14 thoughts on “Tuesday Open Thread”

1. Republicans just can't catch a break …

   AP: US wholesale inflation cooled in July in sign that price pressures are continuing to ease

   The Labor Department reported Tuesday that its producer price index — which tracks inflation before it reaches consumers — rose 0.1% from June to July. That was down from a 0.2% rise a month earlier. And compared with a year earlier, prices were up 2.2% in July. That was the smallest such rise since March and was down from a 2.7% year-over-year increase in June.

   The July wholesale figures reflect a broad and steady slowdown in price increases, which peaked at a four-decade high in mid-2022 but are now moving toward the Fed’s 2% inflation target. On Wednesday, the Labor Department will release the most well-known inflation measure, the consumer price index.

   Tuesday’s report showed that prices in the nation’s vast service sector fell 0.2% last month, the biggest drop since March 2023. Goods prices rose 0.6%, largely because gasoline prices jumped 2.8% from June to July.

    

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   1. That opens the Federal Reserve to drop interest rates a couple of times before the election.

      The Fed interest target most directly affects mortgage rates, and indirectly other things like the stock and bond markets.

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      1. The Fed should already have cut rates, but Powell is a pearl-clutching coward.  Labor market will be down next Spring because of his waiting too long. 

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2. How to win friends and influence people:

   • Case one, reported by Heather Cox Richardson:  "When the real X channel finally began to function, it showed Musk and Trump heaping praise on each other. But Trump was slurring his words, and when HuffPost White House journalist S.V. Dáte asked the campaign about his inability to articulate, it answered: “Must be your sh*tty hearing. Get your ears checked out.”
   • Case two, from The Guardian:  "At a campaign rally in Atlanta earlier this month, Trump picked a fight with Brian Kemp, Georgia’s popular Republican governor, whom he termed “little Brian” and accused of having turned Georgia into a “laughing stock”. Or, slightly expanded, from the Independent: "Trump … attacked the governor and his wife, calling Kemp “disloyal” and referring to him as “Little Brian.”

     “I don’t want her endorsement. I don’t want his endorsement. I just want them to do their job for Georgia,” Trump said. “In my opinion, they want us to lose.”

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3. Anyone know when Peters is scheduled to be sentenced? Hope it is before the general election.

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   1. According to the court file case schedule, sentencing is set for October 3rd at 9:30.  Set for 2.5 hours (a half day essentially).  It would be interesting to see what the presentence report says, though that'll be confidential.  

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4. Is this going to be a big deal?
   https://apnews.com/article/trump-campaign-burglary-virginia-073d9a821f1f2e58898126760ec5ff42

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   1. Sadly not at the Watergate.

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5. Marcy at EmptyWheel

   My point is not that there’s some secret formula to elicit actual, truthful answers from Donald Trump. Trump doesn’t believe in truth; he believes in leveraging lies to exercise power. So no standard interview format will pin the man down.

   Rather, it’s that journalists are indulging their own vanity by imagining they’re doing any better than Elon Musk.

   Given that that’s the case — given that Trump’s attacks on the press have rendered them little more than props in his reality show — journalists ought to reflect on their own failures before they continue to screech that Kamala Harris, who in 23 days has vetted and picked a running mate, added key staffers, and done fairly epic campaign appearances in six swing states, has yet to offer a press conference to many of the same journalists who could do nothing more than make Trump squirm about crowd size.

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   1. I didn’t tune in to the X interview semi-circle jerk last night but I see Bobo is raging about how great it was and that anyone who watched it would understand there is only one person who can save America – the diapered great Orange one!  Soooo….I can assume it was as off the rails as one could imagine? 

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      1. I couldn't stand to listen, but here's one report

         Trump's conversation with Musk is even bigger disaster than expected

         Thanks to a duplicitous, double-standards media, Trump has avoided the kind of “cognitive decline” stories that reporters couldn’t stop writing about President Joe Biden. Heck, The New York Times wrote dozens of stories about Biden’s age in the wake of the first presidential debate. But Trump? His increasingly unhinged rants and inability to go on the campaign trail don’t even muster a raised eyebrow. 

         After his “conversation” with Musk, however, it’s going to be impossible for the media to ignore. It wasn’t just his inability to have a straight conversation with Musk. We know Trump is no longer capable of expressing a coherent thought. It was worse than that. 

         Trump had a bizarre lisp the entire event, slurring words with the letter “s.” 

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         1. Plus his posting on X is causing his stock, DJT, to plummet to $ 24 per share today. Not to mention the 16 million quarterly loss announced. Still can't understand why true believers in red hats buy this. They are about to be fleeced by the orange turd in September when he can sell his shares and crater the company, which will just make them more angry and unhinged. That doesn't, however, mean they'll fess up to being gullible and stupid. They'll probably blame Biden.

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            1. I cannot figure out why DJT Media stock is at $24 and not 50¢.

               Fat Donnie's return to Xitter is the death blow to Truthy.

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6. In Comedy, Truth — I'm gobsmacked by the second panel:

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