US Erection 12 *AND* 16 *AND* 20 *AND* 22 *AND* 24 *AND* Beyond

[JelloPuddingPop]

When MTG becomes the only grown up in the room. It shows how far each party has fallen.

Drain the swamp indeed.

[5thhorseman]

Are the Dems really saying every vote was perfect! If they are, yes shame on them but I find that hard to believe. I've tuned everything out though so wouldn't know if they did.

[donlever]

Olympic hottie Eileen Gu wins gold and defends her halfpipe title. This is her 6th medal overall.

...and chirped JD Vance after the fact as well.

All in all a solid day for EG.

[Carl Yagro]

She chirped Mr. Eyeliner in the most elegant and respectful way too. I guess if you have to give JD credit, he didn't go the Fox "News" vitriol route and call her a peasant.

Note: The Bronze medallist is a mix of Caucasian and Malaysian Chinese descent, born and raised in the US, but competes for the UK. No problem there. Not a traitor at all.

When all those Asians win figure skating or math competitions for the US? Murcia! After they win? Verbally and physically assault them for Covid created in a US lab.

As an aside, if JD somehow does become Prez one day, I wonder if he would ban US citizens from competing for other countries... provided they're deemed as "enemy states". You want to compete for a western nation? Go right ahead. He'd probably ICE his Indian family too.

[Topper]

Congressional Budget Office reported last week on the first five months (starting in October).

The US government had borrowed over $1 trillion, including over $300 billion in February. Interest payments were $433 billion over those first five months.

Reads like an eighties Dodge financial statement.

[Per]

Tucker Carlsson has been interviewed by The Economist, and weirdly he comes across as fairly sensible.
Is that how far we have drifted as a society?

[Per]

The economist and Nobel laureate Paul Krugman has written an interesting piece on the widespread corruption in the current US administration.

Some snippets:

Over the weekend Donald Trump threatened dire vengeance on Iran unless its government opened the Strait of Hormuz within 48 hours, a deadline that would expire Monday evening in Washington. Specifically, he announced that the U.S. would begin bombing power plants — plants that supply electricity to Iran’s civilian population — unless the Strait was cleared.
But at 7:05 AM Monday Trump called the whole thing off — for five days, he said, but many people are assuming that the threatened action, which would have been a massive war crime, is now off the table.

At around 6:50 a.m. in New York, S&P 500 e-Mini futures trading on the CME recorded a sharp and isolated jump in volume, breaking from an otherwise subdued premarket backdrop. With thin liquidity typical of early trading hours, the sudden burst stood out as one of the largest volume moments of the session up to that point.
A similar pattern was observed in oil markets. West Texas Intermediate May futures also saw a noticeable pickup in trading activity at roughly the same time, with a distinct volume spike interrupting otherwise quiet conditions.

When officers of a company or people close to them exploit confidential information for personal financial gain, that’s insider trading — which is illegal. But we have another word for situations in which people with access to confidential information regarding national security — such as plans to bomb or not to bomb another country — exploit that information for profit. That word is “treason.”

One question that may be harder to resolve is the extent to which the possibility of insider trading may actually have influenced policy. Are decisions about war and peace in part serving the cause of market manipulation rather than the national interest? If you dismiss this as unthinkable, you just haven’t been paying attention.

You can read the full piece here:
Treason In The Futures Market by Paul Krugman