Mika B. needs an "intervention."

You should watch this MJ segment from today.  Earlier she ripped up Michael Steele a former RNC head and a housling at NBC/MSNBC over his audacity as an uppity housling for having the audacity to defend Trump.  This violates a prime directive 0f Mikanation which enjoins that African-Americans cannot be abused on TV, or anywhere.

In the tape below she moves on to Michael Wolff, clearly a tribal urbanite, who has had the audacity to write an article stating the obvious truth that the US is dividing into two nations along 1850s lines, but with different boundaries, perhaps metro/vs other.  He points to the evident unknownness and inscrutability of the people at Cleveland attending the GOP convention to such as he and Mika.  He then says we are dividing, perhaps, irrevocably.  Mika then throws a fit abusing him for daring to imagine that Trump people are other than ignorant and misinformed.  Clearly she is sure that only her side is possessed of virtue.

IMO MSNBC should give her a rest, somewhere, anywhere.  She should take Joe with her.  Willy Geist would do an admirable job of running the show until they retune someday ...  pl

http://www.msnbc.com/morning-joe/watch/2016-duck-dynasty-vs-lena-dunham-election-738063427840

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Wolff_(journalist)

Comments

[Peter Reichard]

Totally agree with Liza about the economy. After a sixty year post war economic boom the latter half fueled by an overextension of credit I believe we are in the middle of a 15-20 year double dip world depression, the first crack in the dyke being the panic of '08. Failure to rein in the banks caused them to double down on their reckless behavior and after an eight year non recovery the other shoe is about to drop. For several years I have feared that the European banking system would be the source of the next panic with Deutsche Bank the best candidate to be the next Credit-Anstalt as they are leveraged as much as Lehman Brothers but are far larger.
A frightening scenario is coming into focus but is unlikely to happen in the next three months.

[steve]

I don't think Wolff has to travel to Texas or Ohio to learn something that he couldn't just as easily learn by taking a 45 minute subway trip outside of midtown Manhattan or a 45 minute freeway drive away from the westside of Los Angeles.

[bth]

Obama isn't running for president this term.

[jonst]

" fiscally conservative"? "Centrist"? Printing money on this scale? Running up the pubic debt on this level? Creating the largest army of Food Stamp collectors the nation has even see? Or, perhaps even, ever imagined? Use of Executive Orders on an unprecedented scale and scope, since perhaps FDR? Declaring, as a legal doctrine, that classes of people deserve a strict scrutiny standard of judicial review? Dispensing with MEANINGFUL due process before launching drone attacks on American citizens?

Look, these may be the wisest policy choices since Solomon. That is another argument, but I would not call them "centrist" or "conservative" by my historical interpretation of those terms.

[bth]

"If you got out of the dorm youd know " Really? You have no idea.

[morgan]

So, trying to recover its national sovereignty is a "mindless act?"

[SmoothieX12]

The media

The media are unfit to be media, too. Not that this occupation requires many qualifications.

[JerseyJeffersonian]

Good morning, all,

Here is a link to a post from Ian Welsh from just a little while back, Why Poor White Males are the Core of Trump's Support.

http://www.ianwelsh.net/why-poor-white-males-are-the-core-of-trumps-support/

This was from March, and as events have unfolded, it is clear to me that many people are rallying to the support of Mr. Trump's proposed policies, as nebulous as they sometimes seem, and despite his zig-zagging and his occasional foot-in-mouth disease (ruthlessly exploited and distorted by the baying pack in the MSM, I might add). And no, many of those rallying are not poor whites, and some of them may not even be white, yet they see the pernicious trend lines that Mr. Welsh points to as being quite likely THEIR FUTURE, TOO; an erosion of prospects for not only them, but for their children and grandchildren. The benefits accruing to the business and finance elite through first the leveraged buy-outs back in the 70s and 80s, and then the grander schemes of pump-and-dump in the 90s, and on to the criminality of these elites in the mortgage scams and their subsequent impunity from criminal prosecution have only convinced these elites that they can - pretty much literally - get away with murder at the expense of the citizenry, black, white, Hispanic, it matters not at all to these sociopaths. And in the litany of bad acts I catalogued above, I even omitted to mention further ongoing outrages that afflict the nation's citizenry, namely the shipping overseas of manufacturing (labor arbitrage) and outsourcing in general, both mightily corrosive to the financial and social well-being of the nation's citizens. More "falling prices" at Walmart do not make up for the loss of Americans' jobs that are inextricably linked to those "falling prices".

More years of the aggrandizement of these same exploitative types, and the continued lionizing of their priorities are exactly the reasons that the more aware citizens rallied to Senator Sanders (that's me) and also to Mr. Trump. They were both seen to be repudiating business as usual, and as trying to restore balance to the national priorities in both the domestic and foreign policy spheres. Sanders and his supporters were knee-capped, and have fallen back to devise another way to skin the cat. Mr. Trump soldiers on to the full disapprobation of the Inner Parties, whether Democrat or Republican, both of them loathe to be pulled away from the hog trough that they have engineered.

The sheep look up, and are not fed. This cannot endure for very much longer.

[robt willmann]

In the NY Times newspaper of today (5 August), an editorial appears entitled, "I Ran the C.I.A. Now I'm Endorsing Hillary Clinton", by Michael J. Morrell (you have to turn on web browser cookies to see it)--

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/05/opinion/campaign-stops/i-ran-the-cia-now-im-endorsing-hillary-clin
ton.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=opinion-c-col-right-region&re
gion=opinion-c-col-right-region&WT.nav=opinion-c-col-right-region&_r=0

A reader's first reaction will probably be that Mr. Morrell's opinion piece was ghost-written by S.J. Perelman--

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0673279/bio

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S._J._Perelman

At the end, the article says that Mr. Morrell was the acting director and deputy director of the CIA from 2010 to 2013. Now, the organized attack on the U.S. persons in Benghazi, Libya took place on September 11-12, 2012, followed by the false story about how it started and happened. And when did the violence in Syria start, about which a public pronouncement was made by the Obama administration that "Assad must go"; was that not around 2011?

It is always nice to start the day with a little humor.

[Fred]

Jack,

"...people may get their information from alternative sources."

This is one reason both campaigns focus so heavily on social media (especially Trump) as well as the complains on social media manipulation. (Type in "Free Milo" to get an idea of just one such complaint). It makes the polling even harder to to do.

[David Habakkuk]

Jack,

Things are getting progressively crazier.

Yesterday, just as Carney announced a cut in interest rates and more QE, the ‘FT’ published an article by Robert Skidelsky entitled: ‘A tweak to helicopter money will help the economy take off; One idea is to give cash to households with an incentive not to hoard it’.

(See https://next.ft.com/content/a36c5a26-5997-11e6-9f70-badea1b336d4 .)

Apparently, the idea is that: ‘You could create smart cards with £1,000 for each person on the electoral register. The cards could be programmed to reduce the value of the balance automatically each week.’

I had always thought Lord Skidelsky an intelligent and rational person. But this to me smacks of panic. How the endgame plays out is quite beyond me.

Incidentally, our exchange on the ‘Trump is a nationalist, not an internationalist thread’ gave me a great deal to think about – particularly in relation to parallels between ‘strategic studies’ and economics.

I hope to feed some of the results into discussions here as we go along.

[Tyler]

Trent/Bth,

Because socially liberal is what we have now, and socially liberal is another way of saying "encouraging social dysgenics". Which in turn leads to more social spending, which blows the idea of "fiscally conservative" out of the water.

You can pick one, not both.

[rjj]

Nice. The doublespeak [as in Is this irony???] quality of his credentials is not new:

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/11/09/michael-j-morell-introducing-the-cia-s-new-acting-director.html

too bad Perelman is not instantly recognized and needs a footnote.

[Tyler]

Morgan,

The mask has slipped and Brenner has outed himself as another soulless Borg Globalist.

[Tyler]

Brenner,

Good grief. You can t wrap your head around the fact that Leftism is tolitarianism, can you?

How do you navigate with your head buried so firmly in the sand?

[Tyler]

Jonst,

Brenner is either in denial or lying. Either way it's not pretty.

[Jack]

Charly

It's the size of the SNB balance sheet relative to the size of Switzerland's economy. And it is also the point about the meaning of the "price" of a security when central banks buy securities with "money" they created with a keystroke. In the not too distant past people would have you committed if you expressed such ideas. But now it is considered perfectly normal although it has done nothing for median household incomes.

[Matthew]

DH: If inflation was so easy to tame, why didn't think of this in 1979?

[Joseph Moroco]

The two Stephens, Cohen on the rare tv or radio appearance and Kinzer in the Boston Globe, are always a pleasant corrective to the Borg.

[Jack]

David

The FT is no longer a conservative paper. It has now become the mouthpiece for the craziness that goes for contemporary discourse on finance and strategic affairs.

Lord Skidelsky is only suggesting what Ben Bernanke has been advocating that Japan do as their program of neo-keynesian government spending and central bank balance sheet expansion has done nothing for their real economy. What is interesting is that these over-educated charlatans are determined to destroy the purchasing power of "money". Their statistics they claim show no inflation. However, the average person sees shrinkflation in their packaged food, rising health care premiums, rents, school tuition for their kids, restaurant meals and pretty much everything they need to live on. Yes, gas prices have declined in the past year.

No one knows the end game. Rudi Dornbusch studied currency crises. But in an environment of competitive devaluation and relative values that may not be the first place where the change in psychology manifests itself. My own feeling is we will likely see the initial behavioral change in the asset class with the most egregious "pricing" - sovereign debt.

One thing I am absolutely certain is that sometime in the future people will ask "what were those people thinking" and "how did so many lose their head". Future generations will study this period to understand how mass delusions get formed and sustained. The next Kindleberger will even write a book.

[JMH]

I expect mini landslides in the swing states which will not be contestable by the Democrats. Even though she will have won the popular vote, Trump will carry the electoral college.

[different clue]

Michael Wolfe is being honest in trying to get his "Wolfe Nation" audience to understand that there is a whole other Nation in this country. Of course, insisting that everyone is either part of Duck Nation or Dunham Nation leaves out a few couple million Bitter Bernistas. If Bernie wasn't offering a real bridge between the two nations with his concerns of de-rigging the upper-class-biased economy and de-rigging its support structures in politics and government, he was at least trying to establish radio contact between Dunham Nation and Duck Nation. But his defeat was assured by electoral engineering by the DNC and in various Primary elections. So what will Sanders' small legions of the defeated and the disregarded become? Bitter Bernie Borderers?

[Fred]

"...THEIR FUTURE..."

When all the (white) women who support Hilary look at their sons tonight they should reflect upon the fact that the establishment thinks there is an immigrant somewhere who deserves the same future as their son. Then they should question whether those politicians mean that future is "the same as" or "instead of."

[Seamus Padraig]

"Chinese banks issued bonds denominated in IMF special drawing rights (SDRs)"

Do you have a source on that? If true, that would/should be front-page news.

[Seamus Padraig]

The MSM owe the Clintons for the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which led to massive industry consolidation and made all the media execs vastly richer. No doubt they can expect more goodies if Hellary is elected.