SunSeeker
SunSeeker's JournalOrange Crush supporters respond after recent remarks from Tybee's mayor scolding annual HBCU beach bash
The date for Orange Crush usually coincides with the calendar week of spring break at most HBCU schools, and that’s the rationale behind when the event is scheduled. A public beach with very few ways to legally shut down access, there is not much Tybee can do to prevent a large number of people from meeting at the beach, at the same time, every year. Orange Crush in 2024 falls on the weekend of April 19-21.
The pier did not need to be permitted, since it is operated by Chatham County, so Turner was never denied an event permit by the City of Tybee Island. Still, he decided to cancel his fashion show event for the pier out of worry that Tybee could hold Orange Crush Florida accountable for anything that happened on the island that weekend, especially after Wigfall's permit denial.
Turner also believes there is a race factor behind the actions of Tybee officials. Demographic data from Census Reporter indicates Tybee's population of roughly 3,100 is 93.7 percent white (2,928 residents) and 3.4 percent black (110).
Pearce finished well behind Mayor West in Tybee's November 2023 mayoral election, but she was aiming to become the island's first black mayor. Wigfall listed her as one of two references on his Jan. 22 HBCU Food Truck Festival permit application. When asked if she was surprised by Tybee's handling of Orange Crush of late, Pearce said she wasn't.
https://www.connectsavannah.com/community/orange-crush-supporters-respond-after-recent-remarks-from-tybees-mayor-scolding-the-annual-hbcu-beach-bash-21703462
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I happened to be on Tybee Island this weekend camping. The police were out of control, stopping and arresting black spring breakers. All the Tybee Island restaurants had closed for the weekend, and barricades were placed on public streets on Tybee Island so that students could not get to the beaches. But the police did not bother us, we are white. It made me sick to see how they treated those students from HBCUs. How is this not a national story?
The Key to Winning the White House: Math
Biden starts the process at a slight mathematical disadvantage from 2020: Redistricting after the 2020 census means he would get three fewer Electoral College votes (303) if he won the same places he won four years ago. That’s still enough to win, but a scenario that makes it even more critical that he hang on to what he captured in his first face-off with Trump.
And that's shaping up to be an uphill battle for the incumbent president, with polls showing Trump ahead in the core battleground states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada,
Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
So the Biden campaign is casting its eyes farther afield: South, to be specific, with North Carolina as a primary target and Florida part of the mix as well. Both states, notably, picked up an Electoral College vote in the 2024 map. And Democrats see the New South, including Georgia, as a new pathway to victory this fall.
"If there is going to be a pickup anywhere on the map, North Carolina is the target, if history tells us anything," says Christopher Cooper, director of the Haire Institute for Public Policy at Western Carolina University. The Tar Heel State – where a recent Marist Institute of Public Opinion poll showed Trump just 3 percentage points ahead of Biden – is "just as gettable" for Biden as Georgia is, Cooper says. "It's primed."
https://www.usnews.com/news/the-report/articles/2024-03-29/biden-looks-south-to-beat-trump-in-2024-presidential-race
They came for Florida's sun and sand. They got soaring costs and a culture war.
One of the first signs Barb Carter’s move to Florida wasn’t the postcard life she’d envisioned was the armadillo infestation in her home that caused $9,000 in damages. Then came a hurricane, ever present feuding over politics, and an inability to find a doctor to remove a tumor from her liver.
After a year in the Sunshine State, Carter packed her car with whatever belongings she could fit and headed back to her home state of Kansas — selling her Florida home at a $40,000 loss and leaving behind the children and grandchildren she’d moved to be closer to.
...
But while hundreds of thousands of new residents have flocked to the state on the promise of beautiful weather, no income tax and lower costs, nearly 500,000 left in 2022, according to the most recent census data. Contributing to their move was a perfect storm of soaring insurance costs, a hostile political environment, worsening traffic and extreme weather, according to interviews with more than a dozen recent transplants and longtime residents who left the state in the past two years.
...
Costs and politics were also enough to cause Noelle Schmitz to leave the state after more than 30 years, despite her son having a year left in high school, and relocate to Winchester, Virginia. She said the politics became ever-present in her daily life — one former neighbor had a massive Trump banner in front of their house for years, and another had Trump written in big letters across their yard. When she put out a Hillary Clinton sign in 2016, it was stolen and her house was egged.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/economics/leaving-florida-rcna142316
DWAC stock shares close nearly 14% down after Trump social media merger approved by shareholders
The price of shares in Digital World Acquisition Corp. closed trading Friday nearly 14% lower than their opening price after the shell company's shareholders approved a merger with the social media company owned by former President Donald Trump.
DWAC had opened the trading day at $44.20 per share, but quickly tumbled on the heels of the vote.
A total of 11% of the tradable shares of DWAC are being sold short, FactSet data shows.
This means investors holding these positions are betting the price will fall before they have to buy the shares back and return them to the entities who loaned the shares to them.
https://www.cnbc.com/2024/03/22/trump-social-dwac-stock-falls-after-merger-approved.html
The Real Reason No One Is Giving Biden Credit for How Good the Economy Is Right Now
Much of this scenario can be laid at the feet of the Democratic Party. Not the official fundraising and administrative apparatus that runs conventions and formulates policy platforms, but the broad constellation of think tanks, nonprofits, academic experts, and journalists that collectively regulates the liberal intellectual atmosphere. For much of his presidency, Biden has been the victim of a centrist revolt against his economic program that the progressive wing of the party has been either unable or unwilling to put down. Everyone expects Republicans to give a Democratic president a hard time, but sharp and sustained economic criticism from Biden’s ostensible allies established a narrative of failure that has proved alarmingly resistant to reality.
And so the economic commentary field remained open to Summers and other expert doomsayers—including some with politics well to Summers’ left. Economics dominated the news cycle in a way that it hadn’t since the banking crash, and seemingly everyone had something terrible to say about it. Biden wasn’t creating enough union jobs. His spending was really just a corporate welfare extravaganza. He was stealing jobs from Europe. There were too many regulations on manufacturers. There weren’t enough regulations on manufacturers. A recession was coming. A recession was already here. Some high-profile Democrats even insisted that a recession was necessary—on CNBC, former Obama and Clinton adviser Jason Furman argued that millions of workers would have to be laid off to get inflation back under control. Summers even floated the possibility of 10 percent unemployment.
The layoffs, however, refused to materialize. When inflation peaked at 9.1 percent in June 2022, the unemployment rate stood at 3.6 percent. Today, using the same metrics, inflation is just 3.2 percent, and unemployment is at just 3.9 percent. For 12 of the previous 19 months, the jobless rate has held steady at or below its June 2022 level, while inflation has been running below 4 percent since June 2023. Economists are still debating why the Fed’s higher rates didn’t translate into job losses, but the important point is that millions of people were not, in fact, fired. Moreover, millions of people did not need to be fired in order to fix inflation. As Mike Konczal concluded in a report for the Roosevelt Institute in September 2023, the vast majority of inflation during the Biden years was driven by pandemic-related supply problems. Whatever was going wrong in 2022, it wasn’t because you were too rich.
There is some evidence that the economic commentariat is coming to its senses as the 2024 election approaches. Some of the same centrists who ripped Biden’s stimulus package in 2021 are now applauding his recovery. The anti-Biden left has largely abandoned the economic playing field, finding cleaner grounds for criticism on other subjects. Contrary to the narrative abuse directed at Biden over the past few years, the economic numbers across his presidency tell a simple, optimistic story about the art of government in the democratic world. The American economy is strong today for the same reason that the labor market has been strong throughout Biden’s presidency: the U.S. government spent a ton of money to support workers and their families. Biden has not only established a blueprint for successful crisis management, but he has achieved something on the economy that pessimists across the ideological spectrum have been declaring impossible for much of the 21st century: He learned from the government’s prior mistakes and found a way to govern better.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2024/03/biden-economy-voters-polling-numbers-covid-recovery.html
[Really great article, which includes an excellent summary of how Biden saved the economy. I just picked 4 paragraphs to give you the main conclusions, but the whole thing is well worth a read.]
Rep. Katie Porter Says She Regrets Calling California Senate Race 'Rigged'
“Obviously, I wish I had chosen a different word,” Porter said in a Tuesday episode of the podcast “Pod Save America.”
“At no time and in no way would I ever suggest that there’s anything other than a careful, thoughtful, amazing election system that actually should be the model for a lot of the country,” she said in the “Pod Save America” interview.
Porter said she was trying to call attention to what she views as problems with laws around election spending.“Outcomes are manipulated and distorted when you have people coming in spending millions and millions of dollars at the last minute, and that money is not disclosed until after the election,” she said.
Both Porter and Schiff rejected all corporate PAC money for their Senate campaigns, as did other Senate hopeful Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.) However, Schiff fundraised more than all his election opponents combined.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/katie-porter-senate-race-rigged_n_65f9e007e4b0d47c510044ee
The $10k Chinese EV that could blow away the competition.
Ford Authority reported last week, Ford CEO Jim Farley recently stated that he views not only Chinese EVs in general as a threat, but specifically pointed to one, in general – the BYD Seagull. These comments don’t come as a huge surprise, per say, given the fact that the Chinese automaker recently lowered the price of this entry-level EV to a mere 69,800 yuan ($9,700), which is far, far cheaper than any all-electric vehicle currently sold in the U.S. Recently, Autoline Network took a closer look at the BYD Seagull, and came away with some important notes on what makes it tick.
This particular BYD Seagull has a sticker price of $11,500 and comes equipped with the larger 38.8 kWh battery pack. Looking around, one can find a few areas where cost-cutting measures are evident, but overall, it’s a pretty nice-looking vehicle that doesn’t appear to be some kind of bargain-basement build. There are things like a single windshield wiper instead of two, and there’s no rear wiper, but nothing terribly major.
Even the interior presents quite nicely and is not what one would expect in such a cheap car, and the Seagull even has contrast stitching and features like cruise control and wireless charging, coupled with four-wheel disc brakes. It reportedly rides comfortably and drives well, though it obviously won’t blow anyone away in terms of performance. Throw in the fact that it has 252 miles of range, and it’s pretty clear why people like Jim Farley are worried about the BYD Seagull making it to the U.S. market.
https://fordauthority.com/2024/03/heres-an-overview-of-the-ev-ford-ceo-says-is-threat-video/
UK judge orders Trump to pay $380K to man who penned infamous "Steele Dossier"
Former President Donald Trump's escalating legal penalties are a little larger after a judge in the United Kingdom ordered him to pay more than $380,000 to a firm run by Christopher Steele, the ex-British spy who penned the infamous 2016 dossier accusing Trump of harboring close ties to the Russians.
Trump sued Steele's firm, Orbis Business Intelligence, in a London court in 2022 over claims that the series of memos known as the "Steele Dossier" harmed his reputation and violated British data privacy laws.
But in February, Justice Karen Steyn tossed the suit -- without determining whether the allegations in the dossier were true or false -- and ordered Trump to compensate Steele for his legal fees.
According to the judge's order, which was made public Thursday, the judge gave Trump 28 days to execute the payment of GBP 300,000, which equates to roughly $384,000.
Read more: https://abcnews.go.com/US/uk-judge-orders-trump-pay-380k-man-penned/story?id=107902444
UK judge orders Trump to pay $380K to man who penned infamous 'Steele Dossier'
Source: ABC News
Former President Donald Trump's escalating legal penalties are a little larger after a judge in the United Kingdom ordered him to pay more than $380,000 to a firm run by Christopher Steele, the ex-British spy who penned the infamous 2016 dossier accusing Trump of harboring close ties to the Russians.
Trump sued Steele's firm, Orbis Business Intelligence, in a London court in 2022 over claims that the series of memos known as the "Steele Dossier" harmed his reputation and violated British data privacy laws.
But in February, Justice Karen Steyn tossed the suit -- without determining whether the allegations in the dossier were true or false -- and ordered Trump to compensate Steele for his legal fees.
According to the judge's order, which was made public Thursday, the judge gave Trump 28 days to execute the payment of GBP 300,000, which equates to roughly $384,000.
Read more: https://abcnews.go.com/US/uk-judge-orders-trump-pay-380k-man-penned/story?id=107902444
Last I checked, the Steele Dossier has yet to be disproven.
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