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Joe is always busy.

Blinken calls off China visit as spy balloon drama continues.

The U.S. State Department says Secretary Antony Blinken has postponed his trip to Beijing amid concerns about a Chinese surveillance balloon flying over U.S. airspace.

The Pentagon said Thursday it had "very high confidence" that the high-altitude surveillance balloon came from China and is being used to collect information from sensitive sites.

China's foreign affairs ministry confirmed on Friday that the balloon is theirs, but called it a "civilian airship used for research, mainly meteorological purposes," that had gone off course by accident.

"Affected by the Westerlies and with limited self-steering capability, the airship deviated far from its planned course," it said in a statement. "The Chinese side regrets the unintended entry of the airship into US airspace due to force majeure. The Chinese side will continue communicating with the US side and properly handle this unexpected situation caused by force majeure."

The incident comes at a tense time for U.S.-China relations, with American national security concerns ranging from TikTok to Taiwanand just before Blinken was set to meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing as part of an effort to diffuse those tensions.

The trip would have followed up on President Biden's meeting with Xi in Bali in November. Blinken was due to depart Friday, and would have been the first Biden administration Cabinet secretary to visit China.

The State Department says Blinken plans to reschedule the trip at the next soonest opportunity.

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Touch 👇 to watch the President’s press conference about the Jobs Report. He also gets to boast that there were 500,000 more jobs created in December than were originally reported. With those 500,000 plus January’s 529,000 new jobs, he can boast having created 12,000,000 more jobs created in 2 years. Again, watch 👇!

What happened yesterday at the DNC-

“Let me ask you a sim­ple ques­tion: Are you with me?” Mr. Biden said in Fri­day ad­dress to DNC mem­bers, who re­sponded with loud chants of “four more years.” Af­ter out­lin­ing what he sees as his leg­isla­tive achieve-ments dur­ing his first two years in of­fice, he told party ac­tivists: “We’ve got a lot more to do.” (Source. Wall Street Journal).

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Watch AOC on the House floor on Thursday- “This is about racism.” Touch the image.👇 A must watch.

Mini-Commentary. GOP antisemitism and racism go hand in hand with their embrace of evangelicals and white supremacy. The current GOP world view is always simple and dichotomous, based on anger and hate -white v. black, those saved v.those going to hell, Us v. Them.

Such a world view makes people angry and embattled.

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The latest in MAGA fashion.

Republican Congressman Andrew Clyde of Georgia proudly passed out assault weapons pins to his colleagues, who proudly wear them. This is the same guy who said the January 6th insurrection looked like a “normal tourist visit.”

Just one question - As Representative Eric Swalwell said, why are these pins so small?

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More Fascism alive and well in America - this is in Ohio.

When 'Dissident Homeschooling' reached 1,000 on Telegram, Katja Lawrence celebrated by posting an archival shot of Hitler Youth doing the Nazi salute.

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In Ohio, a ‘normal’ couple secretly runs a homeschooling network to indoctrinate kids into Nazism.

Homeschooling in order to indoctrinate children within the movement has been an important component of far-right advocacy for decades; that is, after all, the reason that Randy and Vicki Weaver moved to the northern Idaho panhandle in the 1980s and bought a home in the woods of Ruby Ridge. One of the best-known organizations for providing homeschooling materials is a far-right Christian nationalist outfit based in Moscow, Idaho, which features lessons offering slavery apologetics and misogynist tropes.

But the “Dissident Homeschooling” operation, organized on Telegram, takes the extremism in an entirely new, explicitly fascist direction. Its overseers post archival photos of German children performing the Nazi salute in class. It shares curricula featuring books that celebrate Hitler and memes dismissing the Holocaust as a hoax, or depicting Black people as apelike beasts.

The husband-and-wife pair who run the Telegram channel—which currently has 2,500 subscribers—were recently exposed by the Anonymous Comrades Collective, a group of antifascist researchers that released a Jan. 23 report and Twitter thread revealing their identities as Logan and Katja Lawrence of Upper Sandusky, Ohio, who use the noms de plume “Mr. and Mrs. Saxon” on Telegram. Reportage by Christopher Mathias at HuffPost and David Gilbert at Vice further confirmed their identities.

“I just work hard to homeschool the children, live life, enjoy the children, do the whole homestead bit, AND secretly anonymously share homeschool information with a group of fellow nazis on a private little corner of the internet so that our children can all become super aware and fight for their race,” explained Katja Lawrence, who seems to do the majority of writing on the channel.

She shares recipes for Führerkuchen (Führer cake) and boasts about her swastika snickerdoodles. She also shares words of wisdom from Hitler about the value of reading stories, and shares audio of her children shouting, “Sieg Heil!”

Her husband, Logan Lawrence, runs his family’s insurance business in Upper Sandusky, and is an officer in the local Masonic lodge. Katja Lawrence is an immigrant from the Netherlands who obtained her U.S. citizenship in 2017. They own a German Shepherd named “Blondi,” after Hitler’s dog of the same breed.

They appeared together on a neo-Nazi podcast called Achtung Amerikaner, extolling the virtues of homeschooling young Nazis. “We have our children’s best interest at heart and nobody can do a better job than we can because it’s our child. We are so deeply invested into making sure that that child becomes a wonderful Nazi,” she said.

“Typically speaking,” wrote “Mrs. Saxon” on Telegram, “whites build societies whereas blacks destroy them.” In another post she mused: “Without homeschooling our children our children are left defenseless to the schools and the Gay Afro Zionist scum that run them.” (Daily Kos).

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Thoughts from the Times and the Bulwark on who may be the GOP candidate for President in 2024.

Is Trump Way Up or Way Down?

Is Donald J. Trump the clear favorite and front-runner to win the Republican nomination? Or is he badly weakened and even an underdog against Ron DeSantis?

At the onset of the Republican campaign, the polls are exceptionally divided on Mr. Trump’s support among Republican primary voters.

In national surveys since last November’s midterm election, different pollsters have shown him with anywhere between 25 percent and 55 percent of the vote in a multicandidate field.

So which pollsters are right?

It’s really hard to tell which of these polls might be “right” or “wrong.” There are countless ways to collect survey data online and, in general, there’s very little transparency about the process. Even when there is transparency, there aren’t well-established best practices that make it easy to evaluate whether a given approach is a sound one.

But there are two reasons to err toward the polls that are showing Trump weakness. ( Click on the blue title above 👆 to read the whole discussion by Nate Cohn, New York Times).
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The Dithering of the "Maybe Trump" Republicans.

Happy Friday!

But before we dive into the weekend, let’s start with Thursday’s Normie Kabuki Theater.

This really shouldn’t be a difficult question. But it speaks depressing volumes that even at this late date — with (waves hands in the air) everything we know — even anti-Trump Republicans are having a hard time saying that Never Again Trump,actually means never.

Both New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu (photo right. above ) and former Maryland Governor Larry Hogan (photo left above) have been harsh critics of Donald Trump, and both have toyed with the idea of running for president, themselves.

Sununu has gone so far as to describe TFG as “Effin Crazy.”

But on Thursday, when they were asked the inevitable, obvious question: would they support Trump if he was the GOP nominee, massive shambolism ensued.

During an appearance on CNN, Sununu said he’ll support the Republican nominee no matter who it is, and insisted that whole “effing crazy” thing was a just a funny, funny joke. (LOL)

Because it was Groundhog Day, Larry Hogan also seemed to say that he’d also back Trump if he was the party’s nominee. “Yeah, I just don’t think [Trump will] be the nominee, but I’ll support the nominee,” Hogan told Hugh Hewitt.

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Trump dithers too.

Trump Won’t Commit to Backing the G.O.P. Nominee in 2024.

Donald J. Trump refused to say he would support the next Republican presidential nominee if it was not him, exposing a potential quagmire along the party’s path toward reclaiming the White House in 2024 and showcasing, once again, the former president’s transactional spin on political loyalty.

In a radio interview on Thursday, the conservative commentator Hugh Hewitt asked Mr. Trump if he would support “whoever” wins the party’s nomination next year. Mr. Trump announced his third presidential campaign in November and faces a number of potential Republican challengers.

“It would depend,” Mr. Trump said, adding, “It would have to depend on who the nominee was.”
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When you list ‘good folks and bad,’ Viktor Orban’s Hungary shouldn’t make the first list.

A U.S. Ambassador Finds Himself on Hostile Ground in Hungary.

BUDAPEST — David Pressman, a gay human rights lawyer, knew he was in for a rough time even before he arrived in Hungary with his husband and two children to take up a new job in September as the United States’ ambassador to Europe’s self-declared citadel of traditional Christian values and friend of the Kremlin.

As his confirmation hearing began in July in Washington, a rubber dinghy carrying a warning appeared on the Danube River near the U.S. Embassy in Budapest. On a black banner emblazoned with a skull and crossbones was an anti-L.G.B.T.Q. message in English and Hungarian: “Mr. Pressman, don’t colonize Hungary with your cult of death.”

Mr. Pressman hung a photograph of that “welcome to Hungary” message on the wall behind his embassy desk. “That,” he lamented, “was before I ever stepped foot in this country.”

And it has been pretty much downhill ever since.

The ambassador, whose predecessor, appointed by Donald J. Trump, delighted his hosts by praising Viktor Orban, Hungary’s illiberal prime minister, has been savaged since his arrival — along with the Biden administration — by government-friendly media as a menace to Hungary, its people and their values.

Mr. Pressman has been accused of violating diplomatic conventions, meddling in the judiciary and trying to silence conservative voices. PestiSracok, a belligerent, pro-government news portal, denounced the appointment of a man it described as “an expert on L.G.B.T. rights” as “an obvious diplomatic provocation.” A guest on a government-controlled television talk show referred to him as “Madame Ambassador.”

More alarming than the personal attacks, Mr. Pressman said in a recent interview in Budapest, are what he sees as a broader assault on the United States in Hungarian media — most of which is either directly controlled by the governing Fidesz party or through its business allies — and a constant “repurposing of Kremlin propaganda.”

Hungary’s government-controlled media, Mr. Pressman said, regularly recycles Russian propaganda tropes, “pushing out Kremlin disinformation and anti-American rhetoric on a routine basis, and that is worrying to the United States.”

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Update on the Economy.

Price Gouging?

$1.1 trillion

— The combined 2022 revenue of Chevron, ConocoPhillips, Exxon Mobil and Shell, as the oil industry enjoyed a record year amid higher energy prices. (Source. DealBook, The New York Times).

Jobs Report.

NEWS ALERT

U.S. Economy Added 517,000 Jobs in January.

The U.S. added 517,000 jobs last month as hiring accelerated. The unemployment rate fell to 3.4%, the lowest rate in more than 53 years. (Source. PWall Street Journal).

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Underestimate Biden-Harris at your peril.

This is the commentary that appeared in the DealBook in the Times before the Jobs Report was released. 👉 - “Investors will be closely watching today’s nonfarm payrolls report, scheduled for 8:30 a.m. Eastern. The consensus estimate is that 187,000 new jobs were created last month.”

The Washington Post Headline after the Jobs Report was released admitted the wonder of what actually happened last month - “Employers added 517,000 jobs in January, astonishing labor market growth. January marked the 25th straight month of solid job growth, and the unemployment rate edged down to 3.4 percent.”

Just for the heck of it, please notice the average hourly pay continued to grow 4.4% in January compared to a year earlier (Source. Associated Press).

Quite a Presidency, Mr. Biden and Vice President Harris, in so many ways. You saved and grew our economy. Thank you.

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What is Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro doing?

Something Very Important for Democrats Just Happened in Pennsylvania.

On Jan. 18, his first full day in office, Shapiro signed an executive order that dispensed with the requirement of a four-year college degree for 92 percent of positions in state government, meaning roughly 65,000 jobs. His action rightly recognized that such a degree is no guarantee of competence, no exclusive proof of intelligence and often less relevant than work and life experiences that have nothing to do with lecture halls.

But it recognized, too, ways in which the Democratic Party is vulnerable, and it sent an important message to voters who feel that the party doesn’t see or have much regard for them.

Utah and Maryland made similar changes to their employment practices last year. But those states had Republican governors. That a Democrat followed suit in Pennsylvania — a much bigger political stage, with a much larger population — matters. Democrats have been wounded by charges of elitism over recent years, and Shapiro’s executive order is a forceful rebuttal of the Republican caricature of his party as the protector of a corrupt meritocracy that demands an expensive, radicalizing adventure in the woke precincts of higher education.

The editorial board of The Times recently praised his executive order, writing:

Too many Americans see our society and economy as profoundly unfair, set up to serve the needs of well-connected elites and providing more benefits to people who went to college or know how to work the system. And too many feel that political leaders don’t care about them and that government and institutions don’t work for them. Opening up jobs may seem small-bore, but it shows that government is listening.

That’s an accurate assessment and excellent argument for Shapiro’s decision, which not only makes practical and political sense. It makes moral sense as well. (Source, NY Times, Frank Bruni).

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Hatch Chiles define New Mexico.

New Mexico Could Become the First State With an Official Scent — and It's Delicious.

In New Mexico, they take their chiles seriously. 

Just look to the small community of Hatch, which hosts the famed Hatch Chile Festival every year that can be smelled for miles around. Vibrant chile ristas are strung up on nearly every street above sizzling blistered chiles that await being savored in stews, fresh salsas, and even burgers. 

So yes, the love of chiles here runs deep — so deep that local Sen. Bill Soules, inspired by a chile presentation led by fifth graders, proposed the smoky-sweet scent of chiles become the state’s official aroma.

While laws dictating scents are uncommon, many states have official markings like flowers, fish, fruits, and vegetables. The only sort-of-official state scents have typically come from candle companies. But, it's common for communities to be known for nostalgic scents — be it the orangey sea breeze smells reminiscent of California or even the fresh smell of roasted coffee reminding you that there is literally a Dunkin' on every corner in Massachusetts. But to Soules, none are quite as special as his state's chiles.

"It's very unique to our state," he shared with the Associated Press. "I have tried to think of any other state that has a smell or aroma that is that distinctive statewide, and I can't think of any."

As AP reported, the bill has already passed its first committee and is likely to get implemented. Its aim, Soules said, is to bring more tourism to the state. And the legislative analysis of the bill came with this special snap to New Mexico's neighbor and low-key chile rival: "The new state aroma could help draw visitors away from Colorado, which, for some reason, thinks it has green chile comparable to that of New Mexico." 

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Warning - I am a Patagonia fan, so please consider this post highly biased.

Sometime ask me why. Shh. It’s all about a 25 year old orange raincoat.

Ryan Gellert Wants Patagonia to Be Part of the Environmental Solution.

Calls to “over­haul” cap­i­tal­ism rarely come from the C-suite, but Patag­o­nia CEO Ryan Gellert doesn’t mince words. “Busi-nesses for far too long have hid­den be­hind this nar­ra­tive that their num­ber one role is to max­i­mize share­holder wealth. That’s a fine lit­tle aca­d­e­mic con­ver­sa­tion to have, but we’ve out­grown it,” he says over video from his of­fice at Patag­o­nia’s head­quar­ters in Ven­tura, Calif. Ar­gu­ing that “the cli­mate eco­log­i­cal cri­sis is an ex­is­ten­tial threat to hu­man­ity, and it’s one of our own cre­ation,” he says that busi­nesses, long part of the prob­lem, must now be part of the so­lu­tion: “The days of ‘busi­ness as usual’ are over.”

Patag­o­nia, which turns 50 this year, de­clares on its T-shirts and else­where that its goal is “to save our home planet.” This may sound rather grand from a com­pany that sells fleece vests and parkas, but Mr. Gellert, 51, notes that Patag­o­nia has a his­tory of har­ness­ing re­tail to sup­port its en­vi­ron­men­tal agenda. For decades, it has been in­creas­ing the share of re­cy­cled ma­te­ri­als in its prod­ucts, sup­port­ing fac­to­ries that pay fair wages and do­nat­ing 1% of its sales to green causes. Last Sep­tember, Yvon Chouinard, Patag­o­nia’s founder, an­nounced that he was do­nat­ing the com­pany to a trust and a non­profit that would use its earn­ings—some $100 mil­lion a year—to fund ef­forts to fight cli­mate change. “Earth is now our only share­holder,” de­clared Mr. Chouinard.

Gam­ing out these trade-offs is “never-end­ing,” says Mr. Gellert. Sus­tain­abil­ity, he ex­plains, isn’t sim­ply a goal that a com­pany can achieve and then move on to other things: “This is the work, for­ever and all time.”    

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Keep Warm, dear subscriber, wherever you are on this planet.

A special reach out to those in America’s Northeast and across Texas, Arkansas, Mississippi and Tennessee.

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