Donald Trump hasn’t taken office yet but Fox News is already claiming that his election has benefitted the country. Referring to an expected rise in retail spending this holiday season, Fox host Trish Regan “asked,” “Is it a Trump bump?”
“All of a sudden, it feels like people are a little more optimistic!” Regan continued. “They watch the Dow, seemingly every day now, close at a new high and they’re shopping.”
And, of course, it’s thanks to Trump, according to Regan. Even as she laughably claimed not to be biased. “All of a sudden,” Regan said to Kelly Jane Torrance of the Weekly Standard, “we’re talking about the promise of lower taxes, less regulation, and I don’t care - you know, look, I’m a business reporter. Politics aside, lower taxes, less regulation, that’s the thing that most people would regard as a positive for the economy. Are sort of your everyday folks feeling the same way?”
Torrance bought it. “People would not be coming out and spending money in record numbers if they didn’t think that things were going to get much better starting January 20th,” she said.
Regan asked Robin Biro, a Democratic strategist, “Now that he’s [Trump] heading to the White House, you see this optimism in the stock market, do you think the optimism is going to stay?”
Biro agreed about the stock market but credited “73 straight months of growth under the Obama administration” for the increased spending.
Suddenly, Regan became argumentative. “Wages haven’t budged in more than 20 years,” she interrupted.
In fact, median incomes rose last year. NPR reported:
[R]eal median household incomes rose from $53,718 in 2014 to $56,516 last year. That’s a 5.2 percent rise — the first statistically significant increase since 2007.
[…]
The official poverty rate decreased to 13.5 percent for last year, a drop of 1.2 percentage points. That represents 3.5 million people who are no longer in poverty and is the largest annual percentage point drop since 1999, the Census Bureau says.
It’s too bad Biro didn’t bring that up.
Torrance didn’t note it either. “We’re finally realizing that the Trump administration will not ruin America,” she crowed.
How would she know? It hasn't done anything yet.
But instead of challenging Torrance, “business reporter” Regan helped validate her. “Everybody needs to take a big deep breath,” she said. “He’s our president-elect. You gotta give the president-elect a shot, and hopefully good things will come.”
Only Fox would credit a Republican president-elect for more retail spending two months before he becomes president.
Watch the bias below, from the November 25, 2016 Your World.
They laugh at Donald. Call him a “clown” but miss the fact him and the right-wingers in Congress he’s enabling are sincere clowns. They believe their own propaganda and plan on fully shove as much of it down our throats as possible.
The assumption appears to be no problem we’ll just vote them out in 2 years if we don’t like them. What they miss is due to gerrymandering it would take an unprecedented wave election to turn the House. Absent that happening all the stuff the Republicans enact will be locked in place for at least probably a decade or more because state houses need to realign too to undo the corrupt gerrymandering.
The GOP is going to press the “mandate” they think they have right now to push through as much radical stuff as they can during the first 100-200 days of Trump in the White House. The Dems will make some noises about opposing this stuff but they don’t have the votes to stop it unless they intend to be just as obstructive as the GOP was with Obama. And it’s a lose-lose for the Dems on that front. If they obstruct everything (which I don’t recommend), then the GOP gets to say “See! The Dems are doing it too! No moral high ground for them!” If they don’t obstruct everything, the GOP will do a LOT of damage, including the aforementioned tax code changes that could really punch the middle class in another year.
When it comes to the SC, Fox News had a laughing panel of conservative WSJ voices on yesterday. This included our old friend James Taranto, who distinguished himself a few years back by openly calling President Obama “a pathetic little man” on the air. The panel sneered at Chuck Schumer saying that the Dems would oppose any SC nominee who isn’t “mainstream”, noting that Schumer has to say something to appease his base but that he’ll cave so he can try to protect his Senate seats for the 2018 campaigns. They’re correct on that point, but the sneering made it extremely difficult to stomach. The panel also made it clear that Fox News and the Right already know they’re going to get a Far-Right 45-year old judge from Trump’s list to replace Scalia right off the bat. And they know that Trump will only be using that list of Far-Right judges for any SC appointment. What the Right is actually more interested in seeing is whether Kennedy or another justice comes off. Kennedy is 80 years old, and could easily retire within Trump’s first term. If he does so, the court swings solidly to the Far-Right and Roberts becomes the regular swing vote. At that point, decisions like Roe become a lot harder to sustain. And if Ginsburg or Breyer retires, there would no longer be any swing votes – it would be 6 Far-Right to 3 Liberals. Not even a chance then. And we’d be looking at 5 of those Far-Right justices being fairly young, so that this fun would continue for another 20-30 years.
The nastiest part of the panel was the open threat that if the Dems choose to filibuster an SC nominee, Donald Trump would go to their swing state and hold rallies and campaign against those Dem Senators. Funny to hear that, given that Hannity and others on Fox News regularly derided Obama as the “campaigner in chief”. Guess it’s now a good thing to do if it’s Donald Trump on the case.
I may have mentioned this before but when it looked like Hillary would win, I was thinking I’d rejoin the Democratic Party. I left and became an independent when it refused to filibuster Samuel Alito to his position on SCOTUS. But unless they prove to have some usefulness, I will never rejoin. And, by the way, I was never even very upset about the whole DNC/DWS thing and was agnostic on Hillary v. Bernie. It’s the goddamn spinelessness in the face of GOP aggression that I can’t take.
And what about alll those crazy-ass appointments he’s planning to make? That insane KT woman and the sacked Islamophobe General in Donald Dunce’s ear day and night? It honestly looks like the prelude to a (possibly nuclear) nightmare.
The Democrats seem to be so damned docile about the whole situation. Where is the urgency? Where is the outrage??
I read that analysis of results has shown that there is a small but clear difference in tallies from electronic voting districts between total votes cast, recorded votes and exit polls, particularly as compared to areas with traditional paper ballots. The idea that the Russkies have not only interfered on Trump’s behalf before the election, but hacked or otherwise ‘fixed’ the voting machines is just appalling.
But not in the magical kingdom of Faux. There, Trump will be praised for the sun rising in the morning and Obama will be blamed for all things bad.
With interest rates on more solid investment options still scraping zero, there will be no shortage of innocent(ish) moms and pops ready to be a little more adventurous (especially now that SuperSaint Donald has arrived, and a steady stream of shysters set to fleece them.
Their hope had been that they could talk down the economy enough to humiliate him by limiting him to a single term. When that failed, they took the next best approach – total obstruction and denial, and a continued presentation of the economy being in total collapse while Obama was in the White House. My favorite part of this was the usual Hannity meme of talking down gas prices, in that Hannity would regularly throw tantrums that gas prices had skyrocketed from the moment that Obama took office. Except that Hannity conveniently left out the part where gas prices had suddenly plummeted right before the 2008 election where for years they’d been already skyrocketing every season. Hannity wanted his audience to only think of the clock running from January 2009 and not including any history from even a minute before then.
Of course, the very moment that Donald Trump games the system and squeaks into the White House, we’re meant to believe that everything’s coming up roses again. I’m betting that they’ll start talking up gas prices again soon, along with any other stat they can find to show Trump being a big winner for the economy. I tend to doubt that they’ll admit what came out in an astonishing article just today – which noted that Trump’s “tax cut” plan would put millions back in the pockets of the super rich but actually RAISE the taxes of middle class families and particularly single parents. Because Trump’s people intend to eliminate the personal exemption and the “head of household” deduction. (And that’s not an accident – it’s a fairly mean-spirited bully move at single mothers, essentially punishing them for not wanting to stay in abusive or dead relationships.)
Again, hang on to your hats. There’s plenty more viciousness where this came from.
Then there’s me. I was going to buy a new car in preparation for retirement until I realized Orange 🍊 Hitler and objectivist Paul Ryan are colluding to privatize Medicare and Social Security. CBS News reported the Republican Party is planning on large cuts to SS. When this goes public I won’t be the only senior cutting back in a mad panic.
