Month: August 2022

One of the big drivers of inflation during the late spring and early summer was – in addition to the relentless meltup in energy and commodities – the surge in airplane ticket prices amid seemingly endless demand, as millions of Americans were willing to pay anything after two years of quarantine, just to go travel anywhere and feel normal again.

But now that prices have more than caught up with travel enthusiasm, demand is tumbling, and as BofA airline analyst Andrew Didora writes today, system net sales (i.e., total bookings) took a sizable step back this week to -23.6% vs 2019 for the week ending 8/21 (compared to last week’s down -9.3%) the biggest drop since February. System volumes and pricing decelerated to -23.5% vs 2019 (vs -11.5% last week) and -0.1% vs 2019 (vs +2.5% last week).

As Didora explains, “we typically only see this type of weekly change around holidays, so the change is surprising. The only comp issue we have found is that in 2019 Hurricane Dorian was approaching the US at the end of August, which could have pulled forward some bookings.”

Some more details on the recent plunge in bookings:

• Domestic/int’l volumes decline with international pricing still > 2019
• Overall international net sales (-21.1% vs 2019) remain ahead of domestic net sales (26.0%) relative to 2019.

• However, international volumes declined to down -24.0% vs 2019 (vs -9.8% last week) and are now slightly behind domestic volumes for the first time since mid-May (excluding choppy comps), which were down -23.3% vs 2019 (vs -12.4% last week).

• Both channels saw pricing step back with domestic and international pricing now down -3.5% vs 2019 (vs -1.9% last week) and +3.8% vs 2019 (vs +6.3% last week), respectively. 

Finally, in a peculiar divergence, while leisure tickets slumped a notable 22%, it was corporate travel that really cratered, tumbling 37% Y/Y.

Looking ahead, the BofA strategists caution that if this softness is not reversed in the next 1-2 weeks, “that would indicate more of an underlying demand problem and create risk to 3Q22 outlooks, which call for 100-200bps of sequential total revenue improvement.”

Authored by Victor Davis Hanson via AmGreatness.com,

Of the last three presidents, Trump was either the most indifferent or the most obstructed when it came to using government agencies for his own partisan political advantages or to neuter his enemies.

For the Left, Donald Trump is synonymous with “fascism” (or “semi-fascism,” as Joe Biden put it the other day). And for Liz Cheney and most of the NeverTrumpers, he remains an existential threat to democracy. 

But to quantify those charges, what exactly has Trump done extralegally – as opposed to his bombast and braggadocio about what he might have wished to have done? 

And what are the standards by which to judge this supposed menace?

Did Trump illegally and with a mere signature nullify over $300 billion of contracted student loans—to firm up his college-student and college-graduate base nine weeks before the midterm elections?

Did Donald Trump weaponize the feared IRS, the logical place to find fascistic tendencies of any president bent on using government to punish his enemies? Did he push through a plan to add 87,000 new IRS investigative agents at a time of national discord?

For the last five years, Trump was rumored to be under investigation by the IRS. Currently, his accountant is facing felony sentencing for advising improper write-offs. 

Certainly, from the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop and the remarks of Hunter’s associates like Tony Bobulinksi, the Biden family raked in millions of foreign dollars. Evidence so far suggests Joe Biden was a recipient (as the “Big Guy”) of 10 percent of these quid pro quo payments. At times, Bobulinksi may have sent a strapped and broke Hunter thousands of dollars in cash gifts. Were any of these stealthy transactions taxed? Does the recently heavily Biden-endowed IRS care?

If Trump wished to abuse his power over the IRS, he would have followed the Obama model of weaponizing it during a reelection year to go after his ideological enemies. 

In Obama’s case, the tax agency slow-walked or denied nonprofit status for groups whose ideology was deemed not helpful to Obama’s campaign in 2012. There was a reason Lois Lerner invoked the Fifth Amendment, and it was not to protect Donald Trump.

Politicized National Security

Did Trump blatantly use the national security apparatus of the government to enhance his own reelection bid in 2020?

That is, did he do anything analogous to Obama’s gambit with Vladimir Putin in 2011? 

Was Trump ever caught on a hot mic promising a Russian president that he would try to ease Russian worries about Eastern European missile defense if only the Russians would give him space during his 2012 campaign for president against Mitt Romney?  

What we forget about the 2011 Seoul, South Korea hot-mic Obama exchange with then-Russian President Dmitry Medvedev was that all the conditions outlined in their hushed 2011 recap were adhered to by both parties: Obama did dismantle plans for a joint U.S.-Eastern European long-range missile defense—a system that might be now of advantage to the U.S. and its allies. Putin did stay quiet during the Obama campaign cycle. Obama did get reelected. And Putin did invade Ukraine and Crimea only after Obama was elected (or, a cynic might put it, because Obama was reelected). 

A current Trump “collusion” critic, mutatis mutandis, might have surmised that a colluding Barack Obama put the national security of the United States and its allies at risk in order to use his office to massage campaign advantages over Mitt Romney in 2012. And the ultimate result of such machinations was a loss of U.S. deterrence that in part explained Russian aggression in 2014.

Weaponizing Justice

Did Trump weaponize the FBI? That is, did the FBI go after journalists, former Obama officials, or Democratic Party activists who variously were attacking Don Jr. or Ivanka on the pretenses of retrieving one of their lost laptops or diaries? 

Did Trump use Republican National Committee firewalls to transfer money to private lobbyists and law firms to find dirt on Hillary Clinton in 2016, and then turn it all over to the FBI to launch a Crossfire Hurricane investigation of Clinton, centered around a Trump-hired ex-spy who became a paid FBI informant? 

Are there texts of Trump-era FBI agents talking about how to “stop” Hillary Clinton’s or Biden’s election bid?

Did Trump’s FBI, in the predawn hours, burst into the homes of New York Times reporters—in James O’Keefe -style—and march them outside in their underwear, all for the possible “crime” of receiving a stolen draft of the Supreme Court early draft of the Dobbs decision? Which is the greater “crime”—trafficking in clearly stolen confidential Supreme Court papers or looking at the abandoned, lost, and lurid diary of a wayward presidential daughter?

Did the Trump Justice Department start an investigation of the suspected illegal lobbying of Joe Biden and Hunter Biden, who used the former’s political connections to win large cash payments from foreign governments? Were there Trump officials in the permanent Justice Department who went after his various political opponents on the pretexts of the Logan Act?  Or did the Trump Administration help spread the allegations of any hired anti-Clinton ex-spies and salt them around the bureaucracies?

Speaking of Trump and threats to the democratic order, did any Trump attorney general refuse a congressional subpoena, as former Attorney General Eric Holder did? Was anyone held in contempt of Congress, as Holder was? Did any simply refuse to honor subpoenas and withhold requested documents from Congress, as the Obama Administration did time and again?

Did Trump order an FBI raid on the Obama home, on rumors that there were thousands of documents under dispute with the National Archives in his possession, especially given the Obama record of fiercely fighting any Freedom of Information Act lawsuits to release his documents? 

Was a John Podesta put in leg irons by the FBI? Was Robbie Mook’s house stormed to learn of what he knew about Hillary Clinton’s missing emails? 

Was Jake Sullivan’s phone grabbed by the FBI at an airport to determine his role in the Russian collusion hoax? 

Or, with a look ahead to his own reelection, did Trump in 2018 order a raid on the Biden home, in search of “lost” Biden vice presidential documents, supposedly improperly removed after Biden’s tenure that might have shed light on the Biden family’s extracurricular foreign lobbying?

Where Is Trump’s Deep State?

Are there now any former Trump loyalists who, as “anonymous” officials in cabinet agencies or obstructionists on the National Security Council, are writing op-eds about their stealthy daily efforts to undermine Biden’s executive orders or his administration’s action?

Is anyone listening to Biden’s phone calls with foreign leaders while working with Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee and while prepping a “whistleblower” to find grounds for impeachment based on some of the things Biden has allegedly said to foreign leaders? 

Did Pfizer rush prematurely to announce a viable COVID-19 vaccination to aid Trump’s reelection—or in contrast, did it slow walk a viable vaccination’s rollout until after the election to massage the result?

Are there now “50 former intelligence officials” who signed affidavits in support of Trump’s allegations about the authenticity of Hunter’s laptop? Are there dozens of retired four-stars now opportunely blasting Joe Biden’s historic humiliation of the United States in Kabul? Have any retired admirals mocked the Uniform Code of Military Justice to write New York Times op-eds suggesting a befuddled Biden leave office “the sooner, the better”?

Are there former Trump officials writing in Foreign Policy that Biden is a disaster who could be removed by impeachment or the 25th Amendment—or more rapidly by a military coup? Are retired officers writing to General Mark Milley urging him to act should he feel in the next election that a likely Republican loss seems suspicious?

Election Interference and Denial? 

Between 2017 and 2020, did Trump’s team systematically seek to change the voting laws in key states to radically transform traditional balloting, in a mail-in or early voting revolution, in which only 30 percent of the electorate would vote on Election Day?

If Trump improperly questioned the ballot result of the 2020 election, then he sinned in the long tradition of presidential ballot objectors, including former U.S. Senator Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), January 6 committee chairman himself Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), and Hillary Clinton, who claimed Trump was an illegitimately elected president and advised Biden not to concede if he lost the 2020 popular vote. A defeated Stacey Abrams toured the country claiming she was the “real” governor of Georgia, yet nobody smears her as an “election truther.”

Was there any “dark money” effort analogous to the efforts of corporate and tech money along with DNC activists and Biden operators in what Time magazine’s Molly Ball described as a “conspiracy” to ensure the defeat of Trump’s opponent? 

Did Trump’s team coordinate with right-wing billionaires to infuse hundreds of billions of dollars to modulate street protests, to absorb the work of state and local registrars in key precincts, and to censor unfavorable stories on social media? 

Trump impotently railed and bayed to the wind about the “fake news” reporters at his rallies. By contrast, the Left, both private elites and public officials, kept quiet and injected half a billion dollars to alter the way people voted and effectively to censor the way people produced and consumed the news.

Restoring Our Norms?

How about Trump’s efforts to revolutionize the very system of government? Did he promote a court-packing scheme to ensure he might not just get a 5-4 majority, but perhaps an 11-4 conservative advantage in a new 15-justice Supreme Court? 

Did he keep mum while right-wing demonstrators swarmed the homes of Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan? Did his attorney general ignore the obvious felonies involved in such threatening tactics? Did Trump work with his Republican Congress in 2017 to end the filibuster to ensure his legislation would not be stonewalled? Did he dream up ways of getting rid of the Electoral College so the “blue wall” might never return? 

It’s alleged that Trump was insincere when he approved the request for thousands of federal troops to be available to local law enforcement on January 6, or that he did not really mean it when he instructed pro-Trump demonstrators on January 6 to “Peacefully and patriotically march to the Capitol.” 

Perhaps even the hint of encouraging any type of protest was reckless in such partisan times. But just days after violent protestors attacked Secret Service agents manning barricades and had sought to storm onto the White House grounds, did Trump boast to the nation of the ongoing demonstrations, as did Kamala Harris, soon to be a vice presidential candidate?

They’re not going to stop. And everyone beware, because they’re not going to stop. They’re not going to stop before Election Day in November, and they’re not going to stop after Election Day. And that should be—everyone should take note of that, on both levels, that they’re not going to let up, and they should not, and we should not.

Was that a sober or insurrectionary thing to advise in a summer of rioting that saw 120 days of violence, $2 billion in damage, 35 dead, and hundreds of police officers injured?

Did Trump as president meet with CIA and FBI directors who, in their weekly and daily briefings, apprised him of efforts to monitor, spy, and infiltrate the campaign of Joe Biden?

Was there, after 2017, a Republican majority committee investigating the former Obama role in launching Operation Crossfire Hurricane, or Attorney General Loretta Lynch’s secret meeting with Bill Clinton while she was investigating Hillary Clinton? And if there were, would Obama loyalists in the House be excluded by the Republican speaker from participating in House investigations that also would allow no hostile or even neutral witnesses, no general counsel’s report, and no cross-examinations?

The strange thing about Trump was that he did not use extraordinary powers to investigate anyone unlawfully. He boasted, he railed, he screamed, he whined, he became at times crude and obnoxious. But he did not use the FBI, the CIA, the Justice Department, or the IRS to go after the Obamas, the Clintons, or the Bidens. 

Instead, he became the most investigated, probed, smeared, and autopsied president in modern history. Trump’s legislative agenda did not include revolutionary changes in the Electoral College or the filibuster, or radical changes to the Supreme Court.

In fact, of the last three presidents, Trump was either the most inept or indifferent, or the most obstructed concerning any issue of using government agencies for his own partisan political advantages or to neuter his enemies. 

In truth, the entire apparatus of permanent government—the Pentagon hierarchy, the Washington elites at the FBI and CIA, the permanently entrenched at the Justice Department, and the apparat at the IRS all despised Donald Trump. And they did not just hate him but acted on their antipathy by using their powers of government to destroy his campaign in 2016, to undermine his transition, to either obstruct or sabotage his initiatives while president, and to hound him as an ex-president. As ex-felon and FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith put it of his own illegal effort to destroy a president, “Viva le [sic] resistance.” Is that the sort of FBI we want—a cadre of self-described revolutionaries?

Donald Trump was impeached for raising the question of Biden family corruption in Ukraine with the Ukrainian president and delaying offensive military aid that had never been approved by a Democratic president.

Evidence since Trump’s impeachment suggests he was prescient in his warning to the Kyiv government to stay out of domestic American politics. Everything thing we know since that 2021 impeachment vote solidifies—not contradicts—Trump’s point that the Biden family was corrupt, and Hunter Biden was receiving large sums of money from Ukraine and China solely because Joe Biden had been vice president and was seen as a possible or even likely future president worthy of such corrupt investment. Or to put it another way, why would those with contacts with the Ukrainian government ever pay millions to an incompetent, drug-addicted miscreant like Hunter Biden, if not for pay-for-play influence?

In that context, Joe Biden’s early boast that he got a Ukrainian attorney general fired, most likely for probing too deeply matters involving his family, gives credence to Trump’s instincts. So does the fact that both Obama and Biden for a time stopped shipments of offensive weapons to Ukraine, while Trump for a time only delayed them but eventually gave them what they wished.

The result of this unprecedented effort to accuse Trump of using government fascistically while fascistically using government to destroy a president is all too clear in the destroyed careers who sought to undermine constitutional government. What John Brennan, James Clapper, Kevin Clinesmith, James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Bruce Ohr, Peter Strzok, Lisa Page, and a host of retired flag officers and intelligence operatives share is not just their venomous antipathy toward an elected president and their efforts rhetorically and often concretely to neuter him, but their subsequent disgrace even among those who once cheered them on.

On Monday Ukraine’s forces launched a much anticipated ‘counteroffensive’ focused on taking back territory in the south of the country, which is among the first portions of Ukraine which Russia seized soon after starting its invasion six months ago.

The operation is said to reflect a growing “confidence” in Kiev that American military aid will continue to flow and even grow. “Today we started offensive actions in various directions, including in the Kherson region,” a Ukrainian public broadcaster announced based on state officials.

Ukrainian journalist Natalia Humeniuk admitted that Russian forces in the south are still “quite powerful” but that Ukraine’s forces have “unquestionably weakened the enemy” – which Russia’s Crimea governor Sergei Aksyonov dismissed as “another fake of Ukrainian propaganda.”

And the White House said that Russia has already had to “pull resources” from fighting in Donbas in order to defend the south.

Like with many prior major battlefield events, two competing narratives are quickly emerging. US officials including a number of Congressmen expressed their immediate optimism upon that start of the southern counteroffensive…

Slava Ukraine!

Time to pray for the success of the freedom loving forces of #Ukraine and the @DefenceU, specifically for fear in the Russian lines and a utter collapse of fighting spirit. Run Orcs!!! https://t.co/ZWFKteHCjs

— Adam Kinzinger🇺🇦🇺🇸✌️ (@AdamKinzinger) August 29, 2022

National Security Council spokesman John Kirby on Monday said the following: 

“Regardless of the size, scale and scope of this counter-offensive that they’ve talked about today, they have already had an impact on Russia’s military capabilities,” Kirby said.

“The Russians have had to pull resources from the east simply because of reports that the Ukrainians might be going more on the offence in the south — they’ve had to deplete certain units from certain areas in the east and the Donbas.”

“The idea of going on the offence is not new to Ukrainians, and they have been taking the fight to the Russians inside their country,” Kirby added. “In fact, with some of the assistance that they’ve gotten from US weapons as well as others, such as Himars, they’ve been able to actually strike behind Russian lines and put the Russians more on defense.”

The statement appeared to be confirmation that Washington is positively encouraging this fresh offensive aimed at penetrating Russian lines in the south.

Kirby also weighed in on the continued standoff at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in southeastern Ukraine at a moment an IAEA team has been dispatched to inspect the site. He urged a “controlled shutdown” in order to protect it, something the Russian occupying forces are unlikely to heed. Kirby called it “the safest and least-risky option in the near term” – but then there would be the question of Ukrainians keeping the lights on headed into winter.

But by Monday’s close, Russia’s defense ministry proclaimed the Ukrainian counter-offensive has “failed miserably”, per state media:

Ukrainian forces attempted to attack in three directions on orders of President Vladimir Zelensky but made no gains, Moscow said.

Russian troops caused “great losses” to the Ukrainian attackers during the day’s battles, including 26 tanks, 23 armored fighting vehicles, nine more armored vehicles, two SU-25 ground-attack jets and more than 560 troops, the Russian Defense Ministry said in a statement on Monday evening.

Likely the truth will emerge amid the conflicting narratives within the next days or even weeks. Russia still aims for full ‘liberation’ of the Donbas as a prime battlefield objective at this point.

Authored by Jack Phillips via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis called on Republicans in Congress to investigate White House COVID-19 adviser Anthony Fauci if they take control of Congress and following statements from Fauci that he’s stepping down soon.

“If the Republicans take control, we need a reckoning on all of this,” he told Dan Bongino, adding that during the pandemic, Fauci “criticized me every step of the way.” The 81-year-old White House adviser had been “wrong on all the important” issues relating to COVID-19, said the governor.

For example, said DeSantis, Fauci tried to “sow fear in the population and scared a lot of parents” when he called for schools to be shut down for in-person learning. “We can never go down that road,” DeSantis said, adding that Fauci and other federal government officials in the future will again pivot to saying that lockdown measures did not go far enough.

His comments about Fauci came after Bongino played a video of Fauci asserting that COVID-19 lockdowns did not cause damage to people, although some studies have shown otherwise.

Notably, after initially supporting some COVID-19-related rules in early 2020, DeSantis later rescinded most of them and refused to impose new mandates.

“In Florida, we will not let them lock you down,” the governor said during an event in December 2021. “We will not let them take your jobs, we will not let them harm your businesses, we will not let them close your schools.”

DeSantis is running for reelection as governor during the 2022 midterms, although he has been flagged as a possible presidential candidate for 2024—especially if former President Donald Trump decides not to run again. Amid the speculation, DeSantis has declined to comment on running for president and often says he is focusing on getting reelected.

Stepping Down

Last week, Fauci issued a statement via the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), the agency he’s headed since 1984, that he will be stepping down by December from his position as chief of NIAID, the head of the agency’s Laboratory of Immunoregulation, and top medical adviser to President Joe Biden.

Read more here…

An FBI special agent at the heart of whistleblower allegations that he sabotaged the agency’s 2020 investigation of Hunter Biden has been escorted out of the bureau’s Washington DC field office, and was seen “exiting the bureau’s elevator last Friday escorted by two or three “headquarters-looking types,”” according to the Washington Times.

Timothy Thibault, who was in charge at the Washington field office until “relatively recently,” was on leave for at least a month following revelations over political statements he made while leading the public corruption unit.

Thibault, among other things, made anti-Trump statements over social media in 2020 while he was helping to lead the FBI’s probe of Hunter Biden, while his father, Joe Biden, was running for the White House. The FBI boss also retweeted a post by the Lincoln Project which called Trump “a psychologically broken, embittered and deeply unhappy man.”

During recent testimony before the Senate, FBI Director Christopher A. Wray dodged questions about Mr. Thibault and his social media posts. He called it “ongoing personnel matters.”

Mr. Thibault, according to the former official, was also known for pushing out unvaccinated agents from the FBI’s election squad that he suspected to be Trump supporters.

One of the former officials, who is also a whistleblower talking to the House Judiciary Committee, was placed on indefinite suspension last year by the bureau because he attended the “Stop the Steal” rally in Washington on Jan. 6, 2021, that preceded a pro-Trump mob storming of the Capitol. The former officials said he never entered the Capitol. 

After resigning late last year, he claimed other FBI officials were “purged” for attending the rally on their own time and not on official FBI business. -Washington Times

In late May, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) sought records from the DOJ regarding Thibault’s work history following the accusations of political bias.

“Political bias should have no place at the FBI, and the effort to revive the FBI’s credibility can’t stop with his exit. We need accountability, which is why Congress must continue investigating and the inspector general must fully investigate as I’ve requested,” he told the Times in a statement.

Meanwhile, several FBI whistleblowers told Grassley earlier this year that agents investigating Hunter Biden “opened an assessment which was used by an FBI headquarters team to improperly discredit negative Hunter Biden information as disinformation and caused investigative activity to cease,” adding that his office received “a significant number of protected communications from highly credible whistleblowers” regarding the investigation.

Grassley added that “verified and verifiable derogatory information on Hunter Biden was falsely labeled as disinformation,” according to the Washington Examiner.

FBI supervisory intelligence agent Brian Auten opened in August 2020 the assessment that was later used by the agency, according to the disclosures. One of the whistleblowers claimed the FBI assistant special agent in charge of the Washington field office, Timothy Thibault, shut down a line of inquiry into Hunter Biden in October 2020 despite some of the details being known to be true at the time.

A whistleblower also said Thibault “ordered closed” an “avenue of additional derogatory Hunter Biden reporting,” according to Grassley, even though “all of the reporting was either verified or verifiable via criminal search warrants.” The senator said Thibault “ordered the matter closed without providing a valid reason as required” and that FBI officials “subsequently attempted to improperly mark the matter in FBI systems so that it could not be opened in the future,” according to the disclosures.

The whistleblowers say investigators from FBI headquarters were “in communication with FBI agents responsible for the Hunter Biden information targeted by Mr. Auten’s assessment,” and that their findings on whether the claims were in fact disinformation were placed “in a restricted access sub-file” in September 2020, according to Grassley, who added that the disclosures “appear to indicate that there was a scheme in place among certain FBI officials to undermine derogatory information connected to Hunter Biden by falsely suggesting it was disinformation.“

Amid the revelations that the FBI told Facebook to quash the Hunter Biden laptop story – a clear case of election interference, Trump called for an “immediate” redo of the 2020 election,

Last week, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg revealed that the FBI told them to be on the lookout for “Russian propaganda.”

“Basically, the background here is the FBI, I think, basically came to us- some folks on our team and was like, ‘Hey, just so you know, like, you should be on high alert…  We thought that there was a lot of Russian propaganda in the 2016 election. We have it on notice that, basically, there’s about to be some kind of dump of that’s similar to that. So just be vigilant,” Zuckerberg told Rogan.

Mark Zuckerberg tells Joe Rogan that the FBI reached out to Facebook to put them on notice that the Hunter Biden’s laptop story was similar to the previous Russian Propaganda and to be on high alert #joerogan #MarkZuckerberg #JRE pic.twitter.com/ojZHhK3isa

— Giuseppe Mercadante (@itsmercadante) August 25, 2022

As a reminder, Hunter Biden abandoned his laptop at a Wilmington, Delaware repair shop on April 12, 2019. The owner, John Paul Mac Isaac, walked into the Albuquerque FBI office, where he explained what he had, but was rebuffed by the FBI. He was told basically, get lost. This was mid-September 2019.

Two months passed and then, out of the blue, the FBI contacted John Paul Mac Issac. Two FBI agents from the Wilmington FBI office–Joshua Williams and Mike Dzielak–came to John Paul’s business. He offered immediately to give them the hard drive, no strings attached. Agents Williams and Dzielak declined to take the device.

Eight months later, Isaac provided a copy to then-President Donald Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani, who provided a copy of the hard drive to The Post.

 

Authored by Jack Phillips via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

A Washington D.C. superior court judge ruled Thursday that the city’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate that was imposed on city employees is unlawful.

An order that was handed down by Judge Maurice A. Ross was a response to a lawsuit filed by the Washington D.C. Police Union and other groups that opposed Mayor Muriel Bowser’s mandate. Bowser in August of last year ordered city government employees to provide proof of vaccination although some workers could seek a medical or religious exemption to the shot.

“A vaccine mandate is not an everyday exercise of power,” Ross wrote in his 17-page ruling (pdf). “It is instead a significant encroachment into the life—and health—of an employee. It is strikingly unlike any other workplace regulations typically imposed, as it ‘cannot be undone at the end of the workday.’ Thus, there is an expectation that a vaccine mandate must come from a legislative body.”

Ross also argued that the legal “system does not permit the Mayor to act unlawfully even in the pursuit of desirable ends,” including curbing COVID-19, adding that “the Mayor lacks legal authority to impose a vaccine mandate on Plaintiffs.”

The judge rejected city lawyers’ arguments that Bowser could impose a vaccine mandate in her capacity to regulate occupational and workplace hazards. The Biden administration made a similar claim to the U.S. Supreme Court last year on its vaccine mandate for private businesses before the court struck the rule down in January.

“Although COVID-19 is a risk that can occur in many workplaces, it is not an occupational hazard in most,” Ross wrote in his order.

Response

It means the city can’t enforce the COVID-19 vaccine mandate. Meanwhile, disciplinary actions that were taken to enforce compliance can be reversed, according to Ross’s ruling.

The DC Police Union praised the decision and said it will ensure that its officers won’t be terminated or forced to take the vaccine.

“Had the Mayor just engaged the Union in good faith bargaining, we would have reached a reasonable compromise that protected everyone’s interests,” Gregg Pemberton, the chairman of the union, said in a statement. “Now, all of our members can go back to do the necessary work of trying to protect our communities from crime and violence without unlawful threats of discipline and termination.”

Read more here…

The annual central bank meeting in Jackson Hole has come and gone, and bears such as BofA’s Michael Hartnett and Morgan Stanley’s Michael Wilson are delighted with the very clear message sent by Powell – the Fed’s fight against inflation is far from over.

Indeed, as Wilson writes in his Weekly Warm-Up Note (available to pro subscribers in the usual place), “Chair Powell’s messaging on Friday was crystal clear, and the equity markets did not take it well”, even though no other asset class had a notable reaction to Powell’s comments. As Wilson discussed in his last weekly warm-up 2 weeks ago, stocks had gotten too excited and even pre-traded a Fed pivot that isn’t coming (yet).

In short, Wilson notes, “the robust rally since June is likely over for now. Technically speaking, this move looks pretty textbook. In June, we reached extreme oversold conditions with breadth collapsing to some of the lowest readings on record (Exhibit 1). However, the rally stalled out exactly at the 200-day moving average for the S&P and many key stocks (Exhibit 2). On that basis alone, the sharp reversal looks quite ominous to even the most basic technical analysts, like us.”

It’s not just technicals, however, and Wilson cautions that from a fundamental standpoint, having a bullish view on US stocks is also challenging for several reasons:

First, there is valuation. As he has discussed many times in his research, the P/E ratio is a function of two inputs – 10 year US Treasury yields and the Equity Risk Premium (ERP). Simplistically, the UST yield is the cost of capital component while the ERP is primarily a function of growth. Generally speaking, the ERP is negatively correlated to growth. In other words, when growth is accelerating or expected to accelerate, the ERP tends to be lower than normal and vice versa. The problem with the conclusion that June was THE low for the Index in this bear market is that the ERP never went above average. Instead, the fall in the P/E from December to June was entirely a function of the Fed’s tightening of financial conditions and the higher cost of capital.

Worse, the ERP plummeted over the past few months and reached near records lows vs. the post GFC period prior to Friday’s sell off. In fact, Wilson notes, the only time the ERP has been lower in the past 14 years was at the end of the bear market rally in March earlier this year, and we know how that ended. Morgan Stanley’s model, which is based primarily on the y/y change in PMIs, suggests the S&P 500 ERP should be closer to 400bps today instead of the 280bps we closed at Friday. That would imply a much lower multiple than the 17.1x we currently trade at. Specifically, assuming a 3% 10-year UST yield implies a fair value P/E of ~14x, or roughly 600 points lower (assuming a conservative 200 in S&P earnings).

Regardless of any rate assumptions, however, Wilson still believes that the real issue remains earnings, not the Fed. He explains why:

While most investors remain preoccupied with the Fed and their next move, we have been more focused on earnings and the risk to forward estimates. In June, many investors began to share our concern, which is why stocks sold off so sharply, in our view. Companies began managing the quarter lower and by the time 2Q earnings season rolled around, positioning was quite bearish and valuations were more reasonable at 15.4x. This led to the “bad news is good news” rally or as many people claimed “better than feared” results. Call us old school, but better than feared is not a good reason to invest in something if the price is high and the results are soft. In other words, it’s a fine reason for stocks to see some relief from an oversold condition but we wouldn’t commit any real capital to such a strategy.

Most importantly, Wilson concludes, recent earnings results showed clear deterioration in incremental operating margins, a trend which is just starting as input costs continue to soar around the globe. In short, Wilson believes that fwd earnings forecasts remain significantly too high.

In the report (available to pro subs), Wilson also lays out his case for further earnings revisions to the downside with much larger cuts than what we have experienced to date. As he noted already, “earnings revision breadth reached very low levels during 2Q results. While revision breadth is a good leading indicator, it tells us nothing about the magnitude of the cuts. As usual, the cuts to NTM EPS forecasts have been de minimis to start this down cycle. Companies and analysts lowered the bar for 2Q into the quarter, but chose to maintain the out year forecasts.

As a result, the NTM EPS forecast for the S&P 500 has fallen by just 1.5% since the top in June (if we back out energy, the NTM EPS estimates have fallen by closer to 5% but this is still just the beginning of the eventual decline we foresee). Again, the full discussion of declining fwd EPS is in the MS note available to pro subs.

Wilson’s bottom line is that “last week’s highly anticipated Fed meeting turned out to be a non event for bonds (flat on Thursday and Friday) while it appeared to be a shock to stock investors. Ironically, given the lack of any material move in yields, all of the decline in P/Es was due to a rising Equity Risk Premium that still remains well below fair market levels, in Morgan Stanley’s view.

Importantly, Wilson thinks Friday’s action could be the beginning of what he says is “likely to be an elongated adjustment period to growth expectations. In our experience, such adjustments to earnings always take longer than they should.” Throw on top of that the fact that operating leverage is now more extreme than it was prior to COVID, and Morgan Stanley concludes that “the negative revision cycle could turn out to be worse than usual.”

Authored by Tom Luongo via Gold, Goats, ‘n Guns blog,

So, every once in a while CNN does some journalism. I guess they are finally picking up what new Warner Brothers Discovery CEO David Zaslav is putting down.

The era of woke is over. The era of self-sabotage and kowtowing to The Davos Crowd’s idiotic war on language, truth and common decency is coming to its ignominious end.

This article about the Twitter whistleblower, Pieter Zatko, from early last week is surprisingly good. Like the person writing it actually decided to tell the story rather than just editorialize about how it’s all Putin’s or Trump’s fault that Twitter had the right to misrepresent itself to a potential buyer.

This shift in editorial tone at CNN is being mirrored throughout Warner Brothers’ properties. And it has immense implications for the future of the Culture War we’re fighting against these vicious little Leninists.

As happy as I’ve been to watch Brian Stelter get the axe and the canning not only of the $90 million Batgirl movie and Ellen Degenerate’s groomer HBOMax series (20 episodes finished and now unreleased) it’s nothing compared his forcing a rework on the woke plans to invert the DCEU by unmaking the Snyderverse through the reported plot of The Flash (killing Superman and replacing him with Supergirl) and forcing reworks on other DCEU projects to un-Davos them.

Zaslav’s threatened to can a $250 million film while putting other projects through complete reshoots because he understands that some things are more important than the sunk-cost fallacy…

…Your reputation.

CNN and DC were being burned to the ground by people who knew their days were numbered and pushed through all sorts of terrible projects, stories and on-air behavior from its ‘talent’ in order to achieve this.

If we can’t control the narrative, better to destroy the brand than allow it to be resurrected.

This is why I was, and still am, so jazzed about Zack Snyder’s Justice League first getting released and then absolutely crushing all its competition in streaming for the past year.

The hunger for real heroes in stories told with passion and without cynicism is real. It’s palpable and it represents something vital in our culture.

A year ago I saw the problem clearly as the execs at Warner Media were trying to downplay Justice League’s success and that the merger with Discovery would lead to something better.

The other big fight is happening over DC’s pantheon of heroes. There is such internal division within Time-Warner over the direction of DC Comics’ film universe that Warner Bros. and Warner Media are literally fighting a civil war in the trade press. It’s part of what’s driving today’s $43 billion merger between AT&T and Discovery which will split off the whole mess, including CNN and HBO, making a pure media company under the direction of Jason Kilar, who greenlit The Snyder Cut of Justice League in the first place.

That’s how much Warner Bros. executives hate Zack Synder and the basic message of his DCEU films. Chaos is bad, men need to be strong and unite against madmen who are irredeemable.

Management are furious by the runaway success, across the globe, of his version of 2017’s Justice League. 

Okay, enough DC fanboi stuff from me. What’s important is that there is a cultural shift happening within WBD that is resulting in significant changes regardless of what the entitled twats on Twitter want.

In a way I feel like Elon Musk’s attempts to buy Twitter are a part of that story as well. Twitter, like it or not, is an important communications platform which needs to be protected as such for all sides of the public debate. As I said back in March:

By forcing Twitter’s board, who doesn’t own any shares in the company, to adopt a Poison Pill strategy, Musk has revealed them to be more interested in maintaining Twitter as a social control response engine rather than as a public company with a responsibility to shareholders.

The fact is, Twitter is a poison pill for society at large, all Musk did was put a price on it.

And I have to give Musk his due here, he’s performed one of the greatest public services in recent memory exposing the lengths to which Davos et.al. are willing to go to maintain their power. Because that’s what mass media to them is, a conduit of their power.

We’ve always known that Twitter was a manipulated playground with variably-applied Terms of Service depending on whatever Davos told us was “the latest thing.’ 

But that doesn’t cover the half of it.  

The reality is that it wasn’t some evil mandated corporate conspiracy, but rather a poorly-built internal architecture which was purposefully allowed to remain broken for plausible deniability purposes.

This paragraph is the money shot for the entire article:

What Zatko says he found was a company with extraordinarily poor security practices, including giving thousands of the company’s employees — amounting to roughly half the company’s workforce — access to some of the platform’s critical controls.

His disclosure describes his overall findings as “egregious deficiencies, negligence, willful ignorance, and threats to national security and democracy.”

As Dexter White said to me, Twitter gave “root admin privs for Tumblrinas” to run around doing their thing.  Here’s the internal corporate structure within Twitter, as revealed by this single paragraph.

After a showdown with the FTC in 2010 to give the company cover that it was under proper government oversight, Twitter grew with no internal regard to those mandates, instead leaving a flimsy server architecture in place, poor employee oversight and a Technology vertical led by someone sympathetic to a particular worldview.

All you need then is an HR department that puts its thumb on the scale of hiring practices and you build an edifice of Tumblrinas running around doing “God’s work” silencing anyone with the wrong ideas.

In the process CEO Jack Dorsey had his company effectively taken away from him, and he was marginalized to the point of being the target of our vitriol.  This is typical misdirection by Davos to hide the real villain, former CTO and current CEO Parag Agrawal, who was promoted for his good work in turning Twitter into a megaphone for the WEF and scapegoating the guy trying to stop the madness.

Maybe now we understand some of those tweets from Dorsey that seemed out of place while all of this was happening.

The story here is fascinating, Dorsey hires Zatko to shore up the company’s internal processes but he reports to Agrawal who stymies him at every turn and then fires him for ’cause,’ ensuring he’s ‘tainted goods’ and harms him professionally.

Then Twitter promotes Agrawal after finally turning the world against Jack Dorsey for the thousand poison flowers he let bloom within the company.  The only thing that upset this apple cart was a bored Elon Musk who, like a lot of people who used to benefit from this shitty system, decided to turn his enormous pile of “Fuck You Money” into a stake in Twitter.

I have to wonder who Zatko ultimately worked for this entire time and why?  You have to think that Dorsey knew what was going on but really was powerless to stop it.  Was Zatko Dorsey/Musk’s mole within the company to root this stuff out and set the hook for Musk’s takeover?  

I doubt it, but it makes a good story worthy of MI6.  More likely Dorsey had simply had enough of this crap, understood the risks to the company he’d built because of Agrawal and the Board’s reckless behavior and tried to slow it all down.

His reward was a good ol’ corporate decapitation.

But was the shift in leadership at Warner Bros. Discovery the only way such a detailed article gets published by CNN, who would normally bury the lede if not memory hole the entire story? I think it’s very possible.

The bottom line here is that Davos’ control over Twitter is slipping and someone is helping Musk out here. This L’affair Zatko is a very big deal.  It portends that the suit against Musk will get thrown out and/or he could still wind up buying the company for a lot less than $44 billion.

Why this matters should be obvious, regardless of how angry we are with Twitter, big tech companies, etc.

There are a lot more of you here reading this article today because Elon Musk blew up Twitter in March. I just passed 20,000 followers there. In March I was at around 9,700.  I went from adding 300-400 followers per month to 1000-2000 per month.

My growth rate didn’t change dramatically because I changed my behavior on Twitter. I’m still an unrepentant asshole. It changed slope dramatically because those Tumblrinas that had been suppressing alternative voices had to remove the roadblocks while Musk was digging through the company’s books.

The growth is stark.  And I’m not the only creator to see this.  Twitter is an amazing marketing tool. Davos understands this.  They understand why it’s more important than Facebook at this point, which is why Data just threw the FBI under the bus on Joe Rogan.  

The ability to jump containment into new addressable markets is unparalleled.  It allows us to find our audiences in a way that ensures our survival.

The whole point of compromising Twitter was to discourage conservatives, populists, and truth-tellers and ‘go build your own.’  They wanted us in smaller echo chambers where we could be easily grouped up and targeted for silencing.

Or did you miss the attacks on Gab and Parler?

The purpose of Twitter is to break down echo chambers, not create them.  Musk understands this.  So does Davos.  That’s why the Tumblrina Army was nurtured and actively recruited.

It’s also why I stayed on the platform, same as Patreon.  This too shall pass.  It always does.  I’ll stay on there for as long as I can building real relationships with real people and pro-actively doing my part to block bots and amplifying them.

I have deep faith that eventually the truth overwhelms the lies.  

Eventually the incentives for maintaining the lies reverse and the dam breaks.  

There is diminishing marginal utility even in lying.  

As long as events like this keep happening in Musk’s favor there is a path to getting a hold of the megaphone and tearing down the house that Davos built.

Can’t stop the signal, Mal.