And don’t lose hope. Despite how awful this all is, I can feel the tide turning. We will win this fight.
Before I get to the good news, here is a poem I wrote. I bet you didn’t know I was a poet!
That is because I am not a poet. Alas. It is not good poetry. But it is how I feel:
.
Senate Republicans
Take your NRA money and shove it up your ass.
It's a ton of money, so it might hurt.
.
Not my baby just died in a school shooting hurt
Not my grandma just died at Tops hurt
Not I had to carry my rapist's baby and I am only 11 hurt.
.
Then get to all that praying y'all keep talking about.
Quit praying for us and our unborn children.
Quit praying for people to stop dying by the guns you fetishize.
.
Instead, pray that you are totally wrong about religion.
Pray that there is no hell.
Because if there is a hell,
each and every one of you is going to burn for eternity.
.
And that will really hurt.
And to all of you who are NOT Senate Republicans, how about some good news to keep us energized?
Good Economic News
There have been some promising economic signs recently:
The Fed’s favorite inflation measure fell in April
Another key tracker of consumer prices took a breather in April, following in the footsteps of inflation indexes released earlier this month.
Economists, the Federal Reserve, the Biden administration and the American people were all hopeful that March would prove to be the peak of the pandemic price hikes. The April inflation reports suggest that might indeed be the case, even though one month may not be enough to conclusively call the end to the trend.
Dow poised to snap 8-week losing streak
Wall Street is poised to finish the week in positive territory for the first time in nearly two months, with the three major U.S. indexes all flashing green in premarket trading.
Dow Jones Rallies On Inflation Data
The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose as stocks rallied on encouraging inflation data. Tesla (TSLA) surged even as CEO Elon Musk issued a warning on high-octane growth stocks. Apple (AAPL) raced higher and Microsoft (MSFT) was another blue-chip winner.
Positive inflation data was helping stocks to end the week on a high. Core personal consumption expenditures — the Federal Reserve's preferred inflation indicator — rose 4.9% in April, slower than March's 5.2% increase. This raises hopes that price increases could be slowing.
S&P 500, Dow snap losing streaks for best week since November 2020
Investors got a reprieve from a painful sell-off as the Dow Jones Industrial Average and the S&P 500 rallied to close their best weeks since November 2020.
The Dow jumped 575.77 points, or nearly 1.8%, to 33,212.96. The S&P 500 rose about 2.5% to 4,158.24. The tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite was the outperformer, helped by strong earnings from software companies and a fall in the 10-year Treasury yield. It was ended the day up 3.3% to reach 12,131.13.
All three of the major averages closed the week higher. The Dow finished up 6.2% for the week and snapped its longest losing streak, eight weeks, since 1923. The S&P 500 is 6.5% higher and the Nasdaq is up 6.8% on the week. Both indexes ended seven-week losing streaks. A chunk of the week’s gains came Thursday and Friday, when all three of the averages rallied as strong retail earnings and a slowing inflation report lifted sentiment.
Democrats Doing Great Things
And of course, Democrats continue to work hard for us. This first one was shared by cc yesterday, but I had to also include it because it is so great and something so few people know.
and this is welcome news:
Latest White House plan would forgive $10,000 in student debt per borrower
White House officials are currently planning to cancel $10,000 in student debt per borrower, after months of internal deliberations over how to structure loan forgiveness for tens of millions of Americans, three people with knowledge of the matter said.
President Biden had hoped to make the announcement as soon as this weekend at the University of Delaware commencement, the people said, but that timing has changed after the massacre Tuesday in Texas.
Most of the nation’s 41 million student borrowers stand to benefit. Canceling $10,000 in debt for everyone with federal student loans would settle the balances of roughly a third of borrowers, while cutting total debt by at least half for another 20 percent, according to the latest data from the Education Department
I knew Biden did a great job uniting the Democracies to fight Russia, but this article really hammered that home:
The secret planning that kept the White House a step ahead of Russia
The first instruction that Secretary of State Antony Blinken got from President Biden was to “reset” America’s alliances and partnerships abroad so that the United States could deal with the challenges ahead. That strategy would prove decisive in combating Russia’s aggression against Ukraine.
Blinken and other officials gave me new details this week, describing a series of behind-the-scenes meetings over the past year that helped forge the U.S.-led coalition to support Ukraine. His narrative validates President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s observation in a 1957 speech: “Plans are worthless, but planning is everything.”
The Biden administration’s secret planning began in April 2021 when Russia massed about 100,000 troops on the Ukrainian border. The buildup turned out to be a feint, but Blinken and other officials discussed U.S. intelligence about Russia’s actions with leaders of Britain, France and Germany at a NATO meeting in Brussels that month. Their message was, “We need to get ourselves prepared,” a senior State Department official said.
Germany was a reluctant but essential ally, and the Biden administration made a controversial decision last summer that was probably crucial in gaining German support against Russia. Biden gave Germany a pass on an initial round of sanctions against a company building the Nord Stream 2 pipeline in exchange for a pledge from Chancellor Angela Merkel that if Russia invaded, Nord Stream 2 would be scrapped. When the invasion came, Merkel was gone but her successor, Olaf Scholz, kept the promise.
By avoiding a crisis with Germany early on, Blinken said, “the net result was that the foundation was in place when the Russians went ahead with the aggression.”
and his actions led to this → Europe is united
Europe is acting with a greater sense of unity and purpose than I have ever seen before. Every European leader I spoke with believed that Russia’s aggression has sparked a revolution of sorts across the continent. The European Union has shown remarkable unity on sanctions and is slowly but steadily coming together on energy policy.
These successes could evolve into greater coordination on foreign and even defense policy. Europeans have realized, at a fundamental level, that they were taking peace and stability for granted, and that it might now have to be created and sustained by hard work and commitment, in part by building hard power of their own and deploying it strategically. There are serious debates about ending the slow, consensual process of E.U. decision-making that allows one country, such as Hungary, to veto its efforts. The most lasting legacy of this crisis could be a new role for Europe as a more purposeful strategic actor on the world stage.
Biden is doing things with making police accountable as well: Biden Set to Issue Policing Order on Anniversary of Floyd Killing
President Biden on Wednesday is expected to issue an executive order aimed at overhauling policing on the second anniversary of the murder of George Floyd, who died after being handcuffed and pinned to the ground by a Minneapolis police officer, people familiar with the matter said.
Mr. Biden will direct federal law enforcement agencies to revise their use-of-force policies and to restrict tactics like chokeholds and no-knock warrants, while using grant incentives to encourage state and local agencies to adopt the same standards.
His order will also create a national registry of officers fired for misconduct and restrict the transfer of most military equipment to police, the people familiar with the order said.
and this internationally: Biden takes aggressive posture toward China on Asia trip
President Biden on Monday signaled a more confrontational approach to China on multiple fronts, issuing a sharp warning against any potential attack on Taiwan at the same time his administration is embroiled in wide-ranging efforts to beat back aggression by another superpower, Russia.
Every President Talks About Focusing on China—Biden’s Really Doing It
Joe Biden is committed to succeeding where his predecessors failed. He recognizes the centrality of Indo-Pacific policy to America’s interests in the 21st Century and he has tenaciously sought to put in place a new U.S. strategy prioritizing the region even as global events have conspired to distract his administration.
Before it began, National Security Advisor Sullivan said, "The message we're trying to send on this trip is a message of an affirmative vision of what the world can look like if the democracies and open societies of the world stand together to shape the rules of the road, to define the security architecture of the region, to reinforce strong, powerful, historic alliances, and we think putting that on display over four days bilaterally with the ROK and Japan, through the Quad, through the Indo-Pacific economic Framework, it will send a powerful message. We think that message will be heard everywhere."
While Sullivan did not mention China in that framing and while Campbell has argued that the steps being taken are not to “counter China” the reality is that few believe that (and those who say they do may be channeling former President Clinton by arguing about the definition of “counter”). Lawyerly language aside, make no mistake, the region sees the trip as part of a U.S. Indo-Pacific Strategy to contain the perceived threat posed by a rising China.
And it is not just Biden, they are busy in the House as well: Capitol attack panel to hold six public hearings as it aims to show how Trump broke law
The House select committee investigating the January 6 attack on the Capitol is expected to stage six public hearings in June on how Donald Trump and some allies broke the law as they sought to overturn the 2020 election results, according to sources familiar with the inquiry.
The hearings are set to be a pivotal political moment for the country as the panel aims to publicly outline the potentially unlawful schemes that tried to keep the former president in office despite his defeat at the hands of Joe Biden.
According to a draft schedule reviewed by the Guardian, the select committee intends to hold six hearings, with the first and last in prime time, where its lawyers will run through how Trump’s schemes took shape before the election and culminated with the Capitol attack.
Bad News for Bad Dudes
Putin’s Own Men Are Already Discussing Who Will Replace Him
Three months into Vladimir Putin’s bloody “special operation” in Ukraine, his own men in the Kremlin are reportedly discussing who will replace him.
That’s according to new reporting by the independent news outlet Meduza, which cited several sources close to the Russian presidential administration who said officials are increasingly fed up with Putin personally.
Longtime Trump Gatekeeper Rhona Graff Subpoenaed by New York AG in Trump Org Investigation
New York’s Attorney General’s Office has subpoenaed Donald Trump’s longtime personal gatekeeper as part of its probe into the Trump Organization. Rhona Graff, who worked as a personal assistant to Trump between 1987 and 2021, will be questioned under oath about the former president’s involvement in the preparation of annual financial statements that are being scrutinized during the investigation. News of Graff’s upcoming deposition on May 31 was revealed in court papers filed by Attorney General Letitia James’ office that oppose Trump’s efforts to scrub a costly contempt of court order for failing to meet a deadline to respond to a subpoena for documents and other evidence. Special litigation counsel Andrew Amer wrote in the latest filing that James’ office wants to grill Graff under oath to find out more detail about how Trump’s financial statements were handled than she had divulged in a previous affidavit.
N.Y. appeals court rules Trump must give deposition in civil probe
An appellate court panel has upheld an order requiring Donald Trump and two of his adult children to sit for depositions as part of the state’s long-running civil investigation into the former president’s business practices at the family-run Trump Organization.
The decision published on Thursday rejects Trump’s argument that investigators from New York Attorney General Letitia James’s (D) office were trying to get evidence against him to use in a parallel criminal case through improper channels.
DOJ interviews Georgia Republicans about interactions with Trump campaign in fake elector probe
Federal investigators have interviewed Republicans in Georgia about interactions with people in former President Donald Trump’s orbit and his 2020 reelection campaign, as the Justice Department’s sprawling criminal probe examines efforts to put forth alternate slates of electors to displace Joe Biden electors in battleground states Trump lost.
In one case, FBI agents asked a prominent Georgia Republican whether he had direct conversations with Trump.
Trump’s Biggest Candidate Bet Was a Bust
Donald Trump rarely gives money to candidates. So it was notable this year when he put more than $3.1 million into two PACs backing former GOP Sen. David Perdue’s gubernatorial bid in Georgia.
That was a bet that didn’t pay off.
On The Lighter Side.
And finally, before I say goodbye, if you have not seen this young man, this is worth a watch:
I am so lucky and so proud to be in this with all of you ✊🏼✊🏾✊🏽🧡💚💛💜✊🏾✊🏽✊🏻