IS THIS WHY TRANSGENDERISM SEEMS TO BE RAMPANT IN PUBLIC SCHOOLS? Lots of folks are wondering why transgenderism has exploded into national media, political and cultural conversation. My latest PJMedia column looks at multiple “persons of interest.”
UPDATE: My apologies for the bad link. Not sure how it happened but it’s fixed now.
CIVIL RIGHTS UPDATE: One indefensible federal gun law just got struck down.
FLORIDA, LIKE COLORADO, IS A LARGE STATE WITH APPARENTLY ONLY ONE BAKERY: Florida Publix refuses to write ‘trans’ on customers’ cake.
Dandelion Hill, co-founder of the Orlando-based non-profit Peer Support Space, was heading to the organization’s Trans Joy Event on April 26, and stopped at the Colonialtown Publix to pick up a cake for the celebration.
Hill, who is trans and uses they/them pronouns, asked if the bakery could write a simple, “wholesome” message in pink icing on the sheet cake: “Trans people deserve joy.”
Hill immediately began to feel like something wasn’t right after the bakery worker hesitated.
“The person working at the bakery said, ‘I will be right back’,” Hill told The Post on Thursday. “I was kind of stewing in anxiety because I had a feeling like, ‘Uh oh, I think something’s brewing, I think something’s wrong.”
After waiting for what “felt like an eternity,” a manager from the bakery “comes back, looks me directly in the eyes and says, ‘I’m sorry we can’t write that. Publix is not allowed to take a stance on this issue,’” Hill said.
The refusal made Hill “shut down” from shock.
“I’m trying to give a message of hope to our community and I feel like I’m getting shot down right at that moment,” they said. “It was really just hurtful.”
Both states provide a huge opportunity for an enterprising baker to siphon off some of the business from pastry makers who must be utterly exhausted from being overworked.
R.I.P. TO LONGTIME SPACE ACTIVIST MARK HOPKINS. I just received word that he died last week of complications subsequent to a heart attack. Mark worked tirelessly for NSS and its sister organizations SpaceCause and SpacePAC, in service of making us a spacefaring civilization. He didn’t make it to the promised land, but at least he lived long enough to catch a glimpse.
THIS SEEMS REMARKABLY SIMILAR TO THE IGLOO I BOUGHT AT TARGET FOR LIKE 30 BUCKS: First Look: Mammoth Coolers’ Pathfinder 30. The Igloo kept things frozen in the car for 9 hours.
READER FAVORITE: DASH Rapid Egg Cooker. #CommissionEarned
ROCKET REPORT: SpaceX hits success milestone, Vulcan to resume testing.. “If we’re going to have sovereign space capabilities … we need somewhere to launch from.”
COLOR ME UNSURPRISED: Research shows home working didn’t harm mental health at the start of the pandemic—but things changed later on.
Personally, I really enjoyed setting up my 3 camera studio for online teaching. And I enjoyed using it for a semester and a half. Then in the middle of Spring 2021 I was suddenly and intensely over it. And pretty much everyone I talked to, students and faculty alike, felt the same way about remote classes at about the same time.
LIGHTNING DEAL: Gradual Men’s Running Shorts with Zipper Pockets. #CommissionEarned
IT’S A RISK FOR LOTS OF THINGS: Study adds evidence linking obesity to greater risk of gastrointestinal cancers.
I’LL TAKE HEADLINES FROM 2020 FOR $500, ALEX: Trump’s second term seems inevitable.
Face it: Biden isn’t that popular as world leaders go. In their respective countries, Narendra Modi (India), Andrés Manuel López Obrador (Mexico), Anthony Albanese (Australia), Lula (Brazil) and Giorgia Meloni (Italy) are all better liked. If you look at Biden’s job approval, using the RealClearPolitics average, he is now slightly more unpopular (a net approval of minus 11.6 percent) than Trump was at this stage in his presidency (minus 10.7 percent).
Trump is also not that unpopular. Indeed, he is less so than at this point eight years ago. In July 2015, Trump’s net unfavorable number was minus 39.3 percent. Today, it’s minus 16 percent. Then, just 23 percent of voters had a positive view of him. Now it’s 39 percent. The RealClear figure for Joe Biden is 41 percent, and his net unfavorable is minus 12 percent.
And that’s the state of play at the moment. But what if there’s a recession between now and next year? It’s not a certainty. There is more than one smart economist who still believes there could be a “soft landing,” despite all the recent worries sparked by US (and Swiss) bank failures. In an interview with CNBC, Apollo Global Management’s chief executive, Mark Rowan, even used the phrase “non-recession recession,” which we must hope doesn’t catch on.
On the other hand, former treasury secretary Larry Summers has had a pretty good run ever since he called the Biden administration’s inflationary fiscal mistake back in February 2021, and he said last week that there’s a 70 percent probability of a recession within the next year. He is not alone.
I’m with the bears. What we have witnessed over the past two years is an epic monetary policy failure. In June 2021, the members of the Federal Open Market Committee thought that the target federal funds rate this year would lie between zero and 1.75 percent. By March of this year, they had to revise those figures up to between 4.75 and 6 percent. Having been asleep at the wheel in 2021, they have cranked up short-term rates to try to bring inflation back down to 2 percent. But they are still a long way from achieving that.
As central bankers love to intone, monetary policy acts with long and variable lags. The current lag is taking longer than people appreciate. Recessions resemble slow chain reactions. The signal from the policy interest rate to the wider economy goes through multiple channels, but the most important is the volume of bank credit.
In the twelve months through March, total bank credit in the US economy declined in real terms. That rarely occurs. Since 1960, it has happened only during, or in the immediate aftermath of, a recession. This is the indicator to watch, along with the surveys of borrowers and lenders.
The deceptive indicators are those that track consumer behavior and the labour market, which still look strong. In the latest GDP print, consumption was still growing. But non-residential investment contracted. The present game of chicken over the debt ceiling makes a recession more likely. As in 2011, the showdown will probably be resolved at the last moment, within twenty-four hours of the “X-date” after which the Treasury must either slash public spending or default on some part of the federal debt. But the 2011 debt-ceiling crisis took place during the sluggish recovery from the 2008 financial crisis, when inflation and interest rates were close to the zero lower bound. The risk of a bond market accident is much higher today.
What this suggests to me is that Joe Biden is in serious danger of following Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush into the trashcan marked “one-term presidents.” Why? For the simple reason that no president since Calvin Coolidge a century ago has secured re-election if a recession has occurred in the two years before the nation votes. It does not need to be as severe as the Great Depression that destroyed Herbert Hoover’s presidency. A plain vanilla recession will suffice.
In the wake of the 1976 Republican convention, Ford was trailing his rival, Carter, by thirty-three points in the Gallup poll. His campaign did an extraordinary job of closing the gap, so that the result was tantalizingly close. But over the GOP, as the New York Times put it in its immediate post-election report, “hung the shadow of Richard M. Nixon and a dangerously shaky economy.”
In 1980, it was Carter’s turn to lose, in part because of “last-minute rejections of [his] handling of the economy,” in part because of the Iran hostage crisis. “Inflation and unemployment had been a constant drag on Mr. Carter throughout the race,” reported the New York Times. “The issue got new prominence when Mr. Reagan stressed it as he closed his argument in the debate in Cleveland by saying, ‘Ask yourself, are you better off than you were four years ago?’”
And in 1992, Bill Clinton ran on “the economy, stupid,” one of three points on a sign that his chief strategist James Carville hung in the campaign headquarters in Little Rock, Arkansas. (The others were “Change vs more of the same” and “Don’t forget healthcare.”)
If you think the economy isn’t going to be the issue in the 2024 election, I’ve got a Whip Inflation Now badge to sell you. Look at the Gallup poll on “satisfaction with the way things are going in the US.” That’s currently at the 1980 level, half what it was four years ago, before the pandemic. Gallup’s economic confidence index is deeply in negative territory, the opposite of where it was under Trump. And this is before any recession.
Whoever is running against Biden gets to play some variation on the “Worst economy in 50 years” tagline of Bill Clinton. But DeSantis can add a variation of Reagan’s trademark: “Are you better off than you were four years ago? Well, Florida residents aren’t. As to the rest of America…”
DISPATCHES FROM THE PARTY OF YOUTH: Trembling, Confused Dianne Feinstein Asks ‘Where Am I Going?’ As She’s Rolled Back In To Work As A US Senator.
Meanwhile, at America’s the Galactic Empire’s Newspaper of Record:
MICHAEL BARONE: ‘Segregation’ Is a Deliberate Act.
Those familiar with the America that emerged victorious but still largely racially segregated after World War II should have no trouble appreciating how racial discrimination and racial segregation have almost entirely disappeared in voting, in the jobs market and in public accommodations. Yet some of the most knowledgeable and perceptive writers and analysts still sometimes use the verb “segregate” without identifying who is doing the segregating.
One example is Clare Malone, a former FiveThirtyEight analyst and now a New Yorker writer. Back in a March 2016 column on how people with low social connectedness tended to vote for Donald Trump, I quoted her analysis of the crowd at a Trump rally. “Something inspirational seems to be happening among the assembled — a sense of collective identity being discovered,” she wrote. The observation stands up well seven years later.
Similarly sharp were her descriptions of two Cleveland suburbs — Shaker Heights, where she grew up, a high-income suburb east of downtown planned a century ago, and Parma, a working-class enclave that grew up west of the Cuyahoga River factories in the 1950s and 1960s.
The differences are not just economic but also ethnic. Parma is populated in large part by the descendants of pre-1924 immigrants from Eastern Europe, including Ukraine. Shaker Heights started off “exclusive,” meaning no Jews or blacks, but has substantial percentages of both groups now, with most of the whites and blacks being college-educated. It’s an unusual mix, similar to Montclair, New Jersey, and Oak Park, Illinois.
Malone ignores those differences, however, when she quotes a Census Bureau finding that “a ‘typical white’ American lives in a neighborhood that’s 75 percent white.” She then adds, “American suburban life seems to regress to a mean of segregation.”
America is basically 75% white. That’s not segregation, it’s the norm.
TENNESSEE TITANS GOES VIRAL WITH UNFORGETTABLE RELEASE OF UPCOMING NFL SCHEDULE:
In recent years, NFL teams have been getting more creative with how they announce their upcoming schedules, and the winner this year goes to the Tennessee Titans, who recently went viral with their unforgettable release of their 2023 matchups.
In a clip posted Thursday, the Tennessee team tweeted simply, “We asked people on Broadway to help us with our 2023 schedule release.” It included a laughing face emoji as well.
The video showed just how many people who visit the famed music/bar strip in Nashville are unaware of NFL team logos, and it’s downright hilarious. At the time of this publication it has been viewed more than 20 million times and counting.
Missed it by that much:
We asked people on Broadway to help us with our 2023 schedule release. 🤣
📺: 2023 Schedule Release on @nflnetwork pic.twitter.com/31LsUUDn3O
— Tennessee Titans (@Titans) May 12, 2023
STANDING UP TO BIGOTRY: Arkansas health agency ends scholarship that excluded white students after lawsuit.
REMY: IT’S CABOTAGE! Great parody of the classic Beastie Boys video:
UNEXPECTED EVIDENCE OF RETURNING SANITY? ABA Pauses Move To Eliminate LSAT Requirement For Admission To Law School. I certainly didn’t expect it, anyway.
It’s good, though, since the only reason for eliminating the LSAT is to make racial discrimination harder to prove.
EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY: Ohio Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown flip-flops on Title 42. “The Ohio senator is not the only representative from his party listed as a co-sponsor. Sens. Joe Manchin (D-WV), Jon Tester (D-MT), and former Democrat Kyrsten Sinema (I-AZ) are also in support of the bill.”
You are obsolete as a Dem constituency. You’re being replaced.