REMEMBERING THE GREAT ECONOMIST AND CHAMPION OF LIBERTY, MILTON FRIEDMAN:

Today marks the 110th birthday of economist Milton Friedman, one of history’s most consequential free-market advocates. Heeding the work of Friedman this year reminds us how much more sound and sustainable the nation’s policies could be.

Born July 31, 1912 to working class immigrants from Hungary in New York City, what made Milton Friedman unique not only was his grasp of economics, but also his ability to simply explain complex ideas.

He opined, for example, that “the most important single central fact about a free market is that no exchange takes place unless both parties benefit.”

What Milton Friedman understood better than most was that individuals, with private interests and expertise, were best able to advance society.

“Nobody spends somebody else’s money as carefully as he spends his own,” he said. “Nobody uses somebody else’s resources as carefully as he uses his own. So if you want efficiency and effectiveness, if you want knowledge to be properly utilized, you have to do it through the means of private property.”

While others of his time advocated for redistribution and central planning of sorts, Friedman argued competition would be the catalyst for success. He understood that merely having good intentions is an inadequate basis for sound public policy.

“When government — in pursuit of good intentions — tries to rearrange the economy, legislate morality, or help special interests, the cost come in inefficiency, lack of motivation, and loss of freedom,” he said. “Government should be a referee, not an active player.”

“I do not believe that the solution to our problem is simply to elect the right people,” Friedman once said. “The important thing is to establish a political climate of opinion which will make it politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right thing. Unless it is politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right thing, the right people will not do the right thing either, or if they try, they will shortly be out of office.”

Not coincidentally: The ghost of Milton Friedman is haunting President Biden.

MILTON FRIEDMAN ISN’T RUNNING THE SHOW ANYMORE: The ‘Recession or Not’ Argument Is a Distraction: Our Economy Is Worse Than Almost All Major Countries.

OH, TO BE IN ENGLAND: Moment army veteran is arrested ‘for causing anxiety’ after retweeting meme of swastika made out of Pride flags as force is condemned by its own crime commissioner for the ‘proportionality and necessity’ of its response.

This is the moment an army veteran was arrested by police for ‘causing anxiety’ after retweeting a picture of a swastika made out of Pride flags on social media.

Darren Brady, 51, has slammed Hampshire Police for ‘impeding his right to free speech’ after he was placed into handcuffs on Friday at his home in Aldershot for sharing a meme.

Footage of the arrest was widely shared on social media and showed an officer who told Mr Brady he was being apprehended because his post had ’caused anxiety’ and been reported to authorities.

The image Mr Brady retweeted was of a swastika that had been digitally manipulated and was made out of four LGBT pride flags.

In the video, shot on a mobile phone, Mr Brady can be heard asking the three police officers: ‘Why am I in cuffs?’

One officer responds: ‘It didn’t have to come to this at all.’

Mr Brady replied: ‘Tell us why you escalated it to this level because I don’t understand.’

The officer adds: ‘Someone has been caused anxiety based on your social media post. That is why you have been arrested.’

Not The Bee adds, “This is some insane-level 1984 stuff right here. Apparently this meme arranging 4 transgender flags into a swastika is what he posted. He was ARRESTED for posting this!”

In 2018, when British cops were threatening social media critics after the NHS banished 23-month-old Alfie Evans to the Spartan hillside, British ex-pat Charles C.W. Cooke tweeted, “Michael Brendan Dougherty pointed out to me that police in the U.K. spend all their time on Twitter threatening people with jail time for frivolous things, and now I can’t stop seeing it.”

As a wise woman once wrote, “There’s no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren’t enough criminals one makes them.”

RIP: Bill Russell, Celtics legend and NBA trailblazer, dead at 88.

EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY. WHY DO YOU ASK? Bank of America Memo, Revealed: “We Hope” Conditions for American Workers Will Get Worse.

GOODER AND HARDER, NEW YORK: SPAM goes on lockdown due to inflation in NYC.

It’s the nation’s crises in a can.

Inflation and crime have gotten so bad in Gotham that even cheap meat like Spam has to be locked up.

At Duane Reade’s store in the Port Authority bus depot, the shelf-stable product — only $3.99 a can — is now being stocked in plastic, anti-theft cases.

“I’ve never seen that before!” one cashier laughed while using a magnet to remove a can of Spam from its cage.

The cashier was among the employees, tourists and store regulars stunned that the iconic blue-and-yellow cans are now being kept under lock-and-key — some even poking fun at the sight as “a sort of Jeff Koons homage,” per one viral tweet.

Jenny Kenny, 43, who was visiting from Louisville, KY, was aware of the ongoing crime waves hitting cities like New York and San Francisco, but still couldn’t believe the sight of “so many things in boxes.”

Back in 2013, I wrote a lengthy post on Charles Bronson’s first Death Wish movie, filmed on location in the clapped out, crime-ridden Manhattan of the 1970s, and concluded:

In contrast, New York has improved immensely since the period depicted in the original 1974 Death Wish. Naturally, New York’s bourgeois-bohemians, as David Brooks would call them, would welcome a chance to return to the hell of Manhattan in the ‘70s, as Daniel Henninger noted in a 2005 Wall Street Journal article:

The actor John Leguizamo: New York in the ’70s “was funky and gritty and showed the world how a metropolis could be dark and apocalyptic and yet fecund.” Fran Lebowitz, a contributing editor for Vanity Fair: The city “was a wreck; it was going bankrupt. And it was pretty lawless; everything was illegal, but no laws were enforced. It was a city for city-dwellers, not tourists, the way it is now.” Laurie Anderson, a well-known New York artist and performer, admits the ’70s were considered “the dark ages” but “there was great music and everyone was broke.”

* * * * * * *

New York is famous for many things, and the reason the whole world knows this is because New York is a city of artists and writers. Though genius may find its muse anywhere, the Times’ commentators are correctly saying that most artists need to have personal flint chipping at social steel to spark the furnace within. But could it be that New York’s great weakness–beyond the public employee unions, beyond the economic obtuseness–is that its leadership elites are fatally enthralled by a reputation for creative fecundity that has been conjured and kept afloat by the city’s artists and writers? At the center of this New York myth is the belief that everyone here is clever, and so “anything is possible.”

But it isn’t. Everyone here isn’t clever.

Over eight years in the 1970s, New York lost more than a half-million private-sector jobs, according to E.J. McMahon and Fred Siegel of the Manhattan Institute, whose essential travel guide to these years and their aftermath may be found in the current Winter issue of the Public Interest. During the 1970s the real New York nightmare wasn’t lived in the SoHo funkytown, but in the funkless outer boroughs.

Many of the city’s most creative people in the 1970s (as now) were high IQ boys and girls from Smalltown who fled to the Apple and had the smarts to survive and thrive in a city beset with drugs, welfare dependency and housing stock distorted by World War II rent controls. Hell has always seized over-developed imaginations. But what attractions hath hell for average Joes who can’t cop a “life” in SoHo or Williamsburg? Then as now, they just took hell’s hits in the neck, or left. In economic terms, much of creative Manhattan simply “free-rides” on the backs of the workers whose tax payments constrain the bankruptcy sheriff.

As Kyle Smith wrote this month, today he and fellow New Yorkers “grouse about soda bans and Citi Bikes. Twenty years ago, we worried about being mugged or murdered. Electing a Democrat who demonizes the police would ignore the luxury provided by two decades of safety.”

And here we are.

GEORGE JETSON’S BIRTHDAY IS TODAY; WE ARE OFFICIALLY IN THE FUTURE.

HOW IT STARTED:

I reach the Reichstag dome’s upper platform, its glass floor doubling as the ceiling of the legislature. This democracy–under–glass is more than just window–dressing: Years of freewheeling multiparty debate have produced a remarkable national consensus. At an earlier press conference, I heard the impressively well–nourished federal minister of economics and technology boast that his conservative government would “march at the forefront to solve the mega–issue of climate protection—other nations can just follow!” He itemized the eco–Anschluss on stolid fingers: German wind farms in the North Sea; German hydropower plants in the Balkans; German windmills in Romania; German solar thermal projects in Spain; a vast half–trillion–dollar complex of solar turbines in the Sahara that will surge gigawatts to whole swaths of Europe. The goal of a carbon–free economy by mid–century may be, as one local enviro put it to me, das Blaue vom Himmel—“a hopeful blue sky”—but when the minister uttered the phrase “to rescue the world,” it sounded like he meant it.

—Marc Barasch, “How Green is My Berlin,” in the September 2010 issue of Condé Nast’s Traveler, as I quoted back then in an article titled, “Springtime for Algore: A Romantic Pilgrimage to Germany’s ‘Eco–Anschluss.’”

How it’s going:

Cities in Germany are switching off spotlights on public monuments, turning off fountains, and imposing cold showers on municipal swimming pools and sports halls, as the country races to reduce its energy consumption in the face of a looming Russian gas crisis.

Hanover in north-west Germany on Wednesday became the first large city to announce energy-saving measures, including turning off hot water in the showers and bathrooms of city-run buildings and leisure centres.

Municipal buildings in the Lower Saxony state capital will only be heated from 1 October to 31 March, at no more than 20C (68F) room temperature, and ban the use of mobile air conditioning units and fan heaters. Nurseries, schools, care homes and hospitals are to be exempt from the saving measures.

“The situation is unpredictable,” said the city’s mayaor, Belit Onay, of the Green party. “Every kilowatt hour counts, and protecting critical infrastructure has to be a priority.”

—“German cities impose cold showers and turn off lights amid Russian gas crisis,” the Grauniad, Thursday.

MARK JUDGE: Weak Dissent. Another Lazy, Dumb, and Error-Packed Book About Me in High School.

Jackie Calmes, a respected veteran journalist at the Los Angeles Times, has a new book out. It’s called Dissent: The Radicalization of the Republican Party and Its Capture of the Court. The focus is Brett Kavanaugh’s elevation to the Supreme Court in 2018. Dissent is full of errors, and I make an appearance early on.

In fall 2018 the political left and the media tried to destroy Kavanaugh, a high school friend of mine. Using opposition research, extortion threats from criminals and an attempted honey trap, the left tried to make me the nomination about me.  A woman named Christine Blasey Ford accused Brett of sexually assaulting her in 1982 when we were all in high school. Ford claimed that I was in the room when it happened.

I Am Iron Man, Apparently 

You can add the contents of Dissent to the long list of intentional media calumny about me, Brett Kavanaugh and Georgetown Prep, the high school we attended. At various times in fall 2018, our East German Stasi media told the public that I’d presided over ten gang rapes. That I’d bought and sold cocaine. That all in all I was a volatile mix of Tom Cruise, Mel Gibson and King Kong.

Vanity Fair had to issue a correction admitting that a woman who’d said we went to college together in fact had attended a different school. The Washington Post withheld an exonerating witness from their explosive first story about Ford. NBC’s Kate Snow withheld damaging facts about Michael Avenatti, whose fever dreams of drugs and gang rapes were touted by New York magazine as the end of Kavanaugh. Avenatti is now awaiting sentencing for extortion and has two more criminal trials coming up.

Read the whole thing.

Related: Christina Pushaw explains to Politico’s Jack Shafer why Gov. DeSantis doesn’t give interviews to the liberal media.

NEW MEDIA RULE: DON’T SAY GAY.

Mainstream journalists have adopted what critics are calling a “don’t say gay” approach to covering the monkeypox outbreak in the United States. The media’s coverage of monkeypox, which officials in New York and California have declared a threat to public health amid rising case numbers, has studiously avoided using the word “gay” when discussing the individuals who are most at risk of contracting the viral disease.

Journalists insist on using the phrase “men who have sex with men”—decades-old terminology often used during the AIDS epidemic—to explain the fact that gay and bisexual men comprise about 98 percent of more than 18,000 monkeypox cases worldwide. Some left-wing activists have argued that even pointing this out is “stigmatizing,” while more sane individuals have suggested this is “particularly important information for gay men to know.”

In other monkeypox news:

More here: San Fransisco To Hold Gay Sex Festival Despite City Declaring Emergency Over Monkeypox Outbreak.

THE CHUY TRUTH:

FOX News media reporter Joseph Wulfsohn picked up Rep. Jesús “Chuy” Garcia’s vulgar tweet below before it was deleted two hours later. I assume Garcia composed it. I can’t believe a staffer would have the nerve to speak this way under Garcia’s name. Warning: If you click on the tweet you will see the whole thing.

Garcia is (over)sensitive to criticism. The sensitivity also makes me think it is Garcia himself speaking in the tweet. That seems a little unusual for a man whose chosen profession is politics. He really ought to develop a thicker skin.

I wonder if we (I) can learn anything from it. These are my thoughts. Not all of them necessarily apply in this case, but Garcia’s tweet prompts these reflections on my part.

Past performance is no guarantee of future borderline retardation:

OLD AND BUSTED ON THE LEFT: “Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.”*

The New Hotness? Patriotism is the last refuge of a drag queen! AOC’s speech on drag queens and patriotism is the pick-me-up Americans needed today.

* Robert Heinlein had some choice thoughts on that quote, and the man who said it.

GET WOKE GO…: The Cleveland Indians bowed to the woke mob and renamed themselves the “Guardians” and now nobody wants to go to their games anymore.

As a result of years of pressure from activist groups, several years ago, the Cleveland baseball franchise announced they would soon be changing the team’s name. …

Well, if the numbers are to be believed, it’s possible that fans might not have taken kindly to the rebranding efforts.

Local TV ratings for the newly christened Guardians have dropped dramatically, with one report placing the number at -30%.

That’s the third biggest decline of any team in the league, with only the moribund Oakland Athletics and rapidly fading San Francisco Giants reporting worse numbers.

I doubt the leftist activists whom the Indians’ management caved to are actually huge MLB fans as well; they were simply looking for the next scalp to collect (if that phrase hasn’t been memory holed by the PC cleanup crew). As they say at Small Dead Animals, “Pleasing your enemies does not turn them into friends” — or ticket buyers.

FORTY-SEVEN YEARS OF FECKLESS DIGGING:

Jimmy Hoffa disappeared 47 years ago tomorrow. He was last seen in the parking lot of the Machus Red Fox, a restaurant in the Detroit suburbs, at around 2:45 p.m. on July 30, 1975. And he was last heard from, on a call from a nearby pay phone, around 3:30 p.m. Very soon after that call, Hoffa vanished.

There are lots of good reasons to think the mob murdered Hoffa. But there is not a speck of real evidence about how it did so, or what happened to Hoffa’s body. The unexplained vanishing of the iconic labor leader has over the decades stimulated the imaginations of dozens of people who have confessed to the crime or claimed to know what happened to Hoffa’s body. It has also led to a lot of feckless digging in locations around the country in search of Hoffa’s remains.

* * * * * * * *

But the tips, and confessions, never stopped coming. Some of the more notorious examples:

• Charles Allen, a Hoffa associate, told a Senate committee in 1982 that Provenzano associates “ground up [Hoffa] in little pieces” that were “shipped to Florida and thrown into a swamp.”

• Donald “Tony the Greek” Frankos claimed to have been part of a Hoffa hit team that dismembered the corpse and buried it in cement at Giants Stadium in New Jersey.

• Frank “The Irishman” Sheeran claimed to have murdered Hoffa in Detroit. (The cops found no evidence to support Sheeran’s claim at the home where the murder supposedly occurred. For my debunking of Sheeran’s claim, see here and here.)

The latter’s story’s resulted in one of the longest and most excruciating films Martin Scorsese has ever made: Painting Houses: The Irishman Arrives on Netflix.

THE SONG REMAINS THE SAME:

● Shot: “The warning that I received, you may take with however many grains of salt you wish, that the brown acid that is circulating around us, is specifically not too good. It’s suggested that you do stay away from that; of course, it’s your own trip, so, be my guest. But, please be advised that there is a warning on that one.”

—Lighting director Chip Monck’s announcement at Woodstock, August, 1969.

● Chaser: Chicago Tells Lollapalooza Attendees to ‘Test Your Drugs’ for Fentanyl.

—Mary Chastain, Legal Insurrection, yesterday.

KAMALA SMILES: Breaking: Joe Biden has COVID again. He’s returning to quarantine.

UPDATE: Cartoonist Roman Genn perfectly captures Kamala’s mood right now.

(Updated and bumped.)

DISPATCHES FROM THE MINISTRY OF TRUTH: Facebook, Instagram Posts Flagged as False for Rejecting Biden’s Recession Wordplay.

Last week, the White House published an online article disputing the standard definition of an economic recession: i.e., two consecutive fiscal quarters in which GDP growth was negative.

“Both official determinations of recessions and economists’ assessment of economic activity are based on a holistic look at the data—including the labor market, consumer and business spending, industrial production, and incomes,” wrote the White House. “Based on these data, it is unlikely that the decline in GDP in the first quarter of this year—even if followed by another GDP decline in the second quarter—indicates a recession.”

This post has been widely shared—and in some cases, mocked—on social media. Graham Allen, an Instagram personality, posted a video reacting to the post in which he asked Siri to define the term recession. Siri’s definition: two consecutive quarters of negative economic growth.

But Allen’s video is currently obscured on Instagram; users can still watch it, but they first have to click past a disclaimer that it contains “false information reviewed by independent fact-checkers.” A similar label has appeared on some Facebook posts that also take issue with the Biden administration’s wordplay.

The fact-checker is Politifact, a fact-checking website run by the Poynter Institute. Politifact is an official third-party fact-checking apparatus for Meta, the company that owns Facebook and Instagram. This means that PolitiFact is not like any ordinary website that offers a critique of a political narrative: PolitiFact’s critiques are enforced by social media platforms.

As of Saturday afternoon, Siri still gives the “two consecutive quarters of negative economic growth” answer — but I assume it’s only a matter of time before she’s reprogrammed with a different definition.

BOMB CANADA: THE CASE FOR WAR. Canadian Children’s Activity Book Indoctrinates Kids into Euthanasia.

Children are being indoctrinated into everything that subverts traditional values these days, and in Canada that includes bringing children along when a loved one is being euthanized — which goes by the euphemism MAID for medical assistance in dying.

Children are introduced into the medical killing fields by Canadian Virtual Hospice with its Medical Assistance in Dying Activity Book, described as being for children ages 6–12. In it, the child is taught how a person is killed during euthanasia:

The three medicines work like this: The first medicine makes the person feel very relaxed and fall asleep. They may yawn or snore or mumble.

The second medicine causes a “coma.” A coma looks like sleep but is much deeper than regular sleep. The person will not wake up or be bothered by noise or touch.

The third medicine makes the person’s lungs stop breathing and then their heart stops beating. Because of the coma, the person does not notice this happening and it does not hurt. When their heart and lungs stop working, their body dies. It will not start working again. This often happens in just a few minutes, but sometimes (rarely) it can take hours.

One fellow on Twitter asks, “I wonder if even Germany in the 1920s and ’30s sank so low as to educate its youth about the goodness of euthanasia of the sick and disabled. Welcome comment from those who know the literature.”

Certainly, the post-Weimar Germany of the 1930s did. It was referred to as “Lebensunwertes Leben.”

(Classical reference in headline.)

WHAT IF THEY GAVE A WAR AND EVERYBODY WAS WOKE? The military’s embrace of faddish politics may make activists happy, but it’s driving away recruits:

Is the U.S. prepared for battle? By one measure, military recruitment, the answer appears to be no. Nearly every branch has struggled to meet its recruitment goals for 2022, with some falling as short as 40%. Worse yet, only about a quarter of America’s youth meet current eligibility standards—and recent surveys show only 9% are even interested.

Military leadership primarily blames this slump on two causes: teen obesity rates and the tight labor market. But data for both claims can’t paint the full picture. Teen obesity did increase during the pandemic, to 22% from 19%. But that jump likely can’t account for the sudden and widespread collapse in recruitment. Neither can the labor market. The unemployment rate today sits at 3.6%—roughly the same as in 2019. Yet in 2019 the Army exceeded its recruiting goals. It’s falling perilously short today and will be understrength by 28,000 troops by the end of 2023. The military’s benefits—including child care, housing allowances, medical coverage and large bonuses, up to $50,000—should also help insulate it from the pitfalls of hiring young recruits in a tight labor market.

What, then, explains the shift? Perhaps one answer lies in the Pentagon’s wholesale embrace of woke politics.

On his first day in office, President Biden rescinded a Trump-era executive order banning critical-race-theory training in the military. The changes made by senior commanders were nearly immediate. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin mandated that every military unit conduct a “stand-down” to confront “extremism in the ranks.” The chief of naval operations, Adm. Mike Gilday, added Ibram X. Kendi’s “How to Be an Antiracist” to his professional reading list for sailors—never mind the book’s endorsement of racial discrimination and its charges that the institutions troops swear to protect are systemically racist.

In addition to the hyper-wokeness, as Glenn noted on Wednesday, there’s also “the Afghanistan debacle. When you casually create the greatest military defeat and humiliation in U.S. history and then pronounce it a success, people aren’t excited about dying for you.”

Update: Priorities: U.S. Military Base Is Hosting a Drag Show. “It seems as if every day lately there is another reason to break out the champagne in Moscow and Beijing, and Saturday was no exception: it was the day of Joint Base Langley-Eustis (JBLE)’s first ‘Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Summer Festival,’ featuring (what else), a drag show. What does all this woke nonsense have to do with winning wars? Oh, never mind that; that’s the old, white supremacist military! The new diverse military has other priorities altogether.”

(Updated and bumped.)

THE BANNINGS WILL CONTINUE UNTIL MORALE IMPROVES: Twitter is censoring every article from the Epoch Times and is refusing to tell the news organization why.

JACK DUNPHY GOES OUT ON A LIMB: Don’t Carry Guns, Don’t Run From the Cops, and if You Do, Expect to Be Treated Roughly.

MILTON FRIEDMAN ISN’T RUNNING THE SHOW ANYMORE: ‘Statistically Indistinguishable From Zero:’ Ivy League Analysis Shreds Biden’s ‘Inflation Reduction Act.’ A new analysis concludes that the “Inflation Reduction Act” wouldn’t reduce inflation at all.

I’m so old, I can remember when Brandon used to pretend to care about inflation:

THE ZELENSKYS’ VOGUE PUBLICITY MISFIRE: Is an Annie Leibovitz shoot the best way to appeal to Middle America’s sympathies?

Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky and his wife posed for renowned photographer Annie Leibovitz. In one shot Olena stands near Ukrainian female soldiers at the Antanov airport. In another she holds hands with her husband in the presidential office compound in Kyiv as the pair stare pensively at the camera. In perhaps the oddest photo, Zelensky is sitting behind his wife, pressing his cheek to hers and looking pointedly at the camera in a manner best described as Zoolander-esque.

* * * * * * * *

Some critics supported the couple’s decision to take their fight to the magazine shelves. The Washington Post’s Sonny Bunch posits that the Zelenskys were smart, not silly, for appearing in Vogue. He provocatively argued that Americans have short attention spans and that we have lost focus on the war in Ukraine. According to Bunch, by “appearing in celebrity-focused magazines,” Zelensky is “taking advantage of our unseriousness” and keeping the crisis at the forefront of people’s minds.

When most Americans think of Vogue, they think of the celebrities dressing like clowns at the annual Met Gala, and thick magazines full of progressive thinkpieces, and ads for expensive face creams. Perhaps the unserious American will see that the president of Ukraine is posing in Vogue and deduce that things can’t be as dire as they were before if the first couple has time for fashion photoshoots. Before you know it, that person — due to their news ADD — has moved on to the next trending topic on Twitter.

If staying in the public discourse is important to Zelensky — and doubtless it is — then he should rethink the Anna Wintour method. A picture is worth a thousand words and an Annie Leibovitz picture is worth that plus a few eyerolls to boot.

Speaking of eye-rolls, who’s ready for the Zelensky action figure?!

Pose him alongside your Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Bernie Sanders and Dr. Fauci action figures!

THE POWER LINE WEEK IN PICTURES: Recession Deniers Edition.

SALENA ZITO: It’s the uncertainty, stupid.

When gas prices started to rise over a year ago, Biden was quick to cast blame upon anyone and everyone else, including “gas supply companies,” Vladimir Putin, gas station operators, etc. What he was not quick to say was he felt your pain.

For his evasions, Biden was rewarded with scores of stories in the New York Times , Axios , Bloomberg and countless others echoing his blame-shifting claims, all written by people who all live far from the people and small business owners who were struggling from the impact of both. The inflation, they all insisted in unison, was transitory .

At every turn, Biden has failed to look voters in the eye and tell them he feels their pain. He spends most of the time either blaming someone else or denying that the pain exists at all. It’s all in your head.

On Thursday, hours after a new government report showed that the economy had shrunk for a second straight quarter, Biden rejected the very idea that the country was in a recession. “That doesn’t sound like recession to me,” he said. He then abruptly walked away from the podium and ignored the scores of question tossed at him by the White House press.

It may not sound like a recession to you. But have you asked anyone outside of experts, advisors and your staff what it feels like to the American people?

Curiously, when Biden was a young senator, he had a much better comms team than he does as president: