The Angry Bear

Did everyone else receive this alert today at 2:18 PM from the head Nazi in the White House?

Trump’s trade war isn’t hurting manufacturing . . . yet The Trump Administration’s trade war hasn’t hurt manufacturing and production yet. At least that’s the message from this morning’s ISM report on manufacturing. According to the ISM: The September PMI®registered 59.8 percent, a decrease of 1.5 percentage points from the August reading of 61.3 percent. The New Orders Index registered 61.8 percent, a decrease of 3.3 percentage points from the August...

2018 Arctic sea ice minimum As I may possibly have mentioned once or twice before, I am a total nerd.  One of the web sites I watch is NSIDC’s site tracking arctic sea ice.  To be honest, I’m a little surprised that it is still functioning, since the Trump Administration believes that climate change is just a Chinese hoax, so I thought they would take it down almost immediately after coming into office.  Guess they haven’t found it yet! Anyway, if...

US Auto Sales Fell by 4 Percent in the Third Quarter “Major automakers said Tuesday that U.S. sales fell 7 percent in September and 4 percent for the June-through-September quarter, compared with the same periods last year. Weaker numbers for September and the third quarter wiped out a 1.8 percent gain during the first half of the year, and left auto sales on pace with 2017. Some analysts had cautioned that the first-half gains were driven by incentives...

I Was Wrong: US-Mexico Trade Deal Lives With Canada: USMCA Rarher Than NAFTA At the last minute last night the US and Canada cut a deal, so now Canada is on on the deal to change NAFTA to USMCA.  I think the name change is the biggest part of it, even though Trump still claims that NAFTA was “the worst trade deal ever” and the new deal makes relatively minor changes in it, especially if one considers what would have been the case if the US had actually...

A thought for Sunday: Trump is stomping all over the GOP’s message If the Congressional GOP had their druthers, they would probably like the autumn mid-term narrative to be about a strong economy, low unemployment, a tax cut, and a big increase in military funding. In vulnerable districts, they’d like to run on local issues, as would GOPers running for state and local offices. But I knew that was never going to happen, because Trump wants the spotlight to...

In an interview with Jake Tapper on CNN’s State of the Union, Kellyanne Conway said, “I’m a victim of sexual assault, I don’t expect Judge Kavanaugh or Jake Tapper or Jeff Flake or anybody to be held responsible for that. You have to be accountable for your own conduct.”  I believe Conway because she spoke about this before, in October 2016, in an interview with Chris Matthews, right after the Access Hollywood tape of Donald Trump’s “locker room talk”...

My understanding is that Bret Kavanaugh presents himself as a textualist, following Antonin Scalia he argues that words in the constitition and laws should be interpreted using their conventional meanings when they were written. This is in contrast to the different approach based on considering legislative history (which is impossible for the main body of the Constitution because the procedings of the Convention were secret). It is in very marked...

As he retires from being a Senator; he has made many noises about being opposed to many things Trump has done as President. Except that is all it was, no action and just noise. “In an announcement that many saw coming, Senator Jeff Flake, of Arizona, announced on Friday that he would retire from humanity, effective immediately. Speaking to reporters at the Capitol, Flake said that the demands of being a human being had ‘taken their toll,’ and that it was...