[jjbrr]

 kenberg, on 2019-July-06, 06:28, said:

My first thought when I read about ramming the ramparts and taking over the airports in 1776 were that it was the work of a prankster and I still think that is likely. I have seen Trump reading, as best he can, prepared remarks. He very obviously not only doesn't mean what he says, he doesn't even listen to what he is saying, he doesn't know what he says, he doesn't care what he says. He was told to give this speech and he does it like a thirteen year old required to read aloud some stupid poem that he has no interest in at all. So I can imagine someone on the speech writing staff making a bet with friends on what words he can put into the president's mouth. Ding dong the witch is dead? Why not?

Na, I think this other guy nailed it on the head.

Quote

So I'm pretty sure I know exactly what happened here. I haven't seen anyone else post about this, but as a teacher who works with struggling readers, I know that highly literate people (including most general-level teachers) have a hard time understanding how someone like this approaches written text, since for many of us reading comes so naturally. From my perspective it's pretty easy to see why Trump said this weird thing, given what we know about him. We know:

• Donald Trump does not read well. Like most of the students I work with, he avoids reading both because he wants to avoid being embarrassed, and because reading costs him a lot more mental energy than for proficient readers. We know from lots of different reports that his staff does not give him anything long or complex to read, because of this avoidance.
  
• For this reason, when Trump does have to read something out loud, it is clear that he is not processing the meaning of what he is saying. For a struggling reader, all their concentration goes into pronouncing the words out loud, and simultaneously processing the meaning is very difficult. We see this when is giving a prepared speech and mispronounces a word in a way that makes no sense. A proficient reader would immediately stop and self-correct. Trump often doesn't, because he is not processing what he is saying. Other times I know I've heard him notice his mistake, but instead of correcting it, he covers it up with a bit of lame word-play, pretending that the mistake was intentional: "through their lives... and though their lives." "authority... and authoritarian powers." "They sacrifice every day for the furniture... and future of our children." It's Trump's go-to move when he misreads a word.
  
• There are other times when he reacts to a line in his speech like he hasn't heard it before. He noticeably stops and inserts a comment of his own before going back to the reading. He does not know how to gracefully glide between reading and impromptu speaking, since reading is so unnatural for him.
  
• Trump also has a relatively small vocabulary. Remember his remarks about "the oranges of the Mueller report." He was parroting something that he had heard before, but not having a firm grasp of the word "origins," he used a more familiar word instead, because that was how his mind remembered the word.
  
• The speech he was giving made heavy use of language from "The Star Spangled Banner." For many struggling readers, this would be helpful, since it would rely on familiar chunks of language that would reduce the mental load of reading it. However, we've seen that Trump does not know the words to the anthem. He has tried and failed to sing along with it but couldn't fake it very well.

Keeping all that in mind, let's look at what he said:

Quote

Our army manned the air, it rammed the ramparts, it took over the airports, it did everything it had to do, and at Fort McHenry, under the rockets’ red glare, it had nothing but victory.

Based on my experience, here's what I think happened, step by step.

Quote

Our army manned the air

Here I think it's likely that Trump skipped a line on his teleprompter. The line was probably "manned the ramparts," and later on I'm guessing there was a reference to "bombs bursting in air." We all do this sometimes, but struggling readers do it a whole lot more. And furthermore, when a proficient reader makes this mistake they can quickly self-correct, but someone like Trump, who is not totally processing the meaning of what he is reading, can get totally derailed when they do this.

Quote

it rammed the ramparts

Trump seems to have noticed that "manned the air" was a mistake, and he went back to do the line over. But he got "manned" and "ramparts" mixed up, so it came out as "rammed." But he's immediately fallen into another pit: the word "ramparts." He doesn't know what it means. It's a very uncommon word that most Americans only know from this line in "The Star Spangled Banner." Trump, however, doesn't even know that, since he has never learned the words to the song. So I think that at this point, already a little flustered from covering up his last mistake, he thinks he has mis-read another word. "Ramparts?" I must have misread something, he thinks to himself.

Quote

it took over the airports

This is a repair strategy that Trump has used in the past. Mess up a word? Pretend it was the first in a sequence of rhyming or similar words and carry on from there. What's a word he knows that sounds like ramparts? Airports. And "air" was already on his mind from just before, when he accidentally read "manned the air." So they manned the ramparts, they took over the airports. He's hoping that nobody will notice. It's worked before.

Quote

it did everything it had to do

This sounds like an impromptu comment that he inserted into the written text. It uses the simple and non-specific language that he is known for in his impromptu speeches. The comment bought him a second where he could find his place after getting completely lost before.

Quote

and at Fort McHenry, under the rockets’ red glare, it had nothing but victory.

And now he's found his place again. He's back to the written speech that uses lines from "The Star Spangled Banner." He might not even realize how ridiculous his last few sentences have sounded, since again, he's not really able to process the meaning of what he is saying.

My kiddos who are in this situation have a hard time. I and their other teachers have to work really hard to help them learn strategies to overcome these difficulties with the way they process written text. It requires just as much hard work on the kids' part. I strongly suspect that Donald Trump never went through this process and remains in a not fully literate state. Usually we're afraid that someone who graduates with this level of reading ability will have very limited career prospects in the future.

[Winstonm]

So many fires and only two feet - and running out of "fixers":

Quote

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) signed a bill Monday that permits the state to release President Donald Trump’s state tax returns.

The bill specifically requires New York’s tax commissioner to release any state tax return requested by the Joint Committee on Taxation, the Senate Finance Committee and the House Ways and Means Committee for any “specified and legitimate legislative purpose.”

[barmar]

Quote

Usually we're afraid that someone who graduates with this level of reading ability will have very limited career prospects in the future.

A silver (or gold in Trump's case) spoon can make up for quite a bit.

You'd think that Trump would have learned better coping strategies in his career, as public speaking is a regular activity of corporate CEOs. But Trump has managed to parlay his inherited wealth and charisma into a successful career, without having to become really educated. He won the presidency just by appealing to common people with his bluster.

[kenberg]

 jjbrr, on 2019-July-08, 09:00, said:

Na, I think this other guy nailed it on the head.

I thank you for this, it sounds exactly right. Listening to Trump read a prepared speech has always made me queasy, apart from the content. I have never been able to identify exactly what was troubling me, but it seemed highly unnatural, something he had to do but wished very much to not do. I have known people with reading difficulties and, now that I think about their difficulties, this seems to be a likely explanation. As mentioned, it wasn't just the airports. Rammed the ramparts? Really? The offered explanation makes sense and agrees with experience.

[awm]

 y66, on 2019-July-08, 07:54, said:

From Maureen Dowd's July 6 interview with Nancy Pelosi:


A master class in House leadership? We'll see. But definitely an impressive work ethic by an old Baltimorean.

The view from Pelosi's left is not so flattering. If the Democrats won't stand up to Trump when he's running actual concentration camps on the border, when will they do anything?

[Winstonm]

 awm, on 2019-July-08, 12:00, said:

The view from Pelosi's left is not so flattering. If the Democrats won't stand up to Trump when he's running actual concentration camps on the border, when will they do anything?

It is curious that with Nancy Pelosi we are seeing a live demonstration of the shameless boast made by Biden that he had made deals with racists, as if that was a positive, and it cost him his huge lead in the polls.

Pelosi is quickly taking the air out of the resistance balloon. And for what purpose?

[Winstonm]

Trump's Himmler:

Quote

The bad faith evident in the Census affair has echoes in the Justice Department’s treatment of the lawsuit brought by Republican-led states against the Affordable Care Act. The lawsuit’s argument has been denounced as profoundly absurd even by opponents of the law, but a Texas judge ruled against the ACA, and the appeal will be heard this week.

A final decision wiping away the law could unleash havoc. But Trump embraced the lawsuit, and Barr’s Justice Department is supporting him by refusing to defend the ACA in court and by filing a brief in support of the lawsuit.

This, too, may have alienated career Justice Department lawyers: The Times now reports that some of them had hoped Barr would act as a “buffer” against adopting legally indefensible positions, but his stance on the ACA has shattered such illusions.

Nicholas Bagley, a law professor at the University of Michigan and a former Justice Department lawyer, suggested the two cases are having a similar corrupting influence.

“In both, Barr directed his lawyers to make bad-faith arguments, just because Trump said so,” Bagley told me. “That’s a blow to the integrity of the Justice Department and a threat to the rule of law.”


Finally, there’s Barr’s enabling of Trump’s attacks on the rule of law. Barr has tried to lend credibility to Trump’s conspiracy theory that law enforcement tried to derail his candidacy, which suggests that his ongoing review of the genesis of the Russia investigation may be tailored to baselessly undermine perceptions of the probe’s legitimacy.

Barr has also suggested that Trump’s “witch hunt” language is reasonable, and has insisted we must appreciate how victimized Trump felt by the probe when evaluating his obstruction of it. Arguably, these things seem designed to legitimize Trump’s thoroughly corrupt attacks on Barr’s own Justice Department.

“This is not business as usual,” Bagley told me, in summing up all we’ve seen. Indeed it isn’t — and we still haven’t seen how much damage it could yet do.

my emphasis

[Winstonm]

A closer look at reality instead of hype:

Quote

Job growth has actually slowed under Trump. This isn’t necessarily a problem. The economy has created jobs consistently since 2010, with the peak coming in 2014, when companies created 3 million jobs, or 251,000 per month. During the last 12 months, employers created 2.3 million jobs, or 192,000 per month. During the first six months of 2019, the pace has slowed further to 172,000 new jobs per month.

my emphasis

[johnu]

 Winstonm, on 2019-July-08, 13:34, said:

Trump's Himmler:

my emphasis

A small correction, Barr is Dennison's Hans Frank.

Hitler’s Lawyer

Quote

I have no conscience; Adolf Hitler is my conscience.


Hans Frank, 1935

Quote

Although Frank tried to protect procedural legal rights for ethnic Germans, he made Adolf Hitler’s will the ultimate source of German law.

Dennison's government paid personal lawyer certainly fits this description.

[johnu]

Routine Dennison lie:

Fact check: Trump promotes fake Ronald Reagan quote about him

Quote

Attached to the tweet was a photo of Trump and Reagan shaking hands -- with a supposed Reagan quote superimposed on top.
"For the life of me, and I'll never know how to explain it, when I met that young man, I felt like I was the one shaking hands with the president," the supposed quote read.

Quote

The fake Reagan quote has been debunked by fact-checkers since 2016, when it began spreading in pro-Trump circles on Facebook. Joanne Drake, chief administrative officer of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute, told fact-check website PolitiFact in February, "He did not ever say that about Donald Trump."

Funny, I recall Reagan saying this about Dennison: "For the life of me, and I'll never know how to explain it, when I met that young man, I felt like I was the one shaking hands with a future convicted criminal who will disgrace himself by selling out his country for profit and Kompromat."

[y66]

From David Leonhardt at NYT:

Quote

Between 9:00 and 10:00 yesterday morning, more than 3 inches of rain fell in Washington, D.C. As a point of comparison, only eight July days have experienced that much rainfall over the last century and a half in Washington — and that was over the course of the whole day.

Oh, and two of those eight days occurred in the past two years.

On my street, there was a small stream between parked cars and the curb. On other streets, closer to the water, the situation was far worse. “After four inches of heavy rain fell in an hour, there was mayhem: dozens of water rescues throughout the region, standstill traffic along major highways, bus route cancellations” and thousands of people without power, The Washington Post reported early yesterday. “Several people were rescued from the rooftops of their cars as they climbed out, trying to avoid the water along Canal Road.”

Extreme rain is the new normal, as I’ve written before. Warm air can carry more water than cold air, and climate change has warmed the air. No wonder the number of extreme rainstorms has jumped by roughly one third since the early 1980s, according to one measure.

Is every one of these storms a result of climate change? Of course not. But the trend is. Days like yesterday in Washington — or floods like the ones that the Midwest, Houston, Florida and many other places have endured in recent years — are becoming the very frightening new normal.

In response, President Trump has decided to make things worse — by rolling back environmental regulations and making it easier for polluters to pollute more. He is also lying about what his administration is really doing.

Not long after the torrential rain stopped yesterday, Trump gave a speech on his environmental policy, because his political advisers told him the subject is a liability for his re-election campaign. While giving the speech, as Katie Rogers and Coral Davenport of The Times reported, he was “flanked by his two senior environmental officials — one a former lobbyist for the coal industry and the other a former oil lobbyist.”

Both Kate Grumke of PBS NewsHour and Rebecca Leber of Mother Jones compare Trump’s misleading statements — on clean air, ocean pollution and more — with his actual record.

The New Republic’s Emily Atkin argues that Trump’s speech is part of Republican lawmakers’ changing rhetoric on climate change. While these politicians once denied climate change outright, they now often try subtler ways of skirting responsibility, Atkin writes: “They admit that climate change is real, and even that humans are responsible — just not humans in America.”

“The fact that Trump is making this sorry attempt to shore up his environmental credentials shows that he sees the writing on the wall,” the Sunrise Movement, a youth-led climate activist group, said yesterday. (Thanks to Grist’s Zoya Teirstein for pointing out the quotation.)

[Winstonm]

The direct links that led Sean Hannity and Fox News to promote and spread a Russian intelligence lie as if it were genuine:

Yahoo: Michael Isikoff

Quote

WASHINGTON — In the summer of 2016, Russian intelligence agents secretly planted a fake report claiming that Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich was gunned down by a squad of assassins working for Hillary Clinton, giving rise to a notorious conspiracy theory that captivated conservative activists and was later promoted from inside President Trump’s White House, a Yahoo News investigation has found.

Russia’s foreign intelligence service, known as the SVR, first circulated a phony “bulletin” — disguised to read as a real intelligence report —about the alleged murder of the former DNC staffer on July 13, 2016, according to the U.S. federal prosecutor who was in charge of the Rich case. That was just three days after Rich, 27, was killed in what police believed was a botched robbery while walking home to his group house in the Bloomingdale neighborhood of Washington, D.C., about 30 blocks north of the Capitol.

The purported details in the SVR account seemed improbable on their face: that Rich, a data director in the DNC’s voter protection division, was on his way to alert the FBI to corrupt dealings by Clinton when he was slain in the early hours of a Sunday morning by the former secretary of state’s hit squad.

Yet in a graphic example of how fake news infects the internet, those precise details popped up the same day on an obscure website, whatdoesitmean.com, that is a frequent vehicle for Russian propaganda. The website’s article, which attributed its claims to “Russian intelligence,” was the first known instance of Rich’s murder being publicly linked to a political conspiracy.

“To me, having a foreign intelligence agency set up one of my decedents with lies and planting false stories, to me that’s pretty outrageous,” said Deborah Sines, the former assistant U.S. attorney in charge of the Rich case until her retirement last year. “Maybe other people don’t think it’s that outrageous. I did ... once it became clear to me that this was coming from the SVR, then that triggers a lot of very serious [questions about] ‘What do I do with this?’”

The previously unreported role of Russian intelligence in creating and fostering one of the most insidious conspiracy theories to arise out of the 2016 election is disclosed in “Yahoo News presents: Conspiracyland,” a six-part series by the news organization’s podcast “Skullduggery” that debuts this week on the third anniversary of Rich’s murder.

The Russian effort to exploit Rich’s tragic death didn’t stop with the fake SVR bulletin. Over the course of the next two and a half years, the Russian government-owned media organizations RT and Sputnik repeatedly played up stories that baselessly alleged that Rich, a relatively junior-level staffer, was the source of Democratic Party emails that had been leaked to WikiLeaks. It was an idea first floated by WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who on Aug. 9, 2016, announced a $20,000 reward for information about Rich’s murder, saying — somewhat cryptically — that “our sources take risks.”

At the same time, online trolls working in St. Petersburg, Russia, for the Internet Research Agency (IRA) — the same shadowy outfit that conducted the Russian social media operation during the 2016 election — aggressively boosted the conspiracy theories. IRA-created fake accounts, masquerading as those of American citizens or political groups, tweeted and retweeted more than 2,000 times about Rich, helping to keep the bogus claims about his death in the social media bloodstream, according to an analysis of a database of Russia troll accounts by Yahoo News.

Speaking publicly about the case for the first time, Sines, the former prosecutor, said that the Russian conspiracy-mongering vastly complicated her efforts to solve the murder by forcing her and the Washington, D.C., police department to investigate a blizzard of false allegations in order to make sure there was nothing to any of them. “To waste your time investigating BS is just horrible,” said Sines.

The Russian-inspired conspiracy theories also have had a devastating effect on the Rich family, especially after the theories migrated to alt-right websites and, ultimately, primetime Fox News shows. As they did so, there were repeated suggestions by alt-right commentators that the DNC staffer’s parents and brother were concealing information about his conduct.

“You’re used, you’re lied to, you’re a pawn in your own son’s death,” said Mary Rich, Seth Rich’s mother, who, along with her husband, Joel, was interviewed for the podcast. “I wish they had the chance to experience the hell we have gone through. Because this is worse than losing my son the first time. This is like losing him all over again.”

Mary Rich, mother of Seth Rich, at a press conference in Washington, Aug. 1, 2016. (Photo: Michael Robinson Chavez/Washington Post via Getty Images)
In her efforts to better understand where the conspiracy theories were coming from, Sines used her security clearance to access copies of two SVR intelligence reports about Seth Rich that had been intercepted by U.S. intelligence officials. She later wrote a memo documenting the Russian role in fomenting the conspiracy theories that she sent to the Justice Department’s national security division, and personally briefed special counsel Robert Mueller’s prosecutors on her findings.

“It appeared to me that it was a very clear campaign to deflect an ongoing federal criminal investigation,” Sines said. “So then you have to look at why is Russia doing this? … It’s not rocket science before you add it up and you go, ‘Oh, if Seth is the leaker to WikiLeaks — it doesn’t have anything to do with the Russians. So of course Russia’s interest in doing this is incredibly transparent.” The Russian strategy, Sines said, was diabolically simple: “Let’s blame it on Seth Rich. He’s a very convenient target.”

The “Conspiracyland” podcast traces the spread of the conspiracy theories about Rich. From their origins as a Russian disinformation plant, the bogus theories about his murder emerged as a persistent theme on alt-right websites and then were fanned by right-wing conspiracy entrepreneurs such as Alex Jones of Infowars and Matt Couch, the founder of an Arkansas-based group called America First Media, which bills itself as “the leading investigative team in America in the Seth Rich murder.”

Along the way, the idea that Rich was murdered in retaliation for leaking DNC emails to WikiLeaks was championed by multiple allies of Trump, including Roger Stone. The same day Assange falsely hinted that Rich may have been his source for DNC emails, Stone tweeted a picture of Rich, calling the late DNC staffer in a tweet “another dead body in the Clinton’s wake.” He then added: “Coincidence? I think not.”

Roger Stone at Trump Tower, Dec. 6, 2016. (Photo: Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
Within months, the Rich conspiracy story was also being quietly promoted inside Trump’s White House. Questions about whether the White House pushed the conspiracy theories about Rich have been raised periodically over the last two and a half years — and were consistently denied by White House officials. But the Yahoo News investigation uncovered new evidence that the false claim that Rich was the victim of a political assassination was advanced by one of the White House’s most senior officials at the time.

“Huge story … he was a Bernie guy … it was a contract kill, obviously,” then-White House chief strategist Steve Bannon texted to a CBS “60 Minutes” producer about Rich on March 17, 2017, according to some of Bannon’s text messages that were reviewed by Yahoo News. (Bannon did not respond to requests for comment.)

The conspiracy claims reached their zenith in May 2017 — the same week as Mueller’s appointment as special counsel in the Russia probe — when Fox News’ website posted a sensational story claiming that an FBI forensic report had discovered evidence on Rich’s laptop that he had been in communication with WikiLeaks prior to his death. Sean Hannity, the network’s primetime star, treated the account as major news on his nightly broadcast, calling it “explosive” and proclaiming it “might expose the single biggest fraud, lies, perpetrated on the American people by the media and the Democrats in our history.”

Among Hannity’s guests that week who echoed his version of events was conservative lawyer Jay Sekulow. Although neither he nor Hannity mentioned it, Sekulow had just been hired as one of Trump’s lead lawyers in the Russia investigation. “It sure doesn’t look like a robbery,” said Sekulow on Hannity’s show on May 18, 2017, during a segment devoted to the Rich case. “There’s one thing this thing undercuts is this whole Russia argument, [which] is such subterfuge,” he added.

In fact, the Fox story was a “complete fabrication,” said Sines, who consulted with the FBI about the Fox News claims. There was “no connection between Seth and WikiLeaks. And there was no evidence on his work computer of him downloading and disseminating things from the DNC.” (A spokeswoman for the FBI’s Washington field office said the office had never opened an investigation into Rich’s murder, considering it a local crime for which the Washington Metropolitan Police Department had jurisdiction. Andrew McCabe, the FBI’s acting director at the time, said in an interview that he reached out to his agents after he heard about the conspiracy stories about Rich and was told, “There’s no there there.”)

After eight days of controversy, Fox News was forced to retract the story after one of its two key sources, former Washington, D.C., homicide detective Rod Wheeler, backed away from comments he had given the Fox News website reporter Malia Zimmerman and a local Fox affiliate reporter confirming the account. The article, the network said in a statement at the time, “was not initially subjected to the high degree of editorial scrutiny we require for all our reporting.” Fox News later announced it was conducting an internal investigation into how the story came to be posted on its website. The results have never been disclosed, and a spokeswoman for Fox News declined to comment, citing ongoing litigation against the news network brought by the Rich family.

But “Conspiracyland” quotes a source familiar with the network’s investigation saying that Fox executives grew frustrated they were unable to determine the identity of the other, and more important, source for the story: an anonymous “federal investigator” whose agency was never revealed. The Fox editors came to have doubts that the person was in fact who he claimed to be or whether the person actually existed, said the source.

In his recent report, Mueller briefly addressed the questions about Rich, writing that Assange had “implied falsely” that the DNC staffer was the source of the party emails leaked to WikiLeaks. His comments about Rich, Mueller wrote, “were apparently designed to obscure” how WikiLeaks really got them: from Guccifer 2.0, an online persona created by Russia’s military intelligence agency, the GRU, who sent the group an encrypted file of DNC material on July 14, 2016, four days after Rich’s death.

In the meantime, the barrage of conspiracy theories — implying that Rich was a leaker who betrayed his DNC colleagues — has spawned multiple lawsuits that are still ongoing. Joel and Mary Rich have filed a lawsuit against Fox News and Ed Butowsky, a Dallas financier who played a key behind-the-scenes role in the Zimmerman story, alleging intentional infliction of emotional stress. Aaron Rich, Seth’s older brother, has sued both Butowsky and Couch, the America First Media founder.

(Fox News, Butowsky and Couch have all denied the claims; the cable news network has argued in court papers that its reporting, while retracted, is a “classic case” of journalism protected by the First Amendment. The Rich family’s claim was initially rejected by a federal judge in New York on the grounds, in part, that the parents could not sue for the harm caused by the defamation of their deceased son. The parents are now appealing that decision. Mary Rich, in an interview for the podcast, said the fact that Fox retracted the false story is irrelevant. “It’s blasted across America with Fox and Hannity,” she said. “All they’ve done is taken it down, but it’s still up there on the internet. This can’t be retracted the way they did it.”)

[y66]

Guest post from Paul Krugman:

Quote

There are people who pore over the details of each new economic report, looking for clues to the economy’s next move. I’m not one of them — not because this kind of tea-leaf reading is worthless, although it’s overrated, but because it’s a dark art I’ve never tried to master. Guessing what next quarter’s GDP growth number will be is a very different enterprise from trying to understand how the economy works, which in some sense is still my main job.

But the accumulation of short-term reports does, eventually, tell you something about the basics. And there was a message in the latest jobs report that is consistent with what these reports have been telling us for at least the past year or two. Namely, the workers are alright.

To see what I mean by that, consider a number many economists now believe gives a better picture of the job market than the official unemployment rate: the prime-age employment ratio, the percentage of Americans in their prime working years, ages 25 to 54, who have jobs.

As you can see from the figure, on the eve of the 2008 financial crisis, the prime-age employment ratio was just shy of 80 percent. When the crisis struck, it dropped to 75 percent, and stayed low for a long time — long enough for many influential people to declare, with an air of great wisdom, that prime-age employment would never recover to its previous level.

Why not? Well, declared the Very Serious People (a term I used a lot at the time), U.S. workers just didn’t have the skills the modern economy needed. And maybe they lacked motivation too, paying video games instead of working, or turning to drugs and alcohol.

Some of us with a sense of history recognized these arguments: Influential people made similar claims in the 1930s, asserting that high unemployment reflected the inadequacy of American workers, not a simple lack of sufficient demand. But then came World War II, and suddenly all those inadequate workers proved perfectly capable of operating the most awesome defense economy the world had ever seen.

Sure enough, after late 2011 prime-age employment began recovering, and it just kept on recovering, year after year. And at this point prime-age employment is right back where it was before the financial crisis. American workers do, it turns out, have both the skills and the motivation to work productively, and did all along. Oh, they may lack some specific skills that employers need — but lo and behold, in a tight labor market many employers are willing to take on and train workers who clearly have the native ability to do jobs they haven’t done before.

So what are we to make of the long trough in employment from 2007 to about 2017? The answer is that it represented a huge waste of human and economic potential. We should have been doing whatever it took to boost the economy, including a lot of infrastructure spending. Instead, our elite obsessed over entitlement reform while insisting that our workers were no good.

Krugman has an annoying habit of correctly analyzing problems in real time and then calling attention to data that support his analysis.

[Chas_P]

 y66, on 2019-July-09, 12:35, said:

Guest post from Paul Krugman:


Krugman has an annoying habit of correctly analyzing problems in real time and then calling attention to data that support his analysis.

Quote

We should have been doing whatever it took to boost the economy, including a lot of infrastructure spending. Instead, our elite obsessed over entitlement reform while insisting that our workers were no good.

So exactly what is Krugman saying here?....that the "elites" wasted a lot of time cramming the ACA down our collective throats when they should have been concerned about boosting the economy by job creation through infrastructure spending? If so, I agree wholeheartedly.

[kenberg]

Krugman is saying "the prime-age employment ratio was just shy of 80 percent. " The rest of the column has no significant content whatsoever, it's just his usual "I'm brilliant, everyone else is stupid" stuff. Given that unemployment has declined significantly, I do not regard it as a huge surprise that employment has increased significantly, but I did appreciate the references to some data that refers to the percentage of people in various age groups that are employed. Unemployment figures, I think, generally refer to percentages based on people seeking employment. The figures he looks at are percentages for employment, regardless of whether an unemployed person is seeking employment or has any intention of seeking employment. Both approaches are worthwhile, but different. 80% is a pretty large number, surely it was much smaller in, say, 1950 when many women did not work or expect to work. As with most data, I think it needs some examination before making too big a deal over it.


So it was interesting and useful, I had my usual reaction to his style.

[johnu]

 Chas_NoSelfAwarenessOfSelfHumiliation, on 2019-July-09, 18:48, said:

No integrity, no dignity, no honor, cannot control himself from continuing to post to this thread and repeatedly demonstrating that he has the same lack of self control of his hero Dennison.

As a sidenote, in the world of pro wrestling, when a wrestler has been suspended, fired, quit, banished in a kayfabe storeyline, that wrestler will sometimes make an immediate return to action wearing a mask. Since he (she) has the same build, the same voice, the same skillset, it's not too hard to figure out that the new masked wrestler is the same guy that was previously banned from the ring. Now, almost everybody know this is the same guy, the crowd, the hot dog vendors, sometimes the opponent. The only people who don't "know" this are on the wrestling company payroll, the ring announcer, the referee, the TV commentators, the general manager and/or president of the company. It all comes down to plausible deniability.

Instead of wearing a mask, all Chas_NoDignity_NoSelfRespect has to do is change to a new screen name. I have been including many possible names in my posts. Nobody will know for sure that the new poster is not Chas_P. I will have my suspicions but I won't know with 100% certainty that this is Chas_P continuing to be a weasel and a man without honor. Nobody will know for sure except for Chas_P.

[cherdano]

 johnu, on 2019-July-10, 03:16, said:

What's the point of posting a version of this rant every day?

[y66]

 kenberg, on 2019-July-09, 19:47, said:

Krugman is saying "the prime-age employment ratio was just shy of 80 percent. " The rest of the column has no significant content whatsoever, it's just his usual "I'm brilliant, everyone else is stupid" stuff. Given that unemployment has declined significantly, I do not regard it as a huge surprise that employment has increased significantly, but I did appreciate the references to some data that refers to the percentage of people in various age groups that are employed. Unemployment figures, I think, generally refer to percentages based on people seeking employment. The figures he looks at are percentages for employment, regardless of whether an unemployed person is seeking employment or has any intention of seeking employment. Both approaches are worthwhile, but different. 80% is a pretty large number, surely it was much smaller in, say, 1950 when many women did not work or expect to work. As with most data, I think it needs some examination before making too big a deal over it.


So it was interesting and useful, I had my usual reaction to his style.

Krugman is saying that the "structural unemployment" argument for the slow recovery that was fashionable among deficit hawks in 2012 was bogus and that the real problem (as he noted in 2009) was insufficient aggregate demand for which he prescribed massive fiscal stimulus.

[y66]

For the investigative reporting is not dead files:

The Jeffrey Epstein Case Was Cold, Until a Miami Herald Reporter Got Accusers to Talk by Tiffany Hsu at NYT.

[y66]

From Justice Dept. Watchdog Is Preparing to Deliver Verdict on the Russia Investigation by Adam Goldman, Charlie Savage and Matthew Rosenberg at NYT:

Quote

Inside a London office building in early June, three investigators for the Justice Department’s inspector general took a crucial step toward clearing the political fallout from the Russia investigation: They spent two days interviewing Christopher Steele, the former British spy whose now-infamous dossier of purported links between Trump associates and Russia ended up in the hands of the F.B.I. ahead of the 2016 election.

The investigators pored over Mr. Steele’s old memos and his contemporaneous notes from meetings with F.B.I. agents in the fall of 2016, according to a person familiar with the investigation. They asked Mr. Steele to explain in detail how he had validated his sources inside Russia, how he communicated with them, and how he decided which of their claims to include in his reports. They spoke at length about Mr. Steele’s work with the F.B.I. on other Russia-related investigations and his contacts with a senior Justice Department official.

The interview was a key step in the investigation by the inspector general, Michael E. Horowitz, into the facts underlying a bitter partisan feud: Did F.B.I. officials do anything wrong in 2016 when they sought to understand the Trump campaign’s links to Russia — including how they used information from Mr. Steele?

That question has hovered over the Russia inquiry for two years as President Trump and his allies repeatedly assailed the investigators who scrutinized him and his advisers. Attorney General William P. Barr, who has accused the F.B.I. of “spying” on the Trump campaign, has begun his own review that will include intelligence agencies as well.

But the investigation by Mr. Horowitz, who has maintained a reputation for being above the partisan fray, may have a better chance of being accepted across party lines as credible. Mr. Horowitz, who is expected to release a much-anticipated report of his findings in the coming weeks, is believed to be weighing whether to recommend that the Justice Department tighten rules for any future counterintelligence investigations of a presidential campaign, which was a novel dilemma in 2016, according to people familiar with aspects of his investigation.