Category: Politics, Religion & Money

Trump says he had declassified the documents retrieved from his Florida residence by the FBI under a valid search warrant. Why in the world would he declassify them, let alone take them home after he left office?

We shouldn’t have to take Trump’s word on this. It’s safe to assume he is declassifying the documents post facto, which he doesn’t have the authority to do. Again it must be asked, why did he take secret documents to his private residence? There is no acceptable answer to that question.

The potential consequences of arresting Trump and, with luck, sending him to prison, are far preferable to the risks of him possibly holding public office again. His crazed followers threatening civil war would only feel all the more empowered by Trump being back in the White House. Lock him up.

His story keeps changing. Of course it does. Does anyone believe that Trump took work home?

https://news.yahoo.com/trumps-latest-defense-mar-lago-105942456.html

Something else today that has me waiting for an update.

The federal judge in Florida had ordered the government to give the filing to Trump immediately and set the deadline for a possible objection to 3 p.m. on Friday.

https://www.npr.org/2022/08/11/1116974512/justice-department-unseal-warrant-mar-a-lago-trump

Trump must be playing his stable genius chess game, staying five moves ahead of everybody else. He had someone act as an informant to falsely claim there were top secret nuclear weapon documents at his Florida residence.

Trump knew that would force Attorney General Garland to seek a search warrant, setting up a new Witch Hunt victim card for him to play when he announces his presidential candidacy. The same sort of brilliant strategy that had him pleading the Fifth Amendment this week.

Waiting for an update on the condition of author Salman Rushdie, who was attacked as he was being introduced at a lecture.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-62524922

In February 1989, at the height of the controversy over Salman Rushdie’s book “The Satanic Verses”, I took a month-long business trip to Saudi Arabia…

Picture dissolves to a flashback scene.

Freberg of Arabia

Economics is the study of how people and society choose, with or without the use of money, to employ scarce productive resources which could have alternative uses, to produce various commodities over time and distribute them for consumption now and in the future among various persons and groups of society. — Paul Samuelson

In the tradition of John Maynard Keynes, Samuelson favored run-on sentences, but his is one of the more generally accepted definitions of Economics. In short, it’s about the use and distribution of resources. Supply and demand. The haves and have-nots. Keeping up with the Joneses (whether a neighbor or an international conglomerate).

Via RSS, I’ve followed the Econbrowser blog for years. I don’t read everything there, but since inflation kicked in I’ve been making more of a point to keep up.

https://econbrowser.com/

It does seem that Biden’s nearly $2 trillion stimulus, coming during the supply chain crisis, was a significant inflation trigger. Money chased goods that were stuck on container ships. Looks like Lawrence Summers was right.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/02/04/larry-summers-biden-covid-stimulus/

The Fed shouldn’t have waited so long to raise interest rates. This is from July 14, 2021.

Popular historian and well-known narrator David McCullough has died. Having a reputation for fairness and honesty comparable to that of Walter Cronkite, how did McCullough view Trump? These comments are from 2017.

In the video Trump is heard saying, “People don’t ask that question. Why was there the Civil War?” That wasn’t a rhetorical question. Trump literally believed his perception as being the reality. Want another example? “Nobody knew health care could be so complicated.” What an unmitigated moron. An unbounded ego spewing the nonsense of a tiny, simple mind.