I am absolutely not being sarcastic. What makes you think so?

Oh, him.

And please tell me you don’t take medical advice you haven’t verified (well, from me, TMC is a Doctor and a really good and high powered one) from some random Internet site that openly proclaims they traffic only in scurrilous rumors and vile calumny.

Ain’t the First Amendment grand?

I’m a stickler for following the rules. For instance I do in fact virtue signal by wearing a mask and gloves that I am willing to conform to make you comfortable with our public interaction. I was reluctant to give up the alliteration but in the original title “Failed” was two words, the first also starting with an “F” and the second of which was “Up”.

Do the math.

Pelosi pulls FISA bill as effort to renew surveillance tools crumbles
By JOHN BRESNAHAN, KYLE CHENEY and SARAH FERRIS, Politico
05/28/2020

House Democrats have pulled a bill to reauthorize parts of the federal surveillance program known as FISA, a stinging defeat for Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s legislative machine provoked by a veto threat from President Donald Trump.

Pelosi announced Thursday that she would seek negotiations with Senate Republicans, a move that sends both parties back to the drafting table to resolve differences. Democrats had initially resisted because it would slow down the process. The stunning reversal, a rarity for Pelosi, leaves behind a political mess for both parties, with limited options unless Trump, again, changes course.

Hey, he’s against it? I’ll add that to the nearly blank 3 x 5 Card I list his accomplishments on (don’t want to get caught out on debate if somebody rhetorically asks “Say one good thing about him.”). I understand we’re leaving Afghanistan too.

In a letter to her members, the California Democrat said Republicans — at the urging of Trump — had “abandoned their support for our national security.”

“Clearly, because House Republicans have prioritized politics over our national security, we will no longer have a bipartisan veto-proof majority,” Pelosi wrote.

The House had been expected to easily approve the bill this week, with an unusual alliance of Republicans and Democrats who carried a similar version across the floor in March. But that fragile coalition collapsed this week as Trump suddenly intervened, issuing a veto threat that seemed to contradict his own administration’s efforts to renew the law.

GOP support for the measure quickly crumbled, forcing Democrats to summon the votes on their own.

But the Democratic caucus was facing its own revolt from the left, with about 100 progressives refusing to back legislation they saw as undermining privacy rights of Americans. And last-minute language from senior Democrats close to Pelosi, like House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), further muddied the waters for an uneasy left wing.

The retreat by Democrats comes after hours of frenetic, but ultimately unsuccessful, maneuvering by Pelosi and her leadership team on Wednesday. But it had been clear for much of the day that Democrats would not be able to win over enough progressives to pass the bill and send it to Trump’s desk.

House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) acknowledged the difficult math on Wednesday evening, shortly after he and Pelosi called off their planned vote and sent members home for the night.

“Frankly, I never expected to win this vote – FISA has always been bipartisan,” Hoyer said.

Trump has rooted his objections to FISA renewal in his disputed claims that the FBI abused its surveillance powers to monitor his campaign in 2016. Though an inspector general review found that a FISA warrant to monitor former Trump campaign aide Carter Page contained significant flaws and omissions, he didn’t conclude whether it would have been enough to invalidate the application altogether.

Ok, that was with a warrant. This Bill lets the FBI do it without a warrant and oh, they can search your Browser History too because Wyden’s Amendment was defeated.

And your Bill didn’t even have that Nancy.

But Trump’s animus toward senior FBI leadership has motivated him and other Republican allies to call for dramatic reforms to the FISA law, even over the efforts by Attorney General William Barr to preserve them largely unchanged.

Democratic objections mounted this week after key committee leaders negotiated an amendment to restrict the FBI’s ability to monitor the web browsing history of Americans. An amendment offered by Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Steve Daines (R-Mont.) failed in the Senate by a single vote, though the Senate passed its version of the FISA bill earlier this month on an 80-16 vote.

But House leaders had agreed to consider a version in the House offered by Reps. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) and Warren Davidson (R-Ohio), which seemed poised for passage.

After Republicans began pulling their support for the measure, Wyden, too, bristled at what he said was an inaccurate characterization of his amendment by Schiff. And he began urging the defeat of both the amendment and bill.

This is a bad Bill, bad policy, and I’d be happy to see it perish in a pit of eternal flame (“Kill it with fire!”).

Our views are Super Majority Mainstream. Really.

Republicans Think They Can Get Away With It. They Might Be Right.
By Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson, The New York Times
May 27, 2020

Does the Republican Party have a death wish?

Its most prominent leaders — particularly President Trump and Senator Mitch McConnell, the majority leader — have dug themselves into positions that defy all conventional rules of electoral survival. In an election year, even ideologically extreme politicians should try to do popular things and avoid doing unpopular things — if for no other reason than so that they can resume pursuing their extreme goals after Election Day.

Instead, top Republicans in Washington are pulling out all the stops to do unpopular things and avoid doing popular things. Their main proposals — more tax cuts for the rich, corporate legal immunity, pushing the post office into bankruptcy — have strikingly little support among voters, even among Republican voters. Meanwhile, they are resisting highly popular measures, such as additional relief for states, localities and ordinary workers, that would almost certainly increase their likelihood of holding onto power this fall.

This situation isn’t just surreal. It’s genuinely scary. In a democracy, leaders of a governing party shouldn’t act as if they can brazenly defy large majorities of voters and still hold onto power. The alarm bells only get louder when you begin to examine why current Republican leaders think this way — and why they might be right.

This situation isn’t just surreal. It’s genuinely scary. In a democracy, leaders of a governing party shouldn’t act as if they can brazenly defy large majorities of voters and still hold onto power. The alarm bells only get louder when you begin to examine why current Republican leaders think this way — and why they might be right.

The United States is a profoundly polarized nation. Yet despite angry protests on the far right, the pandemic has actually lessened the divide among American voters. Large bipartisan majorities favor much more aid to states, localities and workers; believe the federal government has primary responsibility for ensuring adequate Covid-19 testing; and support a cautious reopening of the economy guided by public health expertise.

By contrast, large bipartisan majorities oppose states having to declare bankruptcy; the post office going insolvent; helping out corporate executives, the wealthy and big business with bailouts and other special deals; states handling testing on their own or a quick reopening without robust safeguards.

Rather than celebrating and heeding this unusual convergence, top Republicans in Washington have snubbed it. They have rejected what bipartisan majorities demand and demanded what bipartisan majorities reject. And they’ve done so knowing that voters will soon get their say.

In a few cases, they may believe voters will eventually move toward the party’s stances. In others, they may be posturing so Democrats have to yield costly concessions. And yet, as the stalemate wears on, it becomes harder and harder to avoid the simplest explanation for Republicans’ poisonous positions: They are devoted to them, and they think they can get away with them.

Their devotion may be shocking, but it really shouldn’t be surprising. Since the 1990s, Republicans have increasingly embraced the most extreme goals of the party’s corporate and big-money supporters. In 2017, Republican leaders advanced an agenda that managed to feature the two most unpopular pieces of major legislation of the past quarter century: repeal and replacement of the Affordable Care Act and big, deficit-funded tax cuts for corporations and the rich. The former barely failed. The latter narrowly passed after Republican donors made clear that, if the party didn’t deliver, the funding spigot would run dry.

As the official death toll from Covid-19 passes 100,000, these plutocratic priorities look even more glaring. Amid a crisis that’s laid bare American inequality, Republicans’ first instinct has remained the same: to go to the mat for the superrich. They’ve twisted relief bills to provide unrelated tax cuts and no-strings bailouts, shuttered the Senate amid a national health and economic crisis (though opened it long enough to strong-arm conservative judges onto the bench) and continued to float toxic ideas in an election year — say, making people give up some of their Social Security benefits in return for a financial lifeline today. If there’s an idea popular among conservative billionaires and nobody else, Republicans are probably pushing for it now.

But if Republicans lose big in the fall, then those who benefit from their consistent embrace of plutocracy lose, too. Why do Republicans and their organized allies think they can get away with it — or at least have a good enough chance to justify the risk?

The answer offers a stark warning about American democracy. Republicans benefit from two formidable bulwarks against electoral accountability. The first is tribalism: Republican elites have encouraged their high-turnout voting base to see every election as an epic battle to save white Christian America from a socialist, secular, gun-seizing left, with right-wing media and surrogate groups like the N.R.A. leading the charge.

The second bulwark isn’t solely of Republicans’ creation. Our political system guarantees less populated areas outsize clout in the Senate and gives control over election administration to the states. Republicans have built a growing advantage in rural America over the past two decades. The result is that the Senate (and, to a lesser extent, the Electoral College) remains a counter-majoritarian stronghold — not invulnerable to electoral reversal but highly resistant to it.

At the same time, Republicans in red states have used partisan gerrymandering and voter restrictions to disadvantage citizens outside their base. The latter include voter ID laws, the indiscriminate purging of the voter rolls and rules that make it harder to register, get to the polls, vote early and (especially crucial now) vote remotely. In the latest move, the Republican National Committee and other Republican groups sued California to stop the state from mailing all registered voters absentee ballots for the fall election. Besides being fundamentally at odds with democratic equality, all these efforts further undermine electoral accountability.

In the pandemic, these strategies have become much more dangerous. If Republicans stick to their unpopular positions, they will have to build their twin bulwarks even higher to escape accountability, magnifying racial and cultural divisions and undermining free and fair elections in ways that threaten not just the health of citizens but the health of our democracy.

Republicans could end up losing, despite all this. But their determination to defy the most basic law of electoral gravity — that you respond to the pull of voters as an election approaches — should set off a blaring alarm. In the midst of a health and economic catastrophe, they are putting their dangerous indifference to popular sentiment to the ultimate test.

Institutional Democrats are craven cowardly idiots if they are not complete and total sellouts.

Yeah Andy, tomorrow unless I get ambitious or something distracts me.

The Economist is an incredibly conservative and conventional magazine about, Surprise!, Economics. If you are not familiar with it perhaps the best analogy is a glossy Wall Street Journal without Murdochs.

And it’s very British.

They are not sanguine.

A decline in GDP of 10% usually has professional Economists debating whether it is a Recession or a Depression.

Dismal Earnings, Bullish Stock Investors and the Fed’s Invisible Hand
By Matt Phillips, The New York Times
May 27, 2020

Wall Street analysts have grown increasingly pessimistic in recent weeks about the outlook for corporate profits, even as investors have pushed markets steadily higher, breaking the link between analyst forecasts and the direction of stock prices.

Most companies in the S&P 500 stock index have reported their first-quarter earnings, and the impact of the coronavirus pandemic on profits is becoming clear, at least for January through March. On a per-share basis, profits of S&P 500 companies fell by 13 percent, making it the worst slump since 2009.

Analysts think things will get worse before they get better. At the end of March, the consensus among analysts was that profits at companies that make up the index would sink a modest 1.8 percent in 2020. But after digesting the financial reports of companies from Agilent Technologies to Zions Bancorp, they now think 2020 profits will tumble more than 20 percent.

Any finance textbook’s section on equity prices holds that the direction of the stock market is determined, to a large extent, by the profits and dividends that shareholders expect companies to produce in the future. And academic research has repeatedly shown that when Wall Street analysts revise their forecasts for a company’s profits, it can move share prices.

Traders and investors routinely take note of when analysts erase earlier expectations, using those revisions as a real-time gauge of how the fundamental business prospects of corporate America are looking.

Going by the conventional wisdom, the current collapse in profit expectations — and analysts’ woeful prognoses for future earnings — should be clobbering share prices. But investors don’t appear to be taking their cues from analysts. The S&P 500 has soared more than 30 percent over the last two months.

To be sure, investors priced in some downturn in profits when stocks suffered a 34 percent collapse in February and March. They were right, and the pain, reflected in earnings reports, was widespread.
…
Firms that rely on discretionary consumer spending were, unsurprisingly, hammered. The casino operator Las Vegas Sands posted a first-quarter loss of $51 million, compared with a profit of $744 million during the same period last year. Profits fell 92 percent for the hotel company Marriott International. The cruise line Carnival lost $781 million during the first quarter. Even Amazon.com, ideally positioned for a world reliant on home deliveries, saw profits fall 29 percent as the costs of keeping open during the crisis increased.

Over the last few weeks, disappointing earnings announcements sent share prices down 1 percent on average. (That’s far less than the nearly 3 percent drop stocks suffered on average after falling short of expectations in recent years, according to research from the data provider FactSet.)

Close observers of stocks won’t be surprised. After all, market sentiment has grown increasingly detached from the abysmal outlook for economic growth, another supposedly fundamental building block of market prices. Instead, stocks have climbed even as the consensus expectation among Wall Street economists forecasts a 30 percent annualized rate of decline for gross domestic product this quarter, according to FactSet.

Plenty of explanations have been offered to help explain the market’s blasé approach to a bleak reality facing corporate America. Some say the bad economic news was already priced in during the March collapse. Others argue that markets are simply “discounting” — that is basically betting — that the U.S. will enjoy a V-shaped, or robust, economic recovery. Another argument is that investors, who tend to be forward-looking, are simply setting their sights on a future where the pandemic is a distant memory.

The most powerful reason is simpler: It’s the actions of the Federal Reserve.

Since March 23 — the day the stock market rally began — the Fed has done its best to ensure that the returns on bonds are quite low by signaling its willingness to buy unlimited quantities of Treasury and government-backed mortgage bonds. It has also ventured into buying corporate bonds, which helped push yields on such bonds lower too. The goal, in part, is to push investors away from the safety of the bond markets and into riskier assets, like stocks.

In a recent note, analysts at JPMorgan argued that these programs by the Fed “likely has a bigger positive impact on equity valuation, compared with the negative impact of the temporary earnings loss.”

Translation: The Fed’s efforts to keep interest rates and bond yields low has more than offset the collapse in profits for S&P 500 companies, helping to keep the market aloft even though corporate profitability and the economy look like they will be gloomy for a while.

A similar thing happened during the last financial crisis. Interest rates and bond yields fell to low levels that would have been unthinkable previously, which many partly attributed to central bank actions. And for the years that followed prices of assets such as stocks, bonds and real estate all rallied to levels that looked high relative to the sluggish level of economic activity after the crisis.

So while corporate profits are supposed to be the fuel that revs the stock market’s engine, in the short term, Federal Reserve policy remains in the driver’s seat. That explains why investors are willing to ignore what analysts have to say, at least for the moment.