Biden Touts Job Report As Unemployment Rate Rises

September 3, 2023 John

Biden Touts Job Report As Unemployment Rate Rises

US President Joe Biden arrives to board Air Force One at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland, on September 2, 2023. Biden travels to Florida to visit communities ravaged by Hurricane Idalia. (Photo by Stefani Reynolds / AFP) (Photo by STEFANI REYNOLDS/AFP via Getty Images) — US President Joe Biden arrives to board Air Force One at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland, on September 2, 2023. (Photo by STEFANI REYNOLDS/AFP via Getty Images)

OAN’s Roy Francis
1:28 PM – Saturday, September 2, 2023

SEE: https://www.oann.com/newsroom/biden-touts-job-report-as-unemployment-rate-rises/;

Republished below in full unedited for informational, educational, & research purposes.

President Joe Biden delivered a speech on Friday, remarking on the number of jobs that have been added to the job market.

The president said that the United States is in one of the “strongest job creating periods in our history,” after the recently released Bureau of Labor Statistics report said that 187,000 jobs were added in the month of August, an increase from the 157,000 in July.

“We came to office determined to build the economy in a different way, from the middle out and the bottom up, not the top down,” Biden said. “While I’m proud of the historic legislation my administration has passed and the policies we’ve enacted, the real heroes of this story are the American people, average Americans. They’re the ones getting up every day, putting their heads down, going out that door and going to work.”

However, while the amount of jobs that have been added has increased, the unemployment rate rose as well in the month of August to 3.8%, bringing the number of people without employment to 6.4 million.

The current rate of unemployment is the highest that the country has seen since February 2022, according to the Labor Department.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics also showed that rent, transportation, food, and gas prices have all been on the rise as well.

Meanwhile, according to a recent LendingClub report, 61% of adults say that they are living paycheck to paycheck. Almost three-quarters of consumers that earn less than $50,000 annually, and 65% of those who earn between $50,000 and $100,000, have also been living paycheck to paycheck.

While touting “Bidenomics,” Biden slammed President Donald Trump for leaving office with “fewer jobs than when he entered.”

“It wasn’t that long ago that America was losing jobs,’ he said. ‘In fact, my predecessor was one of only two presidents in history, who entered his presidency and left with fewer jobs than when he entered.”

However, the previous administration had seen massive job growth until the economic shutdown across the country due to COVID-19 forced people home, leading to a stall in economic growth.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the industries that saw the most job growth in August were health care, leisure and hospitality, social assistance, and construction.

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Yeah, We’re Going to Lose World War III to China

September 3, 2023 John

By Stephen Green 4:42 PM on August 31, 2023

SEE: https://pjmedia.com/vodkapundit/2023/08/31/yeah-were-going-to-lose-world-war-iii-to-china-n1723417;Republished below in full unedited for informational, educational, & research purposes.

The bad news is we’re probably going to lose World War III — the Taiwan War, the Pacific War, whatevs — to China. The good news, if you want to see it that way, is that China might drive us all the way back to Hawaii without having to fire a shot.

Let me back up a moment.

This column was originally headlined, “China’s Economy Is Worse Than You Think,” because this was supposed to be about the Communist country’s self-inflicted economic woes. But as I was doing my research and making some edits, I had to change the headline to “China Is Worse Off (and More Dangerous) Than You Think.” It was only on the third pass, and after deleting and rewriting huge reams of text, that I finally settled on the headline you see now.

Before we get to the World War III stuff, I’ll give you the TL;DR on mainland China’s economy: it’s hurting. Beijing keeps trying to avoid difficult economic decisions by indulging in “stimulus” building booms. The result is that a lopsided 30% of the country’s economy is built on real estate, much of which is unprofitable and some of which was so recklessly built that whole blocks of unsafe skyscrapers are getting knocked down instead of inhabited.

Making matters worse, China’s decades of rapid growth may finally have come to an end, with expected 2-3% growth instead of the accustomed 8-12%. How is China dealing with the slowdown, particularly in the troubled housing sector?

NEEDZ MOAR STIMULUS:

Two of China’s biggest cities lowered mortgage requirements for some homebuyers following central government guidance, fanning expectations that more will follow suit to arrest a record housing slowdown.

This is what we call tripling down on stupid.

That’s when it occurred to me: What if Beijing doesn’t mind a little malaise? Maybe endlessly rising living standards isn’t what Beijing wants any longer. It certainly isn’t what our betters in our own country want for us lately.

It could be that Xi’s return to Real Communism™ means he’s secretly pleased with an economy that just muddles along. The population is comfortable enough not to reject the Party outright and surveilled enough that organizing a revolt is probably impossible.

More importantly, Xi’s ever-present State has enough money coming in to pay for an unprecedented military buildup.

Admiral John Aquilino, outgoing chief of our Indo-Pacific Command, “offered remarkably detailed comments,” as The Drive’s Tyler Rogoway described it, about the growing threat from the People’s Liberation Army land, air, and sea forces.

China is “focused very clearly on delivering a force capable of taking on the United States,” Adm. Aquilino warned:

The largest military buildup since World War Two, both in conventional forces and strategic-nuclear. J-20s [stealth fighters] are in full-rate production, ships coming off their industrial baseline at numbers that only replicate what we did in the Lehman time and the 600-ship Navy kind of time frame. Again, nuclear build-up… is the largest and continuous we’ve seen.

(Hat tip, CDR Salamander.)

As covered here previously, China’s nuclear forces are poised for a “strategic breakout” vis-a-vis our own, aging nuclear deterrent, with brand-new ICBMs that will soon outnumber our own. Worse, unrestricted by our START treaties with the defunct Soviet Union, Beijing can arm each missile with three or even ten nuclear warheads — compared with only one on each of our missiles.

While our aging Navy stagnates, Beijing is commissioning new warships at a faster rate than any country in history, except the US during World War II. Already, the Chinese have more ships than we do — mostly smaller and less powerful, granted — but without the need to patrol the Atlantic and Mediterranean as we do. By the end of the decade, the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN, also, don’t ask) might have more firepower, too.

We’ll soon be faced with the prospect of a navy as powerful as our own and the very real possibility of nuclear blackmail. If a crisis were to erupt around Taiwan in 2028 or so, a humiliated American president might find that his best course would be to lose a bloodless war and tuck tail all the way back to Pearl Harbor.

The gains made from 1942-1945, at the cost of 111,606 Americans KIA and another 253,142 wounded — all just thrown away. Because America in this century has come to think that security comes from having “safe spaces” and can barely acknowledge much less respect, the sacrifices made then that have made us so comfortable and soft now.

I’m not saying such a war will happen. But I am saying that the more we allow our forces and their morale to wither away, the more likely such a thing is to happen.

Biden’s Feebleness Getting Harder for Media to Cover Up

September 3, 2023 John

By Rick Moran 3:31 PM on September 01, 2023

SEE: https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/rick-moran/2023/09/01/bidens-growing-feebleness-is-getting-harder-for-the-media-to-cover-up-n1723807;Republished below in full unedited for informational, educational, & research purposes.

The number one problem Joe Biden faces going into his re-election bid is the economy. It stinks. A majority of Americans think it stinks. Almost every previous presidential election was based on the voter’s perspective on the economy. Ronald Reagan’s question still haunts all incumbents: “Are you better off today than you were four years ago?”

The pandemic and the economic fallout from business closings, supply chain disruptions, and $5.2 trillion in government spending — which led to a painful spike in inflation — have made the Reagan question somewhat irrelevant. The economy has come roaring back to almost where Trump left it.

But people’s perspective on the economy is still clouded. That’s why this election may very well be decided by other factors.

This is a major one: a recent AP-NORC poll showed that a whopping 77% of voters think Joe Biden is too old to be president.

Axios:

A quarter of adults associate Biden with words related to his age, while words like “corrupt, criminal,” and “crooked” come to mind first for former President Trump, the poll found.

This foreshadows a potential rematch that could boil down to two main sticking points among voters: Biden’s age and Trump’s legal peril.

Driving the news: 77% of adults think Biden, 80, is too old to effectively serve for four more years, with 89% of Republicans holding that view and 69% of Democrats, the AP-NORC poll found.

That view is held across age groups, but voters 44 and under were more likely to hold the view.

Still, 82% of Democrats said they would at least probably support Biden if he is the party’s nominee.

The difference is that 26% of all voters think Biden is too old (“Old, outdated, aging, elderly”) and 15% think the president is too feeble (“Slow, confused, bumbling”). As for Trump, just 8% see him as a liar (“Liar, dishonest, untrustworthy”) and 15% as a crook (“Corrupt, criminal, crooked).

Biden’s age is a far bigger drag on him than Trump’s alleged corruption is on him. And since it doesn’t appear that the state of the economy is going to be the deciding factor — or at least as pivotal as it has been in the past — it’s possible the election may turn on whether people think Biden can do the job and whether Trump is guilty.

Many believe that Biden will not be the Democratic nominee. But from what I’ve seen, they’re going to have to carry him out of the White House feet first before he quits. Unless Democrats want a bloodbath at their convention, they are going to renominate Biden and Harris (they wouldn’t dare dump a black woman at this point).

But to silence the doubters about Biden’s age, his handlers are going to have to carry out the biggest presidential health cover-up since keeping FDR’s congestive heart failure, melanoma, and sky-high blood pressure from the voters in 1944.

They’ve already cut his daily schedule back to 30 hours and sent him on frequent vacations — 40% of his time in office has been spent at his beach house in Delaware or other relaxing getaways.

Biden’s handlers have made other concessions to his age as well. Ever since the president tripped over a sandbag and fell on stage at the U.S. Air Force Academy graduation, his handlers have tried to ensure that he isn’t placed in a situation where he might fall. To that end, they’re now using the “short stairs” on Air Force One to deplane.

NPR:

It’s one of the iconic images of the American presidency: the commander in chief, standing and waving to the cameras from the top of the stairs leading into Air Force One.

But recently, President Biden has been avoiding climbing up the sometimes-wobbly 18-foot staircase that is trucked over to the plane’s upper door. More often than not, he is using a much shorter and sturdier set of stairs that fold out from the belly of the plane.

If you’re not following the president day-to-day, you’re not likely to pick up on these concessions to his age. And as long as the American people are burdened with an incurious press who don’t want to pick up on any sign of Biden’s feebleness, they aren’t going to know about it.

DR. SUNEEL Dhand: Woke Police target DOCTORS conversations

September 3, 2023 John

Team Biden Continues Two-Pronged Assault on 2nd Amendment and Small Businesses

September 3, 2023 John

By Stephen Kruiser 3:35 AM on September 01, 2023

SEE: https://pjmedia.com/columns/stephen-kruiser/2023/09/01/the-morning-briefing-team-biden-continues-two-pronged-assault-on-2nd-amendment-and-small-businesses-n1723609;Republished below in full unedited for informational, educational, & research purposes.

The Morning Briefing: Team Biden Continues Two-Pronged Assault on 2nd Amendment and Small Businesses — *AP Photo/Haven Daley*

Top O’ the Briefing

Happy Friday, dear Kruiser Morning Briefing friends. Ertenzo felt most purposeful when adding a secret fourth bean to his three-bean salad for the annual Cornhole Club picnic.

The commie puppet masters who run Joe Biden’s brain have made no secret of their contempt for the Second Amendment and law-abiding American gun owners. They’ve had their senile mouthpiece babbling about “assault weapons” almost from the moment he was installed in the Oval Office.

Democrats don’t have a lot of luck with sweeping gun control legislation for a couple of reasons. First, they keep passing laws that make gun owners who have adhered to the law criminals overnight. These laws eventually find their way to a judge or a court that says, “Yeah…no.”

The other reason — and this is the big one — is that there are a lot of Democrats who own guns and are fond of their Second Amendment rights. Most of them are in flyover country, which is why a lot of the D.C. Dems are out of touch with reality.

Team Biden is nothing if not relentless in its pursuit of an anti-American agenda, however. Instead of the legislative process, the bureaucracy is being used to choke the life out of the Second Amendment, which Catherine wrote about yesterday:

The Biden administration, failing to get enough congressional cooperation to trample on the Second Amendment, continues its war against gun dealers.

Bingo.

As we examine the story further, it’s important to remember that Democrats have contempt for small business owners. People who can’t be forced into unionizing and stuffing the coffers of the Democratic Big Labor slush fund are useless to them.

Here’s more from Catherine’s post:

I previously wrote a VIP post about how hundreds of gun dealers suddenly lost their licenses to Biden’s ATF, in what the gun industry says is a back-handed way of undermining gun rights (if you’re not already a VIP subscriber, join today!). Some dealers informed the media that the federal government is hurting a major ally in identifying “suspicious gun buyers” by targeting legitimate gun dealers. But the Biden administration is successfully hurting gun dealers’ business. “We were making $1 million a year, now it’s less than $100,000,” gun dealer Anthony Navarro told the Wall Street Journal. “This policy is designed to be a backdoor violation of the Second Amendment.” Now there’s the new ATF rule, also aimed at gun dealers.

I’m an Arizona resident. Rules regarding private gun sales are practically nonexistent. Both parties have to be Arizona residents and after that, YOLO. The Grand Canyon State has functioned with minimal gun laws for a very long time. My grandfather owned a gun store when I was a kid, so I know whence I speak (write). What the feds want to do now is get their fascist little fingers all over the transactions between individuals, which Ryan Petty explains at our sister site Bearing Arms:

The White House outlined that under the suggested guidelines, individuals would be expected to obtain a federal license and conduct background checks if they meet one or more of several conditions. These include frequently selling firearms shortly after purchasing them, offering guns in near-new condition, selling multiple units of the same gun model, or selling business inventory as a previously federally-licensed dealer without transferring it to a personal collection for at least one year, effectively targeting the so-called fire sale loophole. The proposed rules would establish criteria around the frequency and type of gun sales by unlicensed sellers, along with the condition of the firearms.

The Second Amendment infuriates leftists because the federal government hasn’t been able to wrest control of it from the states. It’s a perfect example of how the country is supposed to work. My good friend, colleague, and “Unwoke” podcast co-host Kevin Downey Jr. once asked me if all of my guns were legal. I replied, “In this state they are.” Were I to move back to California, the story would be different.

The anti-2A crowd is fond of saying, “We don’t want to take away your guns.”

They do, of course, but until they can, they’d like to make the legal acquisition of firearms so onerous that people just give up.