Location: A simple man leading a complicated life....
Exp:
Given how toxic American politics is, this was refreshing to see and read. Maybe there's hope for America
Johnson: ‘The person on the other side of the aisle is not an enemy’
Quote:
In an interview with Politico, Johnson told an anecdote about former President Reagan and Democratic Speaker Tip O’Neill (Mass.) meeting after the attempted assassination of Reagan.
“They didn’t agree on almost anything, but they had respect for one another. And I think we’ve got to get back to that. I think America needs more of that,” he said.
“The person on the other side of the aisle is not an enemy. They’re a fellow American,” Johnson continued. “Our enemies are like Hamas and Hezbollah and the people who are trying to kill us. These are our political adversaries.”
Johnson, who took the gavel just more than six months ago, has had a rocky journey leading the lower chamber.
After the historic ouster of former Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), Johnson earned enough support from House Republicans to become leader. Since then, he’s played tug of war with conservatives, finally passing desperately needed aid for Ukraine in its war with Russia but also balancing Republican demands for more border security.
Fellow Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (Ga.) forced a vote to vacate Johnson on Wednesday after filing a motion more than a month ago.
The House voted overwhelmingly to protect Johnson from Greene’s ousting. Even former President Trump, an ally of Greene’s, supported keeping Johnson in power.
Johnson sat down for the interview with Politico just hours after the vote.
“Look, we have a job to do here. We have to govern. I’m glad that that was done. Let’s rip the Band-Aid off and get it done,” Johnson said. “I regret that it had to come to that.”
Johnson said he spoke with Greene and other frustrated Republicans and takes their thoughts, suggestions and ideas and tries to implement them “when they’re constructive.”
He told them after the vote that he wouldn’t carry a grudge and isn’t angry about the attempt to remove him from his job. House Republicans must work together because of their razor-thin majority, he said.
“We have got to have a functioning Congress, and I think the landslide vote against removing the Speaker is a signal that I think people on both sides of the aisle obviously understand this is not a time for games,” Johnson said.
As Donald Trump sat with some of the country’s top oil executives at his Mar-a-Lago Club last month, one executive complained about how they continued to face burdensome environmental regulations despite spending $400 million to lobby the Biden administration in the last year.
Trump’s response stunned several of the executives in the room overlooking the ocean: You all are wealthy enough, he said, that you should raise $1 billion to return me to the White House. At the dinner, he vowed to immediately reverse dozens of President Biden’s environmental rules and policies and stop new ones from being enacted, according to people with knowledge of the meeting, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe a private conversation.
Giving $1 billion would be a “deal,” Trump said, because of the taxation and regulation they would avoid thanks to him, according to the people.
Trump’s remarkably blunt and transactional pitch reveals how the former president is targeting the oil industry to finance his reelection bid. At the same time, he has turned to the industry to help shape his environmental agenda for a second term, including the rollbacks of some of Biden’s signature achievements on clean energy and electric vehicles.”
You just imagine anyone else doing this, at any other point in history, how quickly they'd be dumped. Yet Trump gets away with saying the quite part loud, with zero shame. Bribe me. I'm your guy.
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Some things are a matter of reason, others a matter of debate. Then there are those that only the heart knows, in that indescribable way, are true.
I was always told the economy was such a big deal breaker in elections.
But to have such different track records in that regard and still have it be such a tight race, maybe even a Trump lead, I guess it really doesn't mean much of anything after all.
It is, but mainly in the way voters interact with it. The stock market being at all time highs and GDP growing quickly doesn't have much direct relevance to the average voter. They think in terms of income and the cost of things, and in those cases the economy hasn't been that great for a number of reasons:
1) Real wages (i.e. adjusted for inflation) have been stagnant under Biden and are currently below where they were pre-pandemic. Whereas in Trump's first 3 years, they increased by about 5% (I've excluded 2020 because real wages got temporarily distorted upwards because of the pandemic). And the effect is even more pronounced in a lot of the swing states.
2) Inflation is still elevated. It's down from where it was, but people are still feeling the fact that the CPI has increased by almost 20% in the last 3 years. For context, the growth in the CPI from 2021 to now is the same as the growth in the CPI from 2008 to 2021.
3) Interest rates have increased extremely quickly, making existing debt cost more to service and has made home ownership much more difficult for first-time buyers than it was even 3-4 years ago.
So sure, there has been a lot of growth in macroeconomic terms, but almost all of it is ending up in the pockets of the rich and people who own capital. Obviously little of that has to do with who was President, and by basically any measure it would have been worse if Trump had gotten re-elected (and much of what we are seeing is after effects of his terrible policies), but that's not how voters think.
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It is, but mainly in the way voters interact with it. The stock market being at all time highs and GDP growing quickly doesn't have much direct relevance to the average voter. They think in terms of income and the cost of things, and in those cases the economy hasn't been that great for a number of reasons:
1) Real wages (i.e. adjusted for inflation) have been stagnant under Biden and are currently below where they were pre-pandemic. Whereas in Trump's first 3 years, they increased by about 5% (I've excluded 2020 because real wages got temporarily distorted upwards because of the pandemic). And the effect is even more pronounced in a lot of the swing states.
2) Inflation is still elevated. It's down from where it was, but people are still feeling the fact that the CPI has increased by almost 20% in the last 3 years. For context, the growth in the CPI from 2021 to now is the same as the growth in the CPI from 2008 to 2021.
3) Interest rates have increased extremely quickly, making existing debt cost more to service and has made home ownership much more difficult for first-time buyers than it was even 3-4 years ago.
So sure, there has been a lot of growth in macroeconomic terms, but almost all of it is ending up in the pockets of the rich and people who own capital. Obviously little of that has to do with who was President, and by basically any measure it would have been worse if Trump had gotten re-elected (and much of what we are seeing is after effects of his terrible policies), but that's not how voters think.
I'm not so sure it's as much grounded in statistical, dinner table, or even real world issues. It's a rhetorical issue just like crime. When looking at polling, most people say they are better off than 4 years ago, but the "economy" is worse. It's simply not grounded in reality, it's grounded in coffee shop conversations and social media memes. Look at public attitudes on crime and they follow a discourse that just isn't grounded in fact.
Years of artificially low tax rates on corporations and the wealthy has greatly exacerbated the inflation problem. The imbalance between spending and revenues has grown to a very unhealthy level; it started with the Bush administration, continued through Obama's administration, and got put on steroids by Trump & the GOP. Biden did not have the votes in the senate to reverse the tax cuts, but do most Americans know this or even care? My guess is they probably don't.
I think she is. She has this backlog of eight substantive pending motions she has yet to decide. Further to that her rulings have been questioned with comments of she doesn't know what she's doing.
I don't understand how "judge was appointed by the defendant" is not enough to force a recusal in the first place. Same with the 3 appointees on the Supreme Court. Why are they allowed to have an opinion at all? There is a very clear conflict of interest.
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I was always told the economy was such a big deal breaker in elections.
But to have such different track records in that regard and still have it be such a tight race, maybe even a Trump lead, I guess it really doesn't mean much of anything after all.
As someone currently in the finance world where the conservative viewpoint reigns supreme, I can tell you the economy was never relevant. It's the *assumption* of a better economy under a Republican president that drives the narrative. So the economy could be great under Biden, but the baseline assumption of conservatives *and the press* will be that the economy will get a bump with a Republican president's election.
Calculatedrisk website has shown how wrong this viewpoint is, but it's just one of those things that is propagated as conventional wisdom. It's not about the economy itself, but about the narrative surrounding the economy. Narratives don't need to be rooted in reality.
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Location: A simple man leading a complicated life....
Exp:
Trump had been making fun of Biden at his campaign rallies, suggesting that the Democratic president was unwilling to debate him. Now Trump advisers are not happy.
That’s much less annoying than when Trump calls Biden the stupidest, most crooked president in American history. Stupidest? That’s Trump. Crooked? Trump wrote the book on corruption and grift.
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