Friday Roundup

The President had a great night; Employment numbers are funky; Governor Hochul does her best Tom Cotton

Well, he did it. President Biden passed a major test of his re-election to President of the United States by delivering an angry, campaign-style State of the Union Address last night to both houses of Congress. The President enjoyed a very low bar of expectations (ah, the old expectations game again), because of his extensive record of gaffes, brain freezes and confusion in public. He performed passably well, delivering the major portions of the speech with fire, screaming angrily over applause from his fellow Democrats in the well. He even accepted Marjorie Taylor Greene’s attempts at heckling by taking her head on and finally saying the name “Lincoln Riley” when he meant Laken Riley, and apologizing to Riley’s family for her having been killed by an “illegal.” The President has received a lot of blowback for using the word illegal, as if that isn’t a polite euphemism itself for “criminal.” When you cross the border illegally, you are an illegal entrant to the United States, after all.

The content of the speech will hardly be remembered, as it was filled with campaign promises, obfuscations and half truths - no, billionaires do not pay an 8% tax rate on income; that’s a fallacy that includes unrealized capital gains that are not taxed nor counted as income by the IRS. And no, the best way to discourage illegal crossings of the border is not to speed up the asylum process as he fantastically claimed; he begged to pass the Senate bill which does nothing to stop illegal crossings, and that experts say will actually increase illegal crossings, with other bad outcomes. And no, Ukraine and Russia are not priorities on America’s existential threat list - the President barely mentioned our primary and fierce adversary, China.

But you have to give the Big Guy credit. He came, he yelled defiantly, and despite a few potential bad moments, he recovered quickly from them and hit his marks. His supporters will take this as a major victory, and there’s hope that whatever adderall-like substance the President was given to make it through this speech will lead his handlers to allow actual debates with Trump and RFK, Jr. in the fall. Here’s hoping.

Finally, can we just end the practice of having a response after the speech. After the energy of a live speech in front of a raucous crowd, the response invariably sucks all energy out of the night when we cut to a lone person in a room attempting to outdo the President of the United States. And these rebuttals are always cringey - remember Marco Rubio and his life-threatening thirst? But Senator Britt’s response hit a new low, with a ton of “Single White Female” energy. It was not a good look. This was President Joe Biden’s night, through and through.

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The Bureau of Labor Statistics (the BLS) released the February jobs report this morning, and there’s a lot of contradictory data. While the top line jobs adds look good at 275k, Unemployment crept up to 3.9% - historically low still also up 0.5% (a 15% rise) since November. The BLS also revised the previous two months new jobs totals downward by 167k jobs. Finally, hourly earnings dropped slightly.

It is disheartening that every BLS report seems to be revised significantly downward as they review previous months. The net effect is that when the initial report first appears, it beats expectations (there’s that expectations game again). But in subsequent months, the initial report seems to invariably revised downward below those expectations - a month or two later when no one remembers what the expectations were nor the truth that the expectations were thus actually missed, upon reflection. Seems like a shell game to me. Plus, there’s this, from ZeroHedge on Twitter:

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The irony of what’s happened in New York City’s crime saga is strong. A few years ago, during the BLM riots of the summer of 2020, there were firings and drama at the New York Times over an Op-Ed by Senator Tom Cotton that suggested we send in the National Guard to restore order in cities like New York. The editor who published the piece was forced out and woke outrage over the suggestion proliferated for quite some time.

Since then, despite increasing reports of street crime, mayhem and open robberies across the city, many on the left had started a campaign to allege that crime rates in big blue cities like New York were better than in red states. Yet, in a stunning show of election-year force by the Governor of New York, Kathy Hochul has sent in the National Guard to restore order in New York City. That’s the last gasp effort before curfews and lockdowns. Is there outrage for Governor Hochul from the left? None that I’ve seen.

It is but another of numerous examples where the Democrats enact fantastical solutions to known problems which common sense dictates will never work. Silly policies like no-cash bails, prosecutorial discretion, and defunding local police directly leads to terrible outcomes. Then when the proverbial stuff hits the fan - around election time - they reverse course, enact policies that were obvious for years, and then blame Republicans for the carnage their bad policies wrought. This has played out in a few key areas, including law and order in our cities, the lawlessness at the southern border, and deficit spending. This is a completely unsustainable model. I don’t understand it, unless the aim is something other than solving problems. We suffer through three years of maladministration until election year when they get serious about basic issues - crime, order, controlled immigration. In the fall, let’s vote in folks that seek the best solution first, whether it’s politically expedient or not.