Brent Nyitray
Fairlington Blade
Let the mutherfuker burn!
jnc4p
Kevin S. Willis
Michigoose
lmsinca
markinaustin
Arcanaut
novahockey
quarterback
ScottC
yellojktVital Statistics:
Stocks are flattish this morning on no real news. Bonds and MBS are down small.
The services PMI declined in January, according to the Institute for Supply Management. The index declined from 54% to 52.8% on weaker activity and orders, however it remains in expansion territory, where it has been for nearly the past 5 years.
While activity declined somewhat, there were two bright spots. Employment increased by 1% and prices declined by 4%. Tariffs remain a worry. “January was the second month in a row with all four subindexes that directly factor into the Services PMI® — Business Activity, New Orders, Employment and Supplier Deliveries — in expansion territory. Slower growth in the Business Activity and New Orders indexes led to the lower composite index reading. Poor weather conditions were highlighted by many respondents as impacting business levels and production. Like last month, many panelists also mentioned preparations or concerns related to potential U.S. government tariff actions; however, there was little mention of current business impacts as a result.”
Announced job cuts increased 28% to 49,795 in January, according to the Challenger and Gray Job Cut Report. While this is an increase from December, there is a big seasonal element, and it is a decrease of 40% compared to January of 2024. Hiring plans increased.
Productivity declined in the fourth quarter to 1.2% compared to 2.3% in the third quarter. Unit labor costs increased from 0.5% to 3.0%. This might have explained why inflation reappeared in Q4. Output increased 2.3% and hours worked increased 1%.
Productivity is a big driver of non-inflationary growth, and it has been trending down for the past couple of years. Note that productivity collapsed in 2022, right about the time inflation was peaking
Filed under: Economy |
All Things in Moderation 
MILF’s support MILF’s
Plus, the underlying possibility of literal G on G action!
Also, this comment is a doozie!
Feb 06, 2025 at 10:30:30 AM
Tulsi Gabbard is potentially more dangerous to us than Trump is.
She’s young, attractive, intelligent, tough, and articulate…everything Trump ISN’T.
If she girds up her bona fides with the right during the next four years and gets nominated by the GOP, we’ll have a hell of a time winning the general unless Trump destroys the economy (in which case no GOPer will win in 2028).
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I’d definitely vote for her as President. 2028 Republican primary should be interesting.
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Yeah, reading the comments the Daily Kos folks are simply unmoored from reality completely. They are worse than even the actual average Democratic voter, or the view. They think they are in a Christiana theocracy.
Also nobody mentions the very good chance JD Vance fucking steamrolls whatever poor chump the Democrats fluidgender victim Olympics nomination process vomits out next time? These people do not live in reality.
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Vance and Gabbard as VP would be effective.
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I’m starting to feel like there is too much winning.
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If you haven’t read it yet, the Bannon interview in the NYT is good:
https://archive.ph/2czHM
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I find it fascinating that Obama is essentially responsible for DOGE, and thanks to Obama and Biden, all the Democrats complaining that DOGE employees can’t do what they are doing because they aren’t vetted and don’t have clearances, and they don’t have the authority, yada yada, is in fact not true.
https://www.dailywire.com/news/a-doge-origin-story-how-barack-obama-laid-the-groundwork-for-elon-musk
Also interesting that during the first administration that what is now DOGE was a 5th column, sabotaging the Trump administration (like many other pieces and parts of the executive branch) at every turn. Not this time.
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One can only hope:
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I had no idea Charles Johnson still existed. His turnaround from typewriter gate to lefty extremist rivals Johan Goldberg in the “Wow” department.
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I’m not sure what he’s getting at. That the Twitter files were lies, or unimportant, or represented good things that were treated as bad things by people too ignorant to understand?
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Didn’t every swinging dick tell us the economy was great?
https://redstate.com/wardclark/2025/02/07/january-jobs-report-biden-economy-worse-than-anyone-expected-n2185322
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there was some weirdness happening with the adjustment to the 3/24 benchmarking. I suspect this report will get revised in a big way over the next month or two.
The number of people employed in Jan 25 versus Dec 24 increased by 2.2 million.
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The missing Biden voters!
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JD Vance is based af. When Trump nominated him I did not think he was a great choice, for a variety of reasons. Convention performance did not help. Debate performance did help. Interviews have helped considerable more. But this response to cancel culture?
https://x.com/jdvance/status/1887960225195638848?s=46
He was the perfect choice. Exactly the person we needed in this moment.
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Dude was an enlisted Marine, I knew from the get go.
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Well, you had more insight than me.
I missed it. But I see it now.
In other news:
https://apnews.com/article/trump-kennedy-center-board-chairman-firings-21cd0018c6e9f591d59becea8573d8c0
Trump fires the Kennedy Center board of trustees and names himself chairman!
Do we live in the best fucking timeline ever or what?
I feel so sorry for the lefties who cannot glory in the magnificence of this orange renaissance, in this amazingly unlikely convergence, in this miracle of serendipity that has occurred and is occurring. They cannot see the reality that they live in a miraculous and unparalleled time, and that is sad.
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The USAID incest continues! The reporter who dug up vaguely racist tweets that got the racist kid genius fired had TIES TO USAID!!
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1887885293866393619?s=46
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Bigbalz has been reinstated! All is right with the world!
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1888078694855344338?s=46&t=vSGsUlnc4rLxcUf7zfUiHg
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That was actually Marko Elez (sp?). Big Balls was the guy with the Russian web site, and never resigned although MSNBC is trying to scare people about him.
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My gawd, that’s funny!
Was this off the cuff or had he held this for the right moment? Either way, chef’s kiss.
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Matt Tiabbi just dropped a note that about half a billion in USAID money went to Internews, and to give him time because he’s sifting through the filth.
USAID has pushed nearly half a billion dollars ($472.6m) through a secretive US government financed NGO, “Internews Network” (IN), which has “worked with” 4,291 media outlets, producing in one year 4,799 hours of broadcasts reaching up to 778 million people and “training” over 9000 journalists (2023 figures). IN has also supported social media censorship initiatives…
Have you ever come across a big piece of plywood lying flat in a field, or a junkyard? Sometimes you pick it up and it’s just dirt, and sometimes it’s a mass of snakes and maggots and wriggling things. Please bear with me on Internews. This one’s going to take a minute.
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Awesome!
Musk has some interesting DOGE news:
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1888314848477376744?s=46&t=vSGsUlnc4rLxcUf7zfUiHg
“Yesterday, I was told that there are currently over $100B/year of entitlements payments to individuals with no SSN or even a temporary ID number. If accurate, this is extremely suspicious.”
Jaw dropper if it bears out.
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Sweet Jeebus, that’s funny!
https://nypost.com/2025/02/08/us-news/inside-trumps-hectic-day-to-day-schedule-as-prez-begins-to-transform-federal-government/
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I found this to be a good view of the larger issues at stake with Trump’s executive orders:
“Welcome to America’s Fourth Great Constitutional Rupture
Feb. 10, 2025, 5:02 a.m. ET
…
Recent presidents have pushed the envelope of executive power, including that of President Barack Obama in providing protection for unauthorized immigrants who arrived as children and President Joe Biden in ordering the forgiveness of some student loans.
Mr. Trump would take these exceptions and make them the new norm.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/10/opinion/trump-caesar-constitutional-rupture.html
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The left never, ever, ever contemplates that their weapons might get picked up and used by the other side.
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George Will shares the schadenfreude
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/02/12/donald-trump-presidency-progressives/
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Really? These “exceptions”? Presidents have at various times governed extensively with executive orders, and both Biden and Obama administrations used them heavily and expansively. “Take these small innocent exceptions and make them the new norm,” my ass. They tried to advance multiple things they knew to be unconstitutional in both administrations.
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Who will be the American POTUS that offers the King a deal he can’t refuse to turn over Jordan to the majority Palestinian population and leave.
https://twitter.com/i/broadcasts/1yNGaLrMoygKj
We all know that is the inevitable solution.
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And what about Egypt? Egypt should share the love.
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So apparently the decision to blow up the Nord Stream pipeline wasn’t made by Biden because he was too far gone by then.
“The buck, of course, when it came to such covert ops, always stopped with the president.
But as one of the operatives told me, the rule did not apply when it came to Biden’s stopping Putin in the Ukraine operation. The president “out of the picture intellectually by the time the Russians invaded,” he said. Biden’s hostility toward the continuing flow of Russian gas to Germany was on the record when he handled some oil and gas issues as Obama’s vice president.
…
On February 7, 2022, less than three weeks before Russia would invade Ukraine, Biden held a meeting in the White House with Scholz. When asked about Nord Stream 2, Biden said: “If Russia invades . . . there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it.”
I was told that the Americans in the field took on the assignment in the belief that they were working to support a US president standing up to the Russian leader and assuring Putin that he meant what he said. “Our mission was set up as a deterrent to Russia going to war in Ukraine,” an involved US official told me, “and we had the capability to blow up the pipelines. That was to be the mission—to show Putin that we have a president who doesn’t fuck around. And look at what happened.” He was referring to the fact that Russia invaded and an order to trigger the mines that did not come until seven months later.”
https://seymourhersh.substack.com/p/nord-stream-and-the-failures-of-the
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