The Democrat’s Recession: It’s official. Biden’s own Bureau of Economic Analysis, which is part of the Commerce Department, reported that GDP has shrunk 0.9%. This is the second consecutive quarter of economic decline. We are in a recession.
Despite the Biden administration now trying to redefine “recession,” Biden’s own economic advisors have defined recession as two quarters of negative growth.
Biden and the Democrats are trying to redefine it, hide it, in some cases ignore it, call it transitory…everything but admit it…their policies have failed.
The American people are feeling the pain. Every week at the gas pump. Every week at the grocery store. Every day in virtually EVERY purchase they make!
To paraphrase Reagan, a recession is when your neighbor loses his job. A depression is when you lose yours. And recovery is when Joe Biden the Democrats lose their job!
Manchin’s Tax and Spend Deal: Senator Machin is giving into pressure from the liberal elite Democrats in Washington and proposing taxing “the rich,” funding the green new deal, corporate welfare, a shell game on Medicare, price controls, doubling the size of the IRS and all of that during a recession with record inflation.
As if the wealthy with all their tax attorneys will pay a cent more…this will hit the middle class hard!
The Machin Plan is making things worse. Worse for West Virginian’s and worse for Americans.
The Machin backroom deal is going to increase spending, increase the deficit, increase inflation, and will be a direct hit on middle class voters across the country.
The so called “Inflation Reduction Act” doesn’t do a single thing to lower inflation…NOT one.
The Democrats are just out of control. There are no moderate Democrats left. And for the Machins of the world, the partisan pressure from the DC swamp is just too much to handle. Shameful.
Dumping Biden…Already: With all the jockeying going on amongst Democrats, Joe Biden’s food taster is going to have to start working overtime.
At first, we watched Kamala Harris just lie in waiting…and now…10 or more want-a-bees can be sure to be “naturally” campaigning around the country, “just in case.”
Politicos, operatives, and loyalists are hard at work spinning their narratives. The worse inflation, the economy, his approval ratings, and Biden’s health gets…the bolder these non-candidates will start stirring it up.
The direction and future of the Democratic party is at stake…this will be one hell of a fight to watch.
“Backlash” The Counter-Revolutions Driving Politics & Policy: The Mehlman, Castagnetti, Rosen & Thomas group put out another excellent analysis of the geopolitical climate of the day. I’ve attached a link to their PowerPoint here which you can view online or download.
https://mehlmancastagnetti.com/wp-content/uploads/BACKLASH-Mehlman-2022-Q3.pdf
Read more below and follow me on Twitter – @sanuzis
–Saul Anuzis
60 Plus Weekly Video Rewind
In this week’s video rewind- The “skinny” on drug price controls, GDP numbers take us into a recession, and Joe Manchin agrees to new Democrat legislation!
We say goodbye to our good friend and former NY Conservative Party leader Michael Long who passed away at 82.
Links to the articles discussed in the video:
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GDP Report Makes Biden Recession Official
U.S. Gross Domestic Product declined .9 percent in the second quarter of 2022 according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis. Thursday’s report makes for the second consecutive quarter of negative GDP movement, after declining 1.6 percent in the first quarter, and makes the Biden recession official.
The Bureau of Economic Analysis reported that the decrease in real GDP “reflected decreases in private inventory investment, residential fixed investment, federal government spending, state and local government spending, and nonresidential fixed investment that were partly offset by increases in exports and personal consumption expenditures (PCE)” while [i]mports, which are a subtraction in the calculation of GDP, increased.”
As Townhall reported in April, initial data for Q1 showed GDP declining 1.4 percent, a negative read that was revised last month to an even greater contraction of -1.6 percent.
Data be damned, the Biden administration has launched a frenzied attempt to redefine the term “recession” and insists that a recession is not here while the president himself on Wednesday told Americans “we’re not going to be in a recession.”
Never mind, apparently, that Biden’s National Economic Council director Brian Deese stated in 2008 that “economists have a technical definition of recession, which is two consecutive quarters of negative growth.”
The Dems’ New Proposal Does Nothing To Lower InflationIf anything, it will exacerbate the problem
The first thing to remember about the reconciliation bill Sens. Joe Manchin and Chuck Schumer agreed to Wednesday is that, despite its utterly preposterous name, it has absolutely zero to do with inflation. The “Inflation Reduction Act of 2022” is crammed with the very same spending, corporate welfare, price fixing, and tax hikes that were part of Build Back Better—long-desired progressive wish-list agenda items. Pumping hundreds of billions into the economy will do nothing to alleviate inflation. The opposite.
Let’s also remember the Democrats’ deflection on inflation last year—claiming it was “transitory” and “no serious economist” is “suggesting there’s unchecked inflation on the way,” and so on—was all part of a concerted political effort to ignore the problem long enough to cram through a $5.5 trillion iteration of their agenda. And when inflation suddenly became non-transitory, and politically problematic, the Biden administration argued that more spending would relieve inflation. They don’t care about the economy, as long as dependency is being expanded.
The bill is far more likely to spike consumer prices than not. You can hate corporations with the heat of a thousand suns, and grouse about the lack of fairness in the world, but it won’t change the fact that businesses don’t pay taxes, they collect them. The Dems’ bill claims it raises $313 billion with a minimum 15 percent corporate tax rate. Democrats seem to be under the impression that corporations that pay less than 15 percent are evading taxes rather than using completely legal tools like accelerated depreciation or taking advantage of tax credits. Whatever the case, raising corporate taxes means fewer jobs or higher prices. Maybe both. What it won’t do is lower inflation.
The same establishment media that is suddenly unsure how to define a recession is going to falsely claim that the bill has a “deficit reduction package,” even though anyone who’s spent five minutes in D.C. knows that the bill features a bunch of accounting gimmicks that will allow Manchin to go back to West Virginia and claim his concerns about spending are allayed. The deficit reduction number—which relies not only upon raising taxes on consumers but creating a more powerful IRS (and IRS public-sector union)—is plucked from the ether. We have no clue how much new taxes and audits will raise. What we do know is that any new spending program instituted today will exist in perpetuity.
Inside the secret Manchin-Schumer deal: Dems shocked, GOP feels betrayed
West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin (R-W.Va.) and Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) reached their agreement on a major tax and climate package Tuesday evening but kept it a closely-guard secret — giving Democrats just enough time to pass a $280 billion chips and science bill that Republicans would have otherwise blocked.
The announcement of the deal, which would raise $739 billion in new tax revenue, fund an array of new climate provisions and pay down $300 billion of the federal deficit, came as a complete surprise to their Senate colleagues.
“I’d say it’s somewhere between a surprise and a shock,” said Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) after attending a special caucus meeting Thursday morning where Schumer explained the deal.
“I’d say it’s somewhere between a surprise and a shock,” said Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) after attending a special caucus meeting Thursday morning where Schumer explained the deal.
It was all the more surprising because less than two weeks earlier, the talks between Schumer and Manchin fell apart in dramatic fashion, when Schumer signaled he would proceed with a scaled-down budget reconciliation bill that included only prescription drug reform and a two-year extension of expiring Affordable Care Act subsidies.
Manchin admitted Thursday morning that he and Schumer lost their tempers in a heated discussion on July 14 when the Democratic leader accused him of “walking away” from a deal after months of negotiations.
Bidenflation has become Bidencession
They said inflation was temporary. Then they said it was transitory. Now, they are saying the economy is in “anything but” a recession. But it became official on Thursday: Bidenflation has plunged the nation into a Bidencession that began in January and continues today.
With new data showing two consecutive quarters of negative economic growth, the United States has entered its 11th recession since World War II. Try as they might, Biden administration officials have failed to redefine “recession” and convince the public that everything is A-OK. And now, Democrats, unsatisfied with an economy that is merely writhing on the ground in pain, want to kick it while it’s down by raising taxes.
With the price of consumer goods skyrocketing, especially that of gasoline and groceries, and real wages down sharply, the Democrats view this as the moment to squeeze a few more dollars out of taxpayers. They intend to target corporations — that is, the employers who would otherwise be investing in expansion, hiring more employees, or raising wages.
Leave it to Democrats to let their obsession with tax hikes push them toward such political folly during an election year.
Republican leaders in Congress owe a fruit basket to Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) for agreeing to put his own party’s senators and congressmen on the record for supporting a tax increase during such dire economic times. Perhaps Manchin’s true intention is to switch parties after the election. Just as the Senate seemed out of reach for Republicans (thanks to some bad candidates), Democrats seem determined to make it happen anyway.
Dumping Biden…already…wow!?!
The top 10 Democratic candidates for president in 2024, ranked
Three months ago in our quarterly list of the top 10 most likely Democratic candidates for president in 2024, we changed things up. For a while, we had been ranking only the candidates not named Joe Biden. In the seemingly unlikely scenario he didn’t run again, the idea was, here’s who would be next in line.
But that scenario seemed to be growing more likely, so we decided to also include Biden on the list. The reason: There might come a time when the incumbent president isn’t the most likely nominee the next time around, for whatever reason. And his own 2024 maneuverings were suddenly very much worth evaluating in real time.
He’s still the most likely nominee, and he’s still sending the signals that he truly intends to run again. But it’s all looking significantly more tenuous than it was even three months ago.
A poll this week showed that 26 percent of Democrats wanted Biden to be their nominee in 2024, while 64 percent preferred “someone else.” As Biden’s approval rating has fallen, he has also seen erosion on this question — to the point where about the only analog we can find in modern political history is Jimmy Carter.
People like the idea of a hypothetical alternative, often much more than the flawed, actual ones. It’s entirely possible the president’s numbers will recover if inflation wanes. But many — indeed, most — Democrats, who still like Biden personally, would prefer someone else on the ballot in 2024, at least right now. And that’s highly unusual.
Biden and Trump seem set for 2024 rematch — why do their bases say they want anyone else?As one pollster put it, “Voters in general are looking for change.”
Joe Biden and Donald Trump have been headed for another face-off since the day Trump lost to Biden in 2020 — but voters say they are upset with the direction of the country and just as ambivalent about having either Biden or Trump lead their political parties in two years, adding an unusual level of uncertainty to what could be an historic 2024 contest.
A New York Times/Siena College poll earlier this month showed abysmal numbers for both leaders: Biden’s job approval scraped 33%, a new nadir, and 64% of Democrats surveyed said they wanted a different nominee in 2024. Meanwhile, 51% of Republicans said they wanted someone other than Trump to be their standard-bearer in the next presidential election — and despite Biden’s unsteady footing, Trump still narrowly trailed him in a hypothetical head-to-head.
Such stark numbers only supercharged speculation, among politicos, over whether either of the two will be on the ballot come 2024. How unusual would it for them to run against one another again? If not them, then who? And what can change between now and then?
“When you have such a sour, negative political environment, voters in general are looking for change,” said GOP pollster Robert Blizzard. “They’re looking for new voices, new people.”
The underlying reasons for this can be contradictory, given voters’ political differences. There is concern about the economy and rising inflation, about the persistence of the coronavirus, about crime and gun violence — including the habitual spasms of mass shootings — and about abortions, LGBTQ rights and more.
The Fattest ‘Skinny’ Spending Bill Ever
ObamaCare expansions and drug price controls will have huge costs.
Democrats are slowly reconciling themselves to the reality that they may have to settle for passing a “small” partisan healthcare spending bill. But don’t be fooled. Their definition of small has expanded like American clothing sizes, and their so-called skinny bill is an enormous expansion in the entitlement state.
West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin says he’s open to passing a bill that would impose drug price controls to supposedly pay for sweetened ObamaCare insurance subsidies for two years. As with ObamaCare, Americans will find out what’s in this bill after they pass it.
Start with the ObamaCare subsidies. Democrats last March made the premium tax credits for buying insurance on the ObamaCare exchanges far more generous and removed the eligibility limit, which had been 400% of the poverty-line ($54,360 for an individual).
Nearly five million enrollees with incomes below 150% of the poverty line paid no premiums for plans this year. The subsidies have reduced premiums for millions of Americans by thousands of dollars. But the sweetened subsidies are set to expire at the end of this year, setting up a subsidy cliff we warned about last March. Democrats now want to extend the subsidies for another two years to delay the cliff they created. Two years from now they’ll do it again, ad infinitum.
The biggest beneficiaries have been insurers that pocketed the subsidies and raised premiums. The Congressional Budget Office this spring raised its estimate for ObamaCare exchange spending by $144 billion over the next decade from higher premiums and enrollment. It’s laughable for Democrats to claim that extending the subsidies for two years will cost a mere $40 billion.
It gets worse. More than 20 million Americans now enrolled in Medicaid will likely lose coverage as soon as the public-health emergency ends. Most will qualify for the expanded ObamaCare subsidies. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimates that extending all of this would cost about $45 billion next year and $495 billion over a decade.
Democrats declare needless emergencies — on COVID and maybe climate change — to grab power
An emergency is a dangerous situation requiring action. Someone tell our elected officials — they clearly don’t know the meaning of the term.
Last week, President Joe Biden considered declaring climate change an “emergency.” Pressured by his party’s leftist flank, which can’t enact climate-change legislation and wants a work-around where it doesn’t have to persuade people to accept its ideas, the president ultimately decided to hold off.
But something either is an emergency or isn’t. The president being able to control the timing of that emergency announcement means it isn’t.
Putting aside that there’s no evidence that any climate proposals, even the radical Green New Deal, would have any effect on global climate change, declaring something an emergency when it’s not is simply a naked power grab.
I understand the president’s confusion over what constitutes an emergency. We’ve been living under just this kind of anti-democratic diktat for more than two years.
When COVID hit in early 2020, it was easy to understand why governments declared emergencies across the country. A new virus was spreading, and we had no idea what it was. We allowed our elected officials extra powers to deal with it. That was a mistake.
The GOP’s Coming U.S. Senate Landslide
If the 2022 Senate elections are analyzed and run as big, nationalized races, the Democrats will likely lose the Senate by a wide margin.
There is consensus that U.S. House Republicans will win a majority this fall, and Kevin McCarthy will be the next Speaker of the House.
There is a lot more confusion about the U.S. Senate races. Republicans are handwringing and Democrats are hopeful as they think through the state-by-state races for U.S. Senate.
But there’s a flaw in the popular Senate race analysis. Most people are thinking about Senate races as small, individual contests. When you think of each race as small and individual, there is hope the Democrats could keep the current 50-50 split – or lose only a few seats. This kind of small race analysis emphasizes candidate quality, money raised, and current polling (that is inconclusive at best).
If the 2022 Senate elections are analyzed and run as a big, nationalized races, the Democrats will likely lose the Senate by a wide margin.
When you have 9.1 percent inflation (compared to 1.4 percent inflation when Donald Trump left office), Democrat candidates at any level should feel like they are in trouble. The highest price of gasoline in history (more than double the price two years ago) does not help them.
And those aren’t the only problems Americans are seeing and feeling everyday. Add skyrocketing murder, rape, and robbery rates; millions of people entering the country illegally receiving taxpayer-funded benefits, and continuing labor and supply chain disruptions caused by destructive government programs. Further, consider the unpopular cultural policies being implemented by federal bureaucrats with aggressive agendas…
… We are now on the edge of another American tsunami. As I wrote in my new book, “Defeating Big Government Socialism: Saving America’s Future,” there is an emerging tidal wave of Democrats, Republicans, and independents who want us to come together and solve problems with common sense rather than Washington sense. They are totally sick of Washington sense.
Some 87 percent of Americans want to restore the America that works. By 91 percent to 6 percent, the American people agree with Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. that the content of our character matters far more than the color of our skin.
This American tsunami is going to defeat an amazing number of sitting Democrat Senators and hopeful Democrat candidates.
So, the next time you hear some detailed state-by-state analysis, just remember they are discussing small races in a big race world.
Putin’s New Police State – In the Shadow of War, the FSB Embraces Stalin’s Methods
Since the spring of 2022, a terrifying new force has coursed through Russian society. Activists who have protested the “special operation” in Ukraine are being rounded up. Opponents of the regime and even ordinary citizens who have had unauthorized foreign contacts are being thrown into Moscow’s Lefortovo Prison, where in Stalinist times, political prisoners were tortured and executed. Special border agents have been interrogating and intimidating Russians who are trying to leave or return. But even those who have made it out are not safe; exiles who have spoken out are being investigated, and their relatives in Russia are being harassed by the regime. And security police are cracking down on Russian companies that buy foreign rather than Russian raw materials and hardware.
As Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine enters its sixth month, a dramatic shift has occurred in the Kremlin’s security bureaucracy, and it has centered on the agency closest to Putin himself: the Federal Security Service, or FSB. When the war began, the Kremlin planned to use the FSB mainly in Ukraine, as a special operations force that would consolidate a rapid Russian conquest. According to the plan, the Russian tanks rolling into Ukraine would trigger regime change in Kyiv, and a new pro-Moscow leadership, sponsored by FSB spymasters, would take control of the country. At the time, it was the FSB’s foreign intelligence branch—the Fifth Service—that was to carry out this task. It was the only major FSB department, out of a dozen, that was directly involved in preparing for the war.
As those plans faltered, however, Putin crafted a different, far more comprehensive mission for the FSB: it would be at the forefront of Russia’s total war effort at home as well as its intelligence operations in Ukraine. And every branch of the service would now be involved. Running the new crackdowns in Russia are the FSB’s counterterrorism unit, its counterintelligence service, and its investigative department. Meanwhile, FSB special forces and the military counterintelligence branch are running operations targeting Ukrainian service people in occupied territories and beyond, recruiting Ukrainian agents, and processing those whom the FSB hopes to see prosecuted in show trials. FSB agents are stationed at Russia’s borders, and the Economic Security Service, which is often considered the most corrupt department of the FSB, has been vigorously enforcing Russia’s economic policies. At FSB headquarters at Lubyanka Square in Moscow, the agency’s rank and file have been told to prepare for three-month tours of duty in the occupied territories.
R.I.P. Michael Long: 60 Plus Association Board Member and longtime Chairman of the New York Conservative Party. A great friend and patriot.
Former NY Conservative Party leader Michael Long dead at 82
Former state Conservative Party Chairman Michael Long — a powerful force in New York politics who was instrumental in getting Republican George Pataki elected governor — died Sunday morning after a long illness. He was 82.
The Brooklyn-born political operative headed the Conservative Party for more than 30 years, from 1988 to 2019, and served a stint as an at-large member of the New York City Council from 1981-83.
He served in the US Marines from 1959-1961 and advocated for a strong American military.
Long was a fixture in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, where he and his brother Tom owned Long’s Wines and Liquors on Fifth Avenue and 79th Street. He later moved to Breezy Point, Queens.
A champion of small-business interests, he and his brother previously owned an ice cream parlor in Cypress Hills, Brooklyn.
It was Long’s Conservative Party ballot line that helped Republican Pataki topple three-term Democratic incumbent Mario Cuomo, the father of former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, for the governorship in 1994. Pataki would go on to serve three terms.
The Conservative Party ballot line earlier also was crucial in electing Republican Al D’Amato to three terms in the US Senate.
Cities With Most Murders 2022 – Common Denominator???
The United States is the 128th safest country in the world according to the Global Peace Index. The US’s safety rank has decreased each year since 2016. A large factor in determining the safety index of countries is their murder rate.
The murder rate varies greatly between cities in the United States. Violent crime rates escalated after World War II and peaked between the 1970s and 1990s.
Crime rates overall are affected by several factors. Factors that influence crime rates include lower arrest probabilities, social influences, and family structures. Crime in metropolitan statistical areas tends to be above the national average. Many attribute the high violent crime rates to gangs and gang violence in urban areas. The United States also has a mass shooting occur, on average, every 200 days. These mass shootings drastically bring up murder rates in the cities that they occur in.
A common misconception is that the cities with larger populations have the highest murder rates. New York City, for example, has a population of 8.39 million people but with 300 murders and a murder rate of 3.4 in 2017, it doesn’t even make it into the top 50 cities.
The twenty cities in the United States with the highest murder rates (murders per 100,000 people) are:
The New Age of Orwellianism
Community organizer and left-wing social activist Saul Alinsky wrote, in his 1971 book Rules for Radicals, that “he who controls the language controls the masses.” Alinsky, whose work profoundly influenced at least one notable fellow Chicagoan, Barack Obama, was in that quip channeling George Orwell’s famous dystopian novel, 1984. “Newspeak,” the language of Orwell’s fictional single-political party superstate, was a tool devised for monitoring the people’s communications, prosecuting “thoughtcrimes,” and ultimately controlling and dictating the people’s very beliefs.
Conservatives have taken pleasure in poking fun at the modern Left’s “Orwellian” tendencies—perhaps too much, actually, as overuse of the accusation has had the effect of limiting its potency. But as the woke ideology metastasizes within the American Left like the cancer it is, and as censors increasingly clamp down on anything sniffing of dissent to the regime’s orthodoxy, it is now clear that we are in a new age of Orwellianism. In this new age, the regime and its enforcers pursue the suffusion of its orthodoxy at any cost, gaslighting dissenters into not believing their own lying eyes.
