The Bidenomics Winning Streak Continues: 209,000 Jobs Added

Bidenomics continued its underacknowledged winning streak in June by creating 209,000 jobs, the Labor Department reported this morning, led by hiring by government, health care, “social assistance” (childcare workers, social workers, home eldercare aides, etc.), and construction. Unemployment ticked down from 3.7 to 3.6 percent (although seasonally adjusted, it’s the same as May).

The job-creation number was somewhat less robust than the 240,000 predicted by a team of experts surveyed by Dow Jones. But even that was a sort of triumph, because by the insane rules of economics reporting too much job creation constitutes a catastrophically tempting invitation for the Federal Reserve to jack up interest rates. Even so, stock futures fell this morning in response to the good news.

Everybody should calm the hell down. Minutes from the Federal Reserve’s June meeting, released earlier this week, showed, to absolutely nobody’s surprise, that the Fed intends to keep raising rates. What today’s job numbers show is that the Biden economy is proving much harder to push into recession than the Fed reckoned on. I’d like to tell you why, but I don’t know. Nobody does. But the bottom-line reality check: That is very good news.

The House of Reps caucus continues to grow.

On Thursday morning, Representative Jamaal Bowman posted a video to Twitter bench-pressing 405 pounds for three repetitions.

“Be sure to always center your health and well-being as we fight to save democracy and humanity,” the New York representative tweeted. The caption seemed to be a reference to Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s interesting video posted last week, in which the presidential candidate squeezed out non–fully extended pushups and 115 pound incline bench presses while donning only a pair of blue jeans.

While Bowman has not shied away from posting videos of himself lifting weights in the past, the most recent video seemed directed at Kennedy and any individuals who view the anti-vaxxer’s muscles as reason to trust him as an authority on health and wellness. The presidential candidate has projected himself as being health-centered in a way that other politicians are not (though Kennedy and his fans readily compare him to Biden, but not to Trump or DeSantis, curiously).

Bowman’s video gestures toward what is obvious: Being physically active is not tied to one strain of politics. You can lift weights and be needlessly contrarian against vaccines, like RFK Jr. You could also lift heavier weights and embrace the rigorous scientific method that helped create such world-changing vaccines in the first place.

A fair chunk of people hailing Kennedy’s candidacy do so on the grounds of his big muscles, or his apparent willingness to stand up against the establishment. He looks healthier than other politicians. He questions their authority. He’s against the grain. He’s a free-thinking, anti-establishment maverick. In “manosphere” terms, Kennedy is perceived as an “alpha.”

No politician warrants unconditional praise or fandom. But if anyone does warrant intrigue or admiration for being a maverick who also happens to lift a lot of weight, perhaps RFK Jr. fans could mull things over. After all, Bowman—a school principal who ousted a 32-year career politician and has bothered conservative and liberal power interests alike while advocating for anti-war, pro-worker, and pro–green energy policies—might be higher up on the list than a guy whose main character trait is spreading flimsy arguments against giving people medicine for life-threatening diseases.

Months after Musk laid off most of Twitter’s staff, he is now suing Meta, accusing the competing social media giant of poaching former Twitter employees so it could create a “copycat” site.

On Wednesday, Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta launched Threads—a companion app to Instagram that is indeed similar to Twitter and many other competitor apps like Bluesky, Mastodon, and Post. But while the others have launched with little fanfare, Meta’s Threads has not, with more than 30 million users having already registered. And thus Twitter took immediate action.

Hours after Threads’ launch, Twitter lawyer Alex Spiro issued a letter to Zuckerberg threatening to sue, accusing Meta of “systematic, willful, and unlawful misappropriation of Twitter’s trade secrets and intellectual property.”

Spiro accused Meta of hiring former Twitter employees who have access to “highly confidential” Twitter information and trade secrets, as well as company documents and electronic devices, and who apparently have ongoing obligations to Twitter. Meta “deliberately assigned these employers to develop, in a matter of months, Meta’s copycat ‘Threads’ app,” the letter claimed.

Twitter demanded Meta stop the apparent poaching and trade-secret exploitation operation or face legal action.

“Competition is fine, cheating is not,” Musk tweeted about the legal threat Thursday.

Meta’s response to the letter was curt: “No one on the Threads engineering team is a former Twitter employee—that’s just not a thing.”

The legal action comes after Musk repeatedly expressed nonchalance and snideness toward the competing app.

It’s unclear what “ongoing obligations” former Twitter employees would have to the company, especially if they were among the thousands victim to Musk’s mass layoffs.

“I would like to apologize for firing these geniuses,” Musk tweeted in November, in response to a report about him firing employees who were critical of him. “Their immense talent will no doubt be of great use elsewhere.”

Beyond competing in the digital world, the bumbling billionaires are said to also be gearing up to duke it out in a cage match.

Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene has officially been booted from the House Freedom Caucus for not being far-right enough.

The House of Representatives’ furthest right contingent was seriously considering ejecting her for some time, and the caucus finally voted last Friday on whether or not Greene could stay. But it was not clear at the time what the vote result was.

Well, it’s official: the QAnon-loving, conspiracy theory-spouting, potentially sedition-encouraging congresswoman is out of the Freedom Caucus, Politico’s Olivia Beavers reported Thursday. Maryland Republican Andy Harris described the vote to Beavers as an “appropriate action.”

This is the first time the Freedom Caucus has kicked out one of its own. Harris said the reason for Greene’s ouster was primarily because “the way she referred to a fellow member was probably not the way we expect our members to refer to other fellow, especially female, members.”

He was likely referring to when Greene called her former work bestie Lauren Boebert a “little bitch” on the House floor. Greene accused her colleague of copying her articles of impeachment against Joe Biden—and then introducing them first.

But Harris also said that another factor in voting Greene out was her decision to diverge from the Freedom Caucus on supporting House Speaker Kevin McCarthy.

Greene seemed unbothered by the vote result, insisting in a statement, “My America First credentials, guided by my Christian faith, are forged in steel, seared into my character, and will never change.”

“I fight every single day in the halls of congress against the hate-America Democrats, who are trying to destroy this country,” she said, contradictorily adding, “I will work with ANYONE who wants to secure our border, protect our children inside the womb and after they are born, end the forever foreign wars, and do the work to save this country.”

The first signs of a rift began after Republicans took control of the House, following the 2022 midterms. Greene was vocal in backing McCarthy’s bid for speakership. She remained a staunch ally during the agonizing 15 votes for the gavel in January, despite her fellow Freedom Caucus members nominating seemingly any- and everyone to oppose McCarthy. At one point, Greene even called Donald Trump, handing the phone to other Republicans on the House floor to try to convince them to back McCarthy.

Since then, Greene has been welcomed by more establishment Republicans, receiving a seat on key committees including Oversight and Homeland Security. She also backed the debt ceiling deal, which Freedom Caucus members vehemently opposed. So while she may not need the Freedom Caucus anymore, the vote is still a stunning example of how Republicans are all too willing to eat their own.

This article has been updated.

What’s difficult about living through history is you often don’t know the magnitude of it all until it’s over. But at this rate, things being “over” might mean us not being around to look back at it at all.

In this particular case of living through history, Earth just logged the hottest global temperature ever recorded three days in a row—and perhaps the hottest it’s been in some 125,000 years. The earliest-known human use of symbols dates to around the same time.

On Monday, the average global temperature reached 62.62 degrees Fahrenheit (17.01 degrees Celsius). On Tuesday, it went even higher, reaching 62.94 degrees Fahrenheit. And that number continued to climb into Wednesday.

Those numbers come after June was already the hottest month on record—and experts predict things will only get worse.

The temperatures recorded over the last week, from the University of Maine’s Climate Reanalyzer, are the highest in the tool’s 44-year history. The European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service has since confirmed that Monday and Tuesday’s temperature readings broke the records in its own data, which spans back even further, to 1940.

Data collected from tree rings, ice cores, coral reefs, and other sources strongly suggests that the temperatures are indeed the hottest in more than 100 millennia.

“These data tell us that it hasn’t been this warm since at least 125,000 years ago,” Paulo Ceppi, climate scientist at London’s Grantham Institute, told The Washington Post.

Jennifer Francis, senior scientist at Woodwell Climate Research Center, affirmed Ceppi’s claim, saying the records were likely the warmest in “at least 100,00 years.”

The heat is part of an ongoing and increasing threat. Copernicus said Thursday that last month was the hottest June since its records begun. “The month was the warmest June globally … exceeding June 2019—the previous record—by a substantial margin,” the organization said.

This extreme heat is partially caused by a regular El Niño weather pattern, which is helping temperatures to surge across the globe. But the skyrocketing temperatures are also thanks to human fossil fuel use and excess carbon emissions. Measurements of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere averaged a whopping 424 parts per million in May—yet another historic peak in a steady climb scientists have recorded for decades.

It cannot be overstated how very real the misery of climate change is. The impacts are being felt worldwide; if you haven’t felt them, you can just ask a longtime resident of virtually any city what the weather was like years ago versus today. But the effects, of course, are much more than people needing to tug at their collar a bit more than before.

Seminole County, Florida, has already exceeded last year in the number of days it had to activate an emergency weather plan—something only initiated when the heat index is 108 degrees or higher. Texas and other Southern states have reached such dangerous levels repeatedly. On Tuesday, at least 57 million Americans were exposed to dangerous levels of heat.

In China, historic weeklong heat waves have scorched millions of residents; days inching toward 110 degrees have halted outdoor work, and initiated heatstroke and even crop-protection measures.

Parts of North Africa peaked up to 122 degrees, while Antarctica’s temperatures inched toward 50 degrees. Chari Vijayaraghavan, a polar explorer and educator who has visited the Arctic and Antarctic regularly for the past 10 years, told the Associated Press that global warming is obvious at both poles, existentially threatening the lives of wildlife like penguins.

By mid-June, at least 96 people in India had died from heat-related conditions—in just two of India’s 28 states.

With all that being said, the heat may only dial up, unless we make dramatic changes to how society runs and who gets to run it.

Robert Rohde, lead scientist at environmental data science organization Berkeley Earth, urges us to consider what it means for a record to break, and break again, and continue to stay at that record-breaking level. “We may well see a few even warmer days over the next six weeks.”