The Ledes

Friday, September 6, 2024

CNBC: “The U.S. economy created slightly fewer jobs than expected in August, reflecting a slowing labor market while also clearing the way for the Federal Reserve to lower interest rates later this month. Nonfarm payrolls expanded by 142,000 during the month, down from 89,000 in July and below the 161,000 consensus forecast from Dow Jones, according to a report Friday from the Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics.”

New York Times: “Colin Gray, the father of the 14-year-old accused of killing two teachers and two students at his Georgia high school, was arrested and charged on Thursday with second-degree murder in connection with the state’s deadliest school shooting, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation said. In addition to two counts of second-degree murder, Mr. Gray, 54, was also charged with four counts of involuntary manslaughter and eight counts of cruelty to children, according to a statement. At a news conference on Thursday night, Chris Hosey, the G.B.I. director, said the charges were 'directly connected with the actions of his son and allowing him to possess a weapon.'” At 5:30 am ET, this is the pinned item in a liveblog. ~~~

     ~~~ CNN's report is here.

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The Ledes

Thursday, September 5, 2024

CNBC: “Private sector payrolls grew at the weakest pace in more than 3½ years in August, providing yet another sign of a deteriorating labor market, according to ADP. Companies hired just 99,000 workers for the month, less than the downwardly revised 111,000 in July and below the Dow Jones consensus forecast for 140,000. August was the weakest month for job growth since January 2021, according to data from the payrolls processing firm. 'The job market’s downward drift brought us to slower-than-normal hiring after two years of outsized growth,' ADP’s chief economist, Nela Richardson, said. The report corroborates multiple data points recently that show hiring has slowed considerably from its blistering pace following the Covid outbreak in early 2020.”

The New York Times' live updates of developments in the Georgia school massacre are here, a horrifying ritual which we experience here in the U.S. to kick off each new School Shooting Year. “A 14-year-old student opened fire at his Georgia high school on Wednesday, killing two students and two teachers before surrendering to school resource officers, according to the authorities, who said the suspect would be charged with murder.” ~~~

     ~~~ Marie: I heard Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R) speak during a press conference. Kemp is often glorified as one of the most moderate, reasonable GOP elected public officials. When asked a question I did not hear, Kemp responded, "Now is not the time to talk about politics." As you know, this is a statement that is part of the mass shooting ritual. It translates, "Our guns-for-all policy is so untenable that I dare not express it lest I be tarred and feathered -- or worse -- by grieving families." ~~~

~~~ Washington Post: “Police identified the suspect as Colt Gray, a student who attracted the attention of federal investigators more than a year ago, when they began receiving anonymous tips about someone threatening a school shooting. The FBI referred the reports to local authorities, whose investigations led them to interview Gray and his father. The father told police that he had hunting guns in the house, but that his son did not have unsupervised access to them. Gray denied making the online threats, the FBI said, but officials still alerted area schools about him.” ~~~ 

     ~~~ Marie: I heard on CNN that the reason authorities lost track of Colt was that his family moved counties, and the local authorities who first learned of the threats apparently did not share the information with law enforcement officials in Barrow County, where Wednesday's mass school shooting occurred. If you were a parent of a child who has so alarmed law enforcement that they came around to your house to question you and the child about his plans to massacre people, wouldn't you do something?: talk to him, get the kid professional counseling, remove guns and other lethal weapons from the house, etc.

Help!

To keep the Conversation going, please help me by linking news articles, opinion pieces and other political content in today's Comments section.

Link Code:   <a href="URL">text</a>

OR here's a link generator. The one I had posted died, but Akhilleus found this new one that he says is easy to use.

OR you can always just block, copy and paste to your comment the URL (Web address) of the page you want to link.

Note for Readers. It is not possible for commenters to "throw" their highlighted links to another window. But you can do that yourself. Right-click on the link and a drop-down box will give you choices as to where you want to open the link: in a new tab, new window or new private window.

Thank you to everyone who has been contributing links to articles & other content in the Comments section of each day's "Conversation." If you're missing the comments, you're missing some vital links.

New York Times: “Hvaldimir, a beluga whale who had captured the public’s imagination since 2019 after he was spotted wearing a harness seemingly designed for a camera, was found dead on Saturday in Norway, according to a nonprofit that worked to protect the whale.... [Hvaldimir] was wearing a harness that identified it as “equipment” from St. Petersburg. There also appeared to be a camera mount. Some wondered if the whale was on a Russian reconnaissance mission. Russia has never claimed ownership of the whale. If Hvaldimir was a spy, he was an exceptionally friendly one. The whale showed signs of domestication, and was comfortable around people. He remained in busier waters than are typical for belugas....” ~~~

     ~~~ Marie: Oh, Lord, do not let Bobby Kennedy, Jr., near that carcass.

New York Times: Botswana's “President Mokgweetsi Masisi grinned as he lifted the diamond, a 2,492-carat stone that is the biggest diamond unearthed in more than a century and the second-largest ever found, according to the Vancouver-based mining operator Lucara, which owns the mine where it was found. This exceptional discovery could bring back the luster of the natural diamond mining industry, mining companies and experts say. The diamond was discovered in the same relatively small mine in northeastern Botswana that has produced several of the largest such stones in living memory. Such gemstones typically surface as a result of volcanic activity.... The diamond will likely sell in the range of tens of millions of dollars....”

Click on photo to enlarge.

~~~ Guardian: "On a distant reef 16,000km from Paris, surfer Gabriel Medina has given Olympic viewers one of the most memorable images of the Games yet, with an airborne celebration so well poised it looked too good to be true. The Brazilian took off a thundering wave at Teahupo’o in Tahiti on Monday, emerging from a barrelling section before soaring into the air and appearing to settle on a Pacific cloud, pointing to the sky with biblical serenity, his movements mirrored precisely by his surfboard. The shot was taken by Agence France-Presse photographer Jérôme Brouillet, who said “the conditions were perfect, the waves were taller than we expected”. He took the photo while aboard a boat nearby, capturing the surreal image with such accuracy that at first some suspected Photoshop or AI." 

Washington Post: “'Mary Cassatt at Work' is a large and mostly satisfying exhibition devoted to the career of the great American artist beloved for her sensitive and often sentimental views of family life. The 'at work' in the title of the Philadelphia Museum of Art show references the curators’ interest in Cassatt’s pioneering effort to establish herself as a professional artist within a male-dominated field. Throughout the show, which includes some 130 paintings, pastels, prints and drawings, the wall text and the art on view stresses Cassatt’s fixation on art as a career rather than a pastime.... Mary Cassatt at Work is on view at the Philadelphia Museum of Art through Sept. 8. philamuseum.org”

New York Times: “Bob Newhart, who died on Thursday at the age of 94, has been such a beloved giant of popular culture for so long that it’s easy to forget how unlikely it was that he became one of the founding fathers of stand-up comedy. Before basically inventing the hit stand-up special, with the 1960 Grammy-winning album 'The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart' — that doesn’t even count his pay-per-view event broadcast on Canadian television that some cite as the first filmed special — he was a soft-spoken accountant who had never done a set in a nightclub. That he made a classic with so little preparation is one of the great miracles in the history of comedy.... Bob Newhart holds up. In fact, it’s hard to think of a stand-up from that era who is a better argument against the commonplace idea that comedy does not age well.”

Washington Post: “An early Titian masterpiece — once looted by Napolean’s troops and a part of royal collections for centuries — caused a stir when it was stolen from the home of a British marquess in 1995. Seven years later, it was found inside an unassuming white and blue plastic bag at a bus stop in southwest London by an art detective, and returned. This week, the oil painting 'The Rest on the Flight into Egypt' sold for more than $22 million at Christie’s. It was a record for the Renaissance artist, whom museums describe as the greatest painter of 16th-century Venice. Ahead of the sale in April, the auction house billed it as 'the most important work by Titian to come to the auction market in more than a generation.'”

Washington Post: The Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., which houses the world's largest collection of Shakespeare material, has undergone a major renovation. "The change to the building is pervasive, both subtle and transformational."

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Wednesday
Jul202016

Recep Tayyip Trump 

Contributor Ken W. sees the link between these two stories, both currently appearing in today's top Reuters reports:

"Erdogan targets more than 50,000 in purge after failed Turkish coup" and

"Trump could seek new law to purge government of Obama appointees."

In her lede, Reuters' Emily Flitter has that "could" as a "would":

If he wins the presidency, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump would seek to purge the federal government of officials appointed by Democratic President Barack Obama and could ask Congress to pass legislation making it easier to fire public workers, Trump ally, Chris Christie, said on Tuesday.

Christie, who ... leads Trump's White House transition team, said the campaign was drawing up a list of federal government employees to fire....

'As you know from his other career, Donald likes to fire people,' Christie told a closed-door meeting with dozens of donors at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, according to an audio recording obtained by Reuters and two participants in the meeting.

Trump's transition advisers fear that Obama may convert these [political] appointees to civil servants, who have more job security than officials who have been politically appointed. This would allow officials to keep their jobs in a new, possibly Republican, administration, Christie said.

'It’s called burrowing,' Christie said. 'You take them from the political appointee side into the civil service side, in order to try to set up ... roadblocks for your successor, kind of like when all the Clinton people took all the Ws off the keyboard when George Bush was coming into the White House.'

We're not Turkey -- yet. While Christie's proposed purge does not rise to the level of Ergodan's purges, it is alarming nonetheless. As Christie says, there is a tradition of "burrowing" some political appointees into the civil service. However, those who are transitioned into civil service jobs are hardly Cabinet-level appointees or undersecretaries. Rather, they're functionaries who do the gruntwork of government. Moreover, the Office of Personnel Management routinely sets guidelines and reviews the suitability of each political appointee the administration proposes to convert to a civil servant. So there are strict limits on the extent of the "problem" Christie plans to "fix."

Christie himself is the King of Cronies (which is why we got "Bridgegate" and related indictments) in a state infamous for its tradition of political corruption. Christie's purpose would seem to be to ensure that he & Trump don't miss a single chance to give some useful hack a desk in Washington.

In addition, Christie "justifies" his proposed with a false equivalency. (I'm sure that surprises you.) He claims his purge will prevent minor vandalism/sabotage "kind of like when all the Clinton people took all the Ws off the keyboard." First, "all the Clinton people" did not take "all the Ws" off the keyboards. An initial GAO investigation found no evidence of widespread pranking and concluded that "the condition of the real property was consistent with what we would expect to encounter when tenants vacate office space after an extended occupancy." Only when confederate then-Rep. Bob Barr (Georgia) demanded a more thorough investigation did a subsequent GAO investigation turn up the Ws-off-the-keyboards claim. (No doubt much of the GAO's "evidence" was based on testimony by Bush appointees.) The second GAO report also considered the problem minor & said it occurred mostly in the Executive Office Building, not in the White House.

But here's the thing. It is most likely that the Clinton pranksters, whoever they were, were political appointees who lost their jobs -- that is, ones whom the Clinton administration had not "burrowed" in. If you still had a job _here you had to type reports & memos, etc., _ould you remove the '_' from your keyboard? I didn't think so. 

So here we have bully-in-charge Chris Christie, evidently with the approval of Donald Trump, planning to urge Congress to write new law with the purpose of making it easier for a Trump administration to purge experienced federal employees and replace them with Trump loyalists. To that end, Christie is "drawing up a list," which well may remind you of Richard Nixon's dark-side "enemies list." And Christie's team has begun this effort months before the election. Should Trump win, one has to wonder how long the list of Trump "enemies" would be by the time of the inauguration.

Should Americans be worried about this pre-emptive, authoritarian urge-to-purge? I think so.

Comments Off

Reader Comments (5)

Once purging starts, where does it stop?
Regarding Erdogan, my guess is that most of the purging of educators is happening in Southeast Turkey. When the PKK won its place in parliament, it also got the right to teach in the Kurdish language, and to have other civil issues bilingually written. It looks like Erdogan will really try to purge the Kurds, just like some of his predecessors purged the Greeks and the Armenians.

Another thought regarding purges:
Pol Pot purged the educated classes in Cambodia by simply killing everybody who wore glasses - or so the story goes.

Who knows what comes after the political appointees are purged?

July 20, 2016 | Unregistered CommenterVictoria

There have been a number of stories purporting to outline the "fall" of Chris Christie, who a couple of years ago was considered one of the stars of the Republican Party and a good bet for a presidential run. Now he's making sure the ice in Donald Trump's drink doesn't melt too quickly and sweeping up the trash around the dumpster in back of Trump Tower.

My contention is that Christie hasn't fallen at all. He's always been a low-life piece of shit. He's a serial bully who, during his high times as governor, before Bridgegate, had an aide follow him around with a video camera to catch "moments" (the Christie staff term) when Chrisco Boy would light into some unsuspecting victim, tear them to shreds and then post the videos on YouTube to demonstrate his manly prowess, such as when he attacked a teacher or stalked a citizen down the Jersey boardwalk yelling "That's right, keep walking" like some asshole 7th grader.

A garden variety bully.

But what most other garden variety bullies don't have is power. The kind a governor has. And a bully with the power of the state behind him is the kind of dangerous bully likely to call for purges. Christie has a long history of tormenting and continuing to abuse those he considers enemies (anyone who stands in his way or stands up to him). He goes after them both publicly and privately. So it's no wonder that he goes to the convention with a torch and a pitchfork, encouraging the drooling mob to scream "Lock her up!".

The truly humiliating thing is that, Christie prostrated himself in front of Donaldo and put up with Trump making fat jokes at his expense in the hope of the VP nod. Then Trump screwed him and went with the guy from Indiana.

And rather than try to salvage some dignity, he continues to crawl in the mud at Trump's feet and goes to the convention to whip up hatred and promote a sort of kangaroo court justice in hopes of getting something, anything, any kind of crumb that Trump might deign to throw him, some administration post, maybe a low level cabinet job or an ambassadorial posting to some postage stamp country in the middle of the Indian Ocean. Anything. He'll take it. He's done in New Jersey. They hate him, so he has nowhere else to go.

He hasn't fallen. He's always been low-life scum, trolling around on the bottom of the pond for something to munch on while bullying the smaller fish.

Asshole.

N.B. Thinking of Christie as a recent can't miss golden boy in the Republican Party reminds me of all the other can't miss golden boys--that famous "deep bench"--who have fallen off their pedestals into the muck: Bob McDonnell, Marco Rubio, Bobby Jindal, Scott Walker, Rick Perry, Rick Santorum...if you notice a pattern, there's a good reason for it. These guys are all charlatans and/or crooks. The favored species for Republican politicians.

July 20, 2016 | Unregistered CommenterAkhilleus

I have always been haunted by this scenario told by the trainee judge Raimund Pretzel who was sitting on the library of the Berlin courthouse in 1933 when Brownshirts burst in loudly expelling all the Jews.
"A Brownshirt approached me and stood before my work table. 'Are you Aryan?' Before I had a chance to think I said, yes. He took a close look at my nose––and retired. The blood shot to my face. A moment too late I felt the shame–-the defeat–-what a disgrace to buy, with a reply, the right to stay with my documents in peace."

It was the core of Hitler's cultural revolution of Germany: to purge the German spirit of "alien" influence such as Communism, Marxism, Socialism., liberalism, sexual freedom, etc. All these "isms" ascribed to Jews, despite massive evidence to the contrary.

"Another thought regarding purges:
Pol Pot purged the educated classes in Cambodia by simply killing everybody who wore glasses - or so the story goes." wrote Victoria.

And in Germany the educated Jews were the first to lose their positions in Universities, medical facilities,the courts along with writers. Evidently Dorothy Parker's "guys don't make passes at girls with glasses" was not the pattern followed by Pol Pot and Adolf who sought out the smarties like hunters seek possum.

A little purging here, a bit of it there and then...

July 20, 2016 | Unregistered CommenterPD Pepe

Christie mischaracterizes the typical motive for burrowing. It is not done by an exiting administration to place "roadblocks" in the policy apparatus. It is done by individuals who want to make a career, but who entered the government in political-appointee (rather than career-competitive) status. Such burrowers are in no position to pursue a political agenda contrary to the new administration's agenda: if they seek to do so they are quickly sidelined, since they no longer have political influence or connections.

Technically, when they change status, they do so in a competitive process (however, that process is often stacked in their favor by job descriptions that are tailored to their background/experience.)

Burrowing does take place, all agencies. But it is not to perpetuate a stealth agenda by an outgoing administration. The hard-core political types typically do not burrow but go back to their previous pursuits (academics, lobbyists, think-tankers, business, etc.)

Crisco is just a prick.

July 20, 2016 | Unregistered CommenterPatrick

In Germany the cultivated Jews were the 1st to misplace their positions in Colleges, medicinal services, the judges alongside with authors.

July 22, 2016 | Unregistered Commenterpay for a research paper
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