Thanks Lindsey! I hope you keep on pushing the GOP anti-abortion/anti women's rights stuff!


[www.politico.com]
A higher-than-expected inflation report was threatening to black out President Joe Biden’s big celebration Tuesday of party-line legislation designed to bring down prices. The subsequent plunge of markets seemed to ensure a painful head-meets-wall day inside the White House.

And then, Sen. Lindsey Graham offered an unexpected soft landing. The South Carolina Republican’s 15-week national abortion ban immediately diverted and divided Republicans and left Biden’s aides shocked at the political lifeline they’d just been handed.

Administration officials and presidential allies — including some anxious about appearing jubilant on a day when markets were crashing — leaned hard into the split screen: denouncing Graham’s bill in increasingly harsh terms while Graham’s Republican colleagues pronounced themselves downright vexed over his decision to offer up a plan more conservative than his previous proposals.

“I’m gonna quote Lindsey Graham from Aug. 7, 2022,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said. “And he said, ‘I’ve been consistent: I think states should decide the issue of marriage and states should decide the issue of abortion.’ That’s from his own mouth.”
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre speaks during a briefing.

So obvious was the apparent ill-timing of the bill’s introduction that one White House aide said a Republican lobbyist friend joked that Graham appeared to be working for the Biden administration. Other aides suggested that the comments continued a Democratic winning streak that started mid-summer and began to imagine holding onto both houses of Congress.

“Dems might need to send gift baskets and champagne to Graham and other Republicans for their selfless act of service today,” another Democratic official told POLITICO.

The immediate response to Graham’s legislation, which would not just establish a ban on abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy but also allow states to keep and pass more restrictive laws, was a microcosm of the way abortion politics has wholly upended the midterm sprint.
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) attends a press conference.

Congress
Graham’s abortion ban stuns Senate GOP

By Burgess Everett and Marianne LeVine and Sarah Ferris

It’s not as if the images out of the White House were pristine. Live TV coverage of Biden’s speech was bracketed by large red arrows signifying the stock market’s downward trajectory. The more Biden talked about how the legislation would help the economy, the more the markets tumbled. By the closing bell, Wall Street had suffered its worst day since June 2020, with the Dow dropping more than 1,250 points.

But Democrats, who have been on the defensive for months over stubbornly high inflation, felt once again revitalized in trying to fend off GOP-led initiatives to restrict abortion rights. Virtually every Senate candidate quickly issued statements excoriating Graham’s bill and asking their Republican opponents whether they would sign off on it.

“What are the ‘MAGA Republicans’ doing over in the Capitol today?” Senate Majority leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) asked at the White House event for Democrats’ healthcare and climate legislation, formally dubbed the Inflation Reduction Act. “Introducing national bans on abortion,” Schumer scoffed. “Just unbelievable.”

Top operatives in the party said that they were just as surprised to see Graham’s move, which they likened to a slow, telegraphed pitch down the middle of the plate. Several confessed to first learning about the legislation Monday evening through Sean Hannity’s Fox News program, where the latest iteration was initially teased.

There was widespread anticipation that the Graham bill would quickly find its way into Democratic fundraising solicitations. Whether it would become a feature of ad campaigns was a somewhat less relevant point, those operatives added, since so much of the current messaging was geared around abortion already — an issue some GOP contenders were already clearing from their websites.

“In almost every race, there is some advertising right now hitting Republicans on abortion,” said one top Senate Democratic official.

Year over year numbers are going to take a long time to look good even when prices begin to steady. It's just the way math is.

Quote
Acer
Year over year numbers are going to take a long time to look good even when prices begin to steady. It's just the way math is.

True. Total CPI is now looking stabilized - essentially unchanged since June (295.328 then, 295.620 now) with the actual M/M increase in CPI in this report being 0.1%. That, annualized by itself would be ~1.2% Y/Y, but even if we keep that level of total CPI, the Y/Y numbers will still reflect the previous higher CPI for another 9 months or so til it progressively and finally comes down to that lower level.

But the core CPI was 0.6%; not so good. I would guess that this will be an outlier, but it needs to come down soon.

That's my senator, folks. That's who my friends and neighbors sent to Washington DC to represent us. Way to go, South Carolinians. Way to go.