The scandal should be how often a Trump appointee head of the BLS manages to ‘revise’ jobs reports significantly upwards month after month after month and not be called to account for providing such low initial numbers.
The BLS should be as non-partisan as it gets to ensure we have the best numbers possible to guide economic decisions.
I always love the Republican cry of “You can’t trust the government! Look at what we do when we are in charge of it!”
Oh, sure, another 467,000 jobs that no one wants to do!!!
And what’s with this weather? Biden shouldn’t be letting all this snow and ice mess up my day! He needs to get on that!
And he better not let that spring thawing screw up our skiing, either!
And the summer better not get too warm or there will be hell to pay.
Lying liar lies.
Why do you think we’ve been dragging our feet on climate change? Give it a couple more decades.
Tell that to the car that’s currently stuck in a snowbank outside my work right now.
Thanks alot Biden!
Like I said, give it a couple more decades. That car will no longer trouble you by that point.
“Why a Hot New Jobs Report is Biden’s Newest Political Headache”
Oh, how I pine for the halcyon days of ITR Champion and his noble concerns. Concern trolls nowadays lack the insight and subtlety of their more hallowed forebears.
[long. Coffee’s kicking in]
I’ve been thinking about the Biden line – delivered in Poland, and said about Putin:
For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power.
The White House walked it back, saying (probably faster than the words could have reached the White House, traveling at the speed of sound):
The President’s point was that Putin cannot be allowed to exercise power over his neighbors or the region. He was not discussing Putin’s power in Russia, or regime change,
Maybe this one is a Rorschach Test like the “Let’s Go Brandon” thing on the NORAD Christmas call.
My gut tells me that we cannot rule out that this combination of an incendiary (and valid) statement, followed by an immediate walk-back by the folks back home, may all have been wired.
It doesn’t give much credit to Biden to believe that he has people working for him who know how to play the game, maybe practiced law and understand the value of asking an inappropriate question at trial only to have the other side object, and then withdrawing the question (the value is in the bell having rung, and the bell cannot be un-rung).
Biden went there. He raised the concept of regime change without having raised the topic of regime change.
He had his people insert an asterisk of plausible deniability that may have taken the hard edge off of something profoundly volatile.
What Trump used to do (as I often put it): he took every conceivable position on every possible issue. He affirmed and disavowed every position he’s ever held. He was both deadly serious and totally kidding. The strategy ? No matter the outcome, he can point to ‘evidence’ that he called it right from the beginning.
As in every other conceivable way, Trump was a boorish amateur … a loose cannon … a fragmentation grenade of a ‘leader.’
Maybe what Biden did in this case was infinitely more of a well-crafted and well-executed surgical strike.
We’ve all been thinking about it. Early in the month, Lindsey Graham – wittingly or unwittingly – stuck a toe in those gator-filled waters by suggesting that Russians should assassinate Putin.
That rang a big heavy-handed, but may have been a rhetorical recon mission, by design or by default.
No idea where any of this is going, but there is some value in deftly planting seeds in the hopes they may bear fruit. There are myriad ways of doing this.
Maybe this is just another example. There’s generally a lot of Kabuki behind the scenes.
And it doesn’t particularly come from a place of Biden Fanboyism. It’s entirely possible that it was nothing more than one of his legendary gaffes.
But maybe not.
The whole thing could have parallels to Reagan’s famous, “Mr. Gorbachev: tear down this wall” line.
[ETA: I wasn’t sure where the line was on a breaking news thread, so I chose not to put it in the ongoing Ukraine thread]
You are accidentally right. Doing this would be immediate grounds for a mistrial and you’d probably be sanctioned by the court. It’s TV shit.
Anyway, I give you 3 points for at least noticing that this sounds exactly like something Trump would do. Unfortunately I have to deduct 3 for the “but maybe this is smart Trump.”
Maybe less Hollywood than history.
There’s a long and pretty well documented history of this sort of move being attempted at trial.
Just one source - 47pp PDF - it’s pretty much on Page 1
I’m left with a vague feeling of dissatisfaction, though, that the much vaunted points thing was a wash.
You linked to a 1982 law review article which says that doing what you described was serious misconduct and violated the rules of professional responsibility, lists examples which led to cases getting reversed, and says that trial judges need to deal with it harshly. It is “pretty much on page 1” in the sense that it is on page 16.
Was your point that Biden has people on his team who engaged in serious professional misconduct, and that he was following their lead in making his speeches, and that this is good? I didn’t think that was your point.
My point is that such things happen, both in law and in politics.
And the existence of a law against something doesn’t preclude the existence of that ‘something.’
People still steal. People still kill. People still defraud.
Nice detour, though.
And just to close out the pointless red herring …
From the first page of the paper:
[bolding mine]
Your point was about Joe Biden’s speech, and a parallel with cheekily saying something with the intention of withdrawing it. I agree there’s been a detour.
So what was your point about his team and his speech?