Busted Big Time

Share

Author: patd

“But I don’t want to go among mad people," Alice remarked. "Oh, you can’t help that," said the Cat: "we’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad." "How do you know I’m mad?" said Alice. "You must be," said the Cat, "or you wouldn’t have come here.” ― Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

32 thoughts on “Busted Big Time”

  3. Last night, OM suggested a 90-day price freeze.  Could that be done?  Would it help?

    Still waiting for my tax refund and can’t get by their automated loop.

  4. excerpts from

    Peter Navarro subpoena suggests DoJ may be investigating Trump | Trump administration | The Guardian

    The exact nature of the subpoena – served on 26 May 2022 and first obtained by the Guardian – and whether it means Trump himself is under criminal investigation for January 6 could not be established given the unusually sparse details included on the order.
    But certain elements appear to suggest that it is related to a new investigation examining potential criminality by the former president and, at the very least, that the justice department is expanding its inquiry for the first time into Trump and his inner circle.
    […]
    At least four separate grand juries are now examining events related to the January 6 Capitol attack.
    One grand jury was impaneled last year for a contempt charge against Trump’s strategist Steve Bannon. A second is examining organizers of pro-Trump rallies, a third is looking at Trump lawyers in a scheme to falsify slates of electors, and now a fourth concerns Navarro.
    Navarro was not told when he was served with the grand jury subpoena whether he was a target or a subject of the investigation. If he was a target, that might indicate the subpoena was related to a contempt case. If he was a subject, it could make him part of a wider inquiry.
    The distinction also raises a third possibility, according to the former assistant US attorneys: he may be a target for a contempt case, and also a subject in a different case – and prosecutors might use the contempt case as leverage to gain cooperation for the other.

  5. BiD, there is this DOJ update on a presidential EO that is helpful altho’ it would be nice if prez would be able to demand rollback of unreasonable hikes rather than just prohibiting future price rises.

    The Department is also committed to preventing hoarding and price gouging for critical supplies during this crisis. To combat this misconduct, the President issued an Executive Order under section 102 of the Defense Production Act, which prohibits hoarding of designated items, and the Department has created the COVID-19 Hoarding and Price Gouging Task Force. In a memo to U.S. Attorneys, it states that “we will aggressively pursue bad actors who amass critical supplies either far beyond what they could use or for the purpose of profiteering. Scarce medical supplies need to be going to hospitals for immediate use in care, not to warehouses for later overcharging.”  

  6. After seeing the cover letter and the option to provide the documents requested Navarro’s claim of executive privilege is a stretch and an opportunity for a bit of showboating that is likely not supported by that doctrine. Any documents that were provided to TFG would likely be covered by the Presidential Records Act, which in turn are subject to FOIA requests to the National Archives (you know, 15 boxes of documents wrongfully taken to and retrieved from Mar-a-Lardo) subject to disclosure protection based upon their level of classification. Problem for Navarro that he has no control over is that Biden has the power to classify and declassify any government documents. Navarro is serving as his own attorney and from what little I’ve seen of his lawsuit to block disclosure of the documents requested by the 1/6 committee, he has a fool for a client. He’d be well advised to lawyer up but his own view of his legal ability to face off against DOJ probably advises him to the contrary. Pity that. 🤪

  7. What about rent hikes?  I keep seeing folks saying they have to move out because of enormous rent increases, but there’s no place to go.   Some sketchy area of Dallas got money, I assume some sort of covid payment, which they used to make improvements on their property, practically doubled the rent, and, have started evicting the current tenants. 

  9. He’s gathering his rose buds while he may, because soon he’ll be a’flying.   One way ticket to Dubai, please.

  10. Sturg,  he better save his money – in checking on a PIT-SEATAC ticket this week what was a $330 r/t fare last year is a $700 ticket this year. That’s plenty of change in the air travel industry for me.

  11. pogo, peter is not a lawyer but yes a fool for trying to act like one.  he is an economist (not sure if he isn’t also a foolish one there too).   

  12. can you imagine the self-restraint the judge will have to have when peter argues his case.  am sure his haughty demeanor will tempt even the most even-tempered jurist to find him in contempt just for being himself (read “asshole” here).

  13. Blue Bronc from yesterday “I do like the containers for storage, but they eventually fail and need to be sent to the plastic graveyard. “

    Just for the record, there is no plastic graveyard.  It has now invaded every corner of the earth and the micro garbage is being ingested by every living thing with the result of encroaching extinction of birds and fish.  There is some evidence of negative effects on human brains and definitely on sperm reduction.  

     

  17. To be fair, fixed-income seniors don’t drive inflation, but extreme wealth concentration leads to a small population having the means to support inflated prices while everyone else gets screwed, something’s gotta give eventually 😰

  18. Democrats could have warned you the stimulus would lead to inflation (i did, btw) but they had elections to win.
     
    Now, they have elections to lose

  19. “Democrats could have warned you the stimulus would lead to inflation …”

    bink, joe manchin did several times and got royally blasted for it

  20. cnn in january this year:

    Manchin expounded on his rationale in a December radio interview with West Virginia MetroNews, saying he had been clear early on in the negotiations that he was concerned about inflation.

  21. I’m no economist but depending on which economist you ask, the 2021 stimulus, supply chain and bottleneck issues, post pandemic demand, corporate profits driven by price increases and most recently the Russia-Ukraine war-generated shortages of grain and sanctions on Russian oil and minerals all contribute to the inflation we’re experiencing.  EU is seeing similar inflation (difference of half a point in 2021) but prices on items (due in part to supply issues related to supply chain and reduced production) are much greater in the US than in Europe as a percentage of the inflation numbers, along with higher housing costs in the US as the two biggest contributors to inflation here. Monetary supply is definitely a driver, but it’s just one of many.

    Oliver Povey (USNews) has this take:

    Economists had believed that the pandemic-era inflation would have already begun to subside by May 2022. However, it has only gotten worse. This cannot be blamed on the Biden administration nor the economists who misread the situation. In fact, no correct reading could have been made; Russia’s invasion of Ukraine upended the thinking on the pandemic recovery.
    Inflation was already rising before the war in Ukraine…
    ***
    … the war in Ukraine has exacerbated existing problems
    While the Biden administration hoped the inflation caused by the pandemic recovery would be transitory, the war in Ukraine has caused an even deeper economic crisis that threatens many more countries than just the US.

    As both Russia and Ukraine are large producers of natural resources, the price of commodities has gone through the roof. This is especially true for natural gas and oil as Russia has been sanctioned by much of NATO, cutting a large part of the world off from such an important resource. The cost of gas in the US has continued to grow, soaring to an all-time high of $4.33 in March 2022, up from a pandemic low of $1.94 in May 2020.

    [Continues]

    Not sure the Fed is up to the task of managing that kind of price increases by raising interest rates half a point at a whack, and shutting down the money supply will lead to a recession in all likelihood.  There ain’t no good options out there that i can see.

  22. I got the news about Nixon’s financial phenaigaling on the radio while cutting across the middle of South Dakroter in a VW bus.  He coulda been talking about Jupiter and Pluto for anything I knew. 

  25. Actually, Depp won 86.66…% (Amber was awarded $2M) Now they each have a piece of paper awarding them money that neither one probably expects to ever collect.

  28. Prices and rents started rising when some folks started making $15/hour…and…because of the stimulus checks. GREED.
     

    The price of our shipping containers went up from $5K to $20K. GREED.

  30. Once upon a time outside St Augustine was a small wooden building, erected on a gentle slope of a hill. People called it “The Crazy House”. It wasn’t built “level and plumb” but was off kilter so that if you stood straight up in the doorway you were standing like 45° in relation to the house, a picture on the wall would hang at an angle, etc. Hard to explain, but inside the house a ball would roll uphill and it could make you feel sick even.   Weird place.

  31. https://www.cnn.com/2022/06/01/tech/elon-musk-tesla-ends-work-from-home/index.html

    “Anyone who wishes to do remote work must be in the office for a minimum (and I mean *minimum*) of 40 hours per week or depart Tesla. This is less than we ask of factory workers,” Musk wrote, adding that the office must be the employee’s primary workplace where the other workers they regularly interact with are based — “not a remote branch office unrelated to the job duties.”

    Whada prick

    “The policy is completely at odds with that of the other tech company Musk is attempting to buy, Twitter (TWTR), which has previously announced employees can continue to work from home “forever” if they prefer.”

Comments are closed.