudence, African-Americans represent a unique class which the constitution specifically intends to raise to the level of white people. One could argue that that task is done somehow, or that society has changed in some respect that makes the original injunction operate differently or that affirmative and compensatory educational preferment is somehow uniquely damaging and thus a disallowed means of achieving that aim. But again, specifically for African-Americans, the "color blindness" constitutional argument doesn't add up.
Josh Marshall talkingpointsmemo.com
Dark Brandon knows economic policy. Biden has seen the labor market surge, with monthly job growth averaging 470,000 positions since he took office. Biden's first two years in office were the strongest two years of job growth on record in U.S. history. The overall size of the labor market has now more than recovered from the downturn caused by the Covid-19 recession.
Biden inherited an unemployment rate of 6.3% in January 2021, and saw the rate fall steadily to a low of 3.4% as of April 2023.
After topping 9% in June 2022, a consumer price index reading of 4.9% this past April marked the tenth straight month of declines in the annual pace of inflation.
Overall labor participation hit 62.6% in April 2023, just off the prepandemic highs achieved under Trump. The prime-age labor-force participation rate, however, is now just above prepandemic levels and surpassing any of the benchmarks hit during the Trump years. www.barrons.com
Remember the above as every single Republican running for President gaslights you by saying how bad things are under Joe Biden.
Jeez, Kagan should have worked for the White House and Speaker of the House's legal teams, because none of them believed it was legal...
Does the Speaker or the White House determine what's defined by statutes? No, the DOJ does, and this is what THEY told the SCOTUS:
The question really should be where the SCOTUS found constitutional grounds to interfere with the authority Congress statutorily gave the Executive in plain, clear language.