Sen. Bernie Sanders is set to announce a plan that guarantees every American “who wants or needs one” a lifetime government job paying at least $15 an hour, with health insurance and other perks. This new progressive workforce will then, according to The Washington Post, build glorious “projects throughout the United States aimed at addressing priorities such as infrastructure, care giving, the environment, education and other goals.”
In reality, writes David Harsanyi, it’s more likely that our state-run workforce would be deployed for ideological and political priorities rather than economic ones. If history is any indicator, it would be used to prop up politically useful projects and keep failing industries afloat, undermining creative destruction, innovation, and long-term growth.
Fox News host Bret Baier and James Comey sat down for a one-on-one interview Thursday night, in perhaps the most serious and direct conversations with the former FBI Director to date.
Incredible interview there from @BretBaier. Respectful, but not deferential. Forceful, without being impolite. And, in a rare feat on TV anymore, it elicited a ton of new and important information.
Baier held Comey’s feet to the fire on a wide variety of controversial topics – including the FBI’s decision to exonerate Hillary Clinton before interviewing her, what Comey knew about the “Steele Dossier” used to obtain a surveillance warrant on a Trump campaign aide, and the memos Comey leaked to his friend which he hoped would lead to a special counsel investigation.
Clinton Exoneration
After starting the interview off with a joke about how Comey must find it “a little tougher to get around town without a motorcade,” Baier pulled no punches – launching straight into asking the former FBI Director if it was true that his team decided to exonerate Hillary Clinton before interviewing her.
In response, Comey said that because of all the prior investigative work the FBI had done on the Clinton email case, investigators said “it looks like it’s not going to get to a place where the prosecutors will bring it,” and that it’s “fairly typical” for white collar investigations to save interviews for last.
Comey: I started to see that their view was, it was unlikely to end in a case that the prosecutors at DOJ would bring.
Baier: Before the interview?
Sure, yeah, because they had spent ten months digging around, reading all of the emails, putting everything together, interviewing everybody who set up her system. They weren’t certain of that result, but they said “Look boss, on the current course and speed, looks like it’s not going to get to a place where the prosecutor will bring it.”
Strzok and Page
On the topic of Peter Strzok – the anti-Trump counterintelligence agent deeply involved in both the Clinton and Trump investigations along with his FBI attorney mistress, Lisa Page, Comey said he never witnessed evidence of bias working with the pair, but that he was “deeply disappointed” when he saw some of the text messages exchanged between them.
“I can tell you this: When I saw the texts, I was deeply disappointed in them,” Comey told Baier. “But I never saw any bias, any reflection of any kind of animus towards anybody, including me. I’m sure I’m badmouthed in those texts, I’m just not going to read them all. Never saw it.”
Comey said that if he had been aware of the level of hatred Strzok and Page had for Trump, he “would have removed both of them from any contact with significant investigations.”
Key part of interview: @Comey admits he’d absolutely have removed Strzok/Page for bias, and then struggles to then claim their work product is still valid. Admits its a “fair question.” Won’t admit he doesn’t have any reasonable answer. #SpecialReport
When it comes to the leaked memos that kickstarted the Mueller probe, Comey maintains that the memos he created to document his interactions with President Trump, seven in all and four of which have been deemed classified; two marked “confidential” and two marked “secret.”
Comey also admitted that he leaked the memos to two other people who he said were members of his “legal team,” including David Kelly and former U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald.
“I gave the memos to my legal team after I gave them to Dan Richman — after I asked him to get it out to the media,” said Comey, who likened the memos to his “diaries.”
“I didn’t consider it part of an FBI file… It was my personal aide-memoire,” Comey said, adding “I always thought of it as mine, like a diary”
It’s difficult to know where to begin on that Director Comey interview w/ @BretBaier. He just admitted to leaking his memos (with now-classified info) to two more people, in addition his friend.
So he shared government property with not one, but three people? What?
Responding to a Fox & Friends interview in which President Trump said “Comey is a leaker and he’s a liar. He’s been leaking for years,” the former FBI Director responded “He’s just wrong. Facts really do matter.” Comey then claimed that because the FBI approved the inclusion of the memos in his book, A Higher Loyalty, they are therefore not classified.
Comey told Bret Baier that he didn’t need to tell Congress that Daniel Richman, the “good friend” to whom he leaked, was a FBI special government employee because “it wasn’t relevant.”
Byron York of the Washington Examiner provides an excellent breakdown of Comey’s semantic absurdity here.
The “Steele Dossier” and who paid for it
Baier asked Comey why the FBI used the Steele Dossier compiled by former UK spy Christopher Steele to obtain a FISA warrant on a Trump campaign aide if it was “salacious,” to which Comey replied that the dossier was part of a “broader mosaic of facts” used to support the application.
And when it comes to who funded the dossier used in the FISA application, Comey claims he still has no idea whether Hillary Clinton and the DNC funded it.
“When did you learn that the DNC and the Hillary Clinton campaign had funded Christopher Steele’s work?” Baier asked.
“Yeah I still don’t know that for a fact,” Comey responded.
“What do you mean?” Baier replied.
“I’ve only seen it in the media, I never knew exactly which Democrats had funded,” Comey explained, “I knew it was funded first by Republicans.”
Baier quickly corrected Comey, noting that while conservative website Free Beacon had Fusion GPS on “a kind of retainer,” they “did not fund the Christopher Steele memo or the dossier,” adding “That was initiated by Democrats.”
In @BretBaier interview, Comey seems unaware/confused about difference between Fusion GPS/Free Beacon period and Fusion GPS/Steele dossier period.
Comey claimed that “Republicans” funded the *dossier* (not other anti-Trump research) and he wasn’t sure that HRC and DNC funded the dossier (they did). That’s either mendacity or negligence.
Comey’s claims to @BretBaier that A: he didn’t leak and B: he doesn’t know to this day that the HRC campaign and DNC financed the dossier simply are not credible. He even claimed the GOP started the funding of the dossier. That was debunked many months ago.
Actually is stunning overall amount the head of the FBI claims to not have known. Didn’t know Steele’s name; didn’t know he lied to the FBI and was dismissed; didn’t know who funded dossier; didn’t know who leaked it. You gotta ask: Maybe he didn’t want to know? #SpecialReport
President Trump will be generally happy with the latest UMichigan Consumer Sentiment Index, which dipped modestly from 101.4, a 14 year high, to 98.8, which however was better than the 98.0 expected, and improved slightly in the 2nd half of the month, shrinking the small overall decline for April according to Umich chief economist Richard Curtin.
Looking at the breakdown, there was a decline across both current conditions and expectations, although the former dipped more than expected, as optimism was barely dented, down to 88.4 vs. 88.8 last month while the current economic conditions index fell to 114.9 vs. 121.2 last month.
Still, the final April figure was nearly identical to its 2018 average (98.9)-which was higher than any other yearly average since 107.6 was recorded in 2000 (which was, in turn, the highest yearly average in more than a half century).
According to the report, consumers are split on two main items: tax reform and trade policies, which “continue to spark spontaneous, or unaided, comments.”
In what will come as good news to Trump and the republicans, the “spontaneous comments” about the tax reform legislation had a positive balance of opinion.
Meanwhile, as the latest Beige Book hinted (with no less than 36 mentions of the word) trade tariffs generated a negative balance of opinion. This was most obvious in the difference in the Expectation Index which was striking: positive views on tax reform had Index values 28 points higher than those who made no mention of the tax reform legislation, and negative views on tariffs had Index values that were 28 points lower than those who didn’t spontaneously mention trade.
However, in a more troubling development, UMich reported that the best simple summary of the current state of consumer confidence is that the economy is “as good as it gets.” In other words, it’s all downhill from here.
And while consumers do not anticipate an economic downturn anytime soon, Curtin said that “the long expansion has made consumers (and economists) somewhat apprehensive about future trends.”
We wonder what consumer would say if they learned that the CBO forecasts another 10 years without a recession: as we reported two weeks ago, the CBO is now estimating that there will be no recession within the next ten years – making this the longest economic cycle without contraction in US history…234 months from June 30 2009 through Dec 31, 2028.
While the long-term economic outlook is increasingly murky, today’s data which saw a beat in GDP and the highest employment cost index since 2008, has convinced traders of one thing: a June rate hike is coming.
As seen in the chart below, the probability of a rate hike in June is now 93.3%, the highest in the series, and is why the 2Y rose as high as 2.495%, flattening the curve even more.
And while nobody is talking about it, the market now believes that there is a non-trivial chance, or 34.2%, of a 25bps rate hike next week.
However, to answer what all this means for the broader economy, and the long-term inflationary outlook, just keep your eyes on the yield curve: the flatter it gets, the more likely a recession is imminent: the only question is when.
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I don’t care about your credentials as long as you are ready to trade and make money daily and have the experience to back it up.
Bill Cosby now faces up to 30 years in prison after being found guilty yesterday of drugging and raping a woman in 2004. The result of yesterday’s retrial was far from certain. Cosby delivered a deadlocked jury ending in mistrial in June 2017, the last time this case came to court. And for decades, he has dodged both legal and social repercussions for the sexual misconduct and violence alleged by at least several dozen women.
Cosby’s conviction “is not just a victory for the 62 of us publicly known Cosby survivors” but “also a victory … for all sexual assault survivors, female and male,” one of Cosby’s accusers, Lili Bernard, told reporters outside the courtroom.
“There was every reason to believe Cosby wouldn’t be found guilty,” writes Buzzfeed’s Scaachi Koul. “Cosby was in his late seventies before the allegations against him actually coalesced into a widely followed news story in late 2014, largely because a male comedian, Hannibal Buress, started talking about them. Cosby’s costars and family were actively defending him in public, as were other celebrities.”
After the verdict, Cosby erupted at one prosecutor who suggested he should be denied bail because he was a flight risk who owned a plane. “He doesn’t have a plane, you asshole!” Cosby shouted.
Cosby’s sentencing will take place in the next 60-90 days.
The news of Cosby’s conviction has given rise to a charged and celebratory mood among accusers of another powerful Hollywood entity, Harvey Weinstein, and other celebrities vocal in recent #MeToo campaigns:
America loved Bill Cosby. Nobody ever loved Harvey Weinstein. Thank you to all the courageous women who came forward and changed the world. #TruthPrevails
And a lot of people couldn’t resist laying into Cosby’s gentlemanly public image, with lectures to other comedians about curse words and to poor black communities about baggy pants and how their problems were all their own fault.
The judge unsealed Cosby’s depositions where he admitted to drugging women because of Cosby’s role as a “public moralist.” He was brought down in part by his own desire to lecture poor black people for moral turpitude, while decades of sexual assault allegations were hidden.
Heard a man on tv reminiscing about the Cosby of old, & expressing bewilderment over the duality of such a revered paternal figure also being a predator & rapist. Yep. You’re starting to get the point, buddy.
“America’s Dad” is what we called Bill Cosby. And we called him that because, well, what a revolutionary way to put it. Through him, we were thumbing our noses at the long, dreary history for black men in America by elevating this one to a paternal Olympus. In the 1980s he made the black American family seem “just like us.” … Mr. Cosby made blackness palatable to a country historically conditioned to think the worst of black people. And to pull that off, he had to find a morally impeccable presentation of himself and his race. This is what Sidney Poitier, his friend and movie partner, was always up against: inhabiting the superhumanly unimpeachable. But Mr. Cosby might have managed to pull a fast one, using his power and wealth to become the predator that white America mythologized in a campaign to terrorize, torture and kill black people for centuries. Mr. Cosby told lots of jokes. This was his sickest one.
FREE MINDS
OK for bars to boot Trump supporters, says court. It’s OK for a bar to kick out someone based on their political beliefs, the Manhattan Supreme Court ruled on Thursday, responding to a case in which a man claims he was kicked out of a New York City bar for wearing a “Make America Great Again” hat. Upon talking to the staffer trying to boot him, the man, Greg Piatek, was allegedly told that “anyone who supports Trump—or believes in what you believe—is not welcome here.”
Piatek’s lawyer told the court that “the purpose of the hat is that he wore it because he was visiting the 9/11 Memorial.” This, they argued, made the hat “part of his spiritual belief,” since he was “paying spiritual tribute to the victims of 9/11.”
New York state and city anti-discrimination law covers spiritual and religious beliefs but not political beliefs. But the judge didn’t buy their 9/11 spirituality and MAGA-hat claims. “Plaintiff does not state any faith-based principle to which the hat relates,” Justice David Cohen concluded, tossing the case.
PEACE…?
War is over—maybe. In a Friday morning summit, the leaders of North Korea and South Korea agreed to “a nuclear-free Korean Peninsula through complete denuclearization,” thereby ending the Korean War.
KOREAN WAR TO END! The United States, and all of its GREAT people, should be very proud of what is now taking place in Korea!
The Koreas are “linked by blood as a family and compatriots who cannot live separately,” said North Korea’s Kim Jong Un. Now, the Koreas “will be united as one country.”
But the “Panmunjom Declaration for Peace, Prosperity and Unification on the Korean Peninsula” agreement signed by Kim and South Korean President Moon Jae-in was short on specifics. “In a sense, the vague joint statement… kicks one of the world’s most pressing issues down the road to a much-anticipated summit between Kim and U.S. President Donald Trump in coming weeks,” writes AP’s Foster Klug.
Confirming reports, two sources tell me police tracked down the alleged East Area Rapist/Golden State Killer by running crime-scene DNA against consumer genealogical websites, giving them possible relatives of the target, then building a pool and narrowing from there.
Immigration officials are pushing for the detainment and prosecution of any parents caught trying to cross the Mexican border illegally with their kids. This zero-tolerance move would represent “a stark change in policy that would result in the separation of families that until now have mostly been kept together,” notes The Washington Post.
Pansexualis the new bisexual. According to Merriam-Webster’s blog, “Pansexual (and pansexuality) entered the English language in the early 20th century, although with a different meaning than it generally has today; the word initially meant “tending to suffuse all experience and conduct with erotic feeling.”
This month Surgeon General Jerome Adams issued an advisory that touted the lifesaving potential of naloxone, an opioid antagonist that reverses potentially fatal overdoses. He called for wider distribution of naloxone to opioid users, their relatives, and their close associates.
While that move is commendable, the surgeon general pulled his punches. He can and should go further by pressing the Food and Drug Administration to reclassify naloxone as an over-the-counter drug, writes Jeffrey Singer, a Phoenix physician and senior fellow at the Cato Institute.
While the GDP print came in stronger than expected, despite a sharp drop in consumption, the big news in today’s data had nothing to do with GDP and everything to do with employment costs, and wages and salaries in particular, which both rose at the fastest pace in nearly a ten years, confirming that inflationary wage pressures are growing.
Specifically, wages and salaries rose 0.9%QoQ, up from 0.6% in the previous quarter. Total compensation, which includes wages and benefits, rose 2.7% over past 12 months, up from 2.4% a year ago, while private-sector wages and salaries advanced 2.9%YoY, also above the 2.6% printed in Q1 2017. Both were the strongest prints since Q3 2008, if slightly below the 3% pace observed heading into the financial crisis as shown below.
In kneejerk response the dollar spiked higher, although it has since faded much of the move, although more ominously, the 2s10s flattened once again, and is back to 48 bps, just shy of fresh post-crisis lows.
Q1 GDP was expected to be a big slowdown from the Q4 2017 GDP of 2.9%, mostly as a result of slowing consumption now that the front-loaded, credit-card funded euphoria from Trump’s tax cust is long gone, and that’s precisely what happened when moments ago the BEA reported that in the first quarter, GDP rose at a 2.3% annualized rate, which while the lowest in the past year, was better than the 2.0% consensus estimate.
The increase in real GDP reflected increases in business investment, consumer spending, exports, and inventory investment. Imports, which subtract from GDP, increased in the first quarter of 2018.
Looking at the components, the biggest cause for the drop in GDP was the sharp slowdown in Personal consumption, which rose only 1.1% in 1Q, in line with expectations, after soaring 4.0% prior quarter, this was the weakest quarter for US consumer spending since 2Q 2013.
The other components were generally also in line with expectations:
Fixed Investment slumped from 1.31% in Q4 to 0.76%: so much for that CapEx boost.
Inventories were the biggest swing factor, adding 0.43% to GDP after subtracting 0.53% in Q4
Exports dropped from 0.83% to 0.59%, while Imports subtracted 0.39% from GDP vs -1.99% in Q4. On net, trade contributed 0.20% to GDP, after subtracting -1.2% in Q4.
Finally government added 0.2% to Q1 GDP, after boosting Q4 GDP by 0.51%.
On the inflation side, the news was a little “flatter” with the GDP price index rising 2% in 1Q after rising 2.3% prior quarter, and missing expectations of a 2.2% print. That said, core PCE rose 2.5% Q/Q in 1Q after rising 1.9% prior quarter, and matched expectations.
Overall, prices of goods and services purchased by U.S. residents increased 2.8 percent in the first quarter of 2018, after increasing 2.5 percent in the fourth quarter of 2017.
Food prices increased 0.4 percent in the first quarter following an increase of 0.1 percent in the fourth quarter of 2017.
Energy prices increased 12.4 percent in the first quarter of 2018 following an increase of 28.2 percent in the fourth quarter of 2017.
Excluding food and energy, prices increased 2.7 percent in the first quarter of 2018, compared with an increase of 2.0 percent in the fourth quarter of 2017.
Overall, this was a solid report, certainly better than expected, and with core PCE rising at 2.5%, it provides the Fed with even more reasons to hike rates in coming meetings.
There’s just too much of this thing. Avengers: Infinity War is way overloaded with super-characters (I count at least 20 weighty names, plus plenty of subsidiary ones), and chaotically edited battles (some of which devolve into boring fistfights), and much leaping and hurling and just plain running around. There are too many fireballs and explosions and all-devouring CGI. And it all goes on for two and a half hours.
This is unfortunate, because the story here, in all of its several facets, is unusually appealing. And the movie has more heart-and-soul than you might expect, too, even in a Marvel production. It’s possible to love this picture and occasionally grow tired of it, as well. There are worse things, writes Kurt Loder in his latest review for Reason.
Sen. Bernie Sanders is set to announce a plan that guarantees every American “who wants or needs one” a lifetime government job paying at least $15 an hour, with health insurance and other perks. This new progressive workforce will then, according to The Washington Post, build glorious “projects throughout the United States aimed at addressing priorities such as infrastructure, care giving, the environment, education and other goals.”
Bill Cosby now faces up to 30 years in prison after being found guilty yesterday of drugging and raping a woman in 2004. The result of yesterday’s retrial was far from certain. Cosby delivered a deadlocked jury ending in mistrial in June 2017, the last time this case came to court. And for decades, he has dodged both legal and social repercussions for the sexual misconduct and violence alleged by at least several dozen women.
This month Surgeon General Jerome Adams 
There’s just too much of this thing. Avengers: Infinity War is way overloaded with super-characters (I count at least 20 weighty names, plus plenty of subsidiary ones), and chaotically edited battles (some of which devolve into boring fistfights), and much leaping and hurling and just plain running around. There are too many fireballs and explosions and all-devouring CGI. And it all goes on for two and a half hours.