9.30 Robert Shapiro in The Washington Post: Using the White House’s preferred data, average earnings rose from $894.06 in January 2017 to $937.02 in August 2018. That suggests impressive gains of $42.96 weekly over the 20-month period and $30.02 weekly over the past year. But what about median earnings rather than average earnings — that is, earnings of those in the middle of the distribution? The Bureau of Labor Statistics has a different database for that view, and its quarter-by-quarter numbers show a very different picture. Median weekly earnings of all workers rose from $865 in the first quarter of 2017 to $876 in the quarter ending June 30, 2018. The typical working American’s earnings increased $11 weekly over 18 months, barely more than one-quarter of the economic progress touted by the White House. Even that modest gain is not very meaningful. The significance of what people earn lies in what they can do with their earnings, and inflation eats away at what any of us can purchase or save. As a result, serious earnings analysis is always framed in inflation-adjusted, or “real,” terms. From January 2017 to June 2018, inflation totaled 3.77 percent, while the $11 increase in unadjusted weekly earnings over those 18 months represented gains of 1.27 percent.
9.30 Kellyanne Conway on CNN: “I feel very empathetic, frankly, for victims of sexual assault, sexual harassment and rape. I’m a victim of sexual assault.”
9.30 In the South China Sea, a Chinese warship cut in front of the USS Decatur, which had the right of way, forcing the destroyer, in effect, to go into reverse and swerve.
9.30 President Donald Trump on North Korean leader Kim Jong Un: “I was really tough and so was he, and we went back and forth. And then we fell in love, OK? No, really, he wrote me beautiful letters, and they’re great letters. We fell in love.”
9.29 Elon Musk reached a settlement with federal regulators that will allow him to remain as Tesla CEO but require him to step down as chairman and to pay a $20 million fine.
9.29 Matt Damon as Brett Kavanaugh on SNL. “I’m a keg-is-half-full kind of guy.”
9.28 Megan Garber in The Atlantic: “Anger, in some ways, is its own kind of inebriation. It is its own loss of control. It is in that sense striking, as yet another glaring double standard on display at Thursday’s hearings: A temper, lost in public, was another luxury that was not afforded to Christine Blasey Ford. She, instead, had to be perfectly composed—perfectly sober, in every sense—to have even the hope of being considered, at the most basic of levels, credible. . . . But Kavanaugh’s anger, revealingly—his performed petulance, and his unchecked rage—was not coded, among many of the pundits who discussed it, as a loss of control. It was interpreted instead as something much more noble: “defiance.” As anger that is dignified, because it is anger that asserts itself as a kind of self-defense. His rage would burn so bright that it would glow; it would be its own tautology; it would be, in a way, beautiful. It would be so righteous—defending a man, and a nation, and a birthright—that it would justify itself.
9.28 After the Judiciary Committee recommends Kavanaugh‘s confoimation, Sen. Flake forces a week’s delay in the vote while the FBI investigates
9.28 Activists confront Sen. Flake in an elevator. Said on: “I was sexually assaulted, and nobody believed me. I didn’t tell anyone, and you’re telling all women that they don’t matter . . . That’s what you’re telling all of these women. That’s what you’re telling me right now. Look at me when I’m talking to you! You are telling me that my assault doesn’t matter . . . Don’t look away from me. Look at me.” Relied a shaken Flake: “Thank you.”
9.28 Lindsay Graham: “I know I’m a single white male from South Carolina and I’m told I should shut up, but I will not shut up, if that’s okay.”
9.28 Rush Limbaugh: “These women are angry. Something has happened to them in their lives, and their rage and anger, they take it out now on the country or on all men or men in ‘the powerful majority,’ which is white Christian men and so forth.”
9.28 Ann Coulter: “There has never been a more pacific, less rapey creature than the white male of Western European descent.”
9.27 Kavanaugh: “I drank beer with my friends. Almost everyone did. Sometimes I had too many beers. Sometimes, others did. I liked beer. I still like beer. But I did not drink beer to the point of blacking out, and I never sexually assaulted anyone.”
9.27 Kavanaugh: “This has destroyed my family and my good name,” the 53-year-old Kavanaugh said. “I may never teach again. … I may never be able to coach again. … You may defeat me in the final vote, but you’ll never get me to quit. Never.”
9.27 Ford, asked how confident she is that Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her when she was 15: “One hundred percent.”
9.27 Dr. Christine Blasey Ford said Kavanaugh was so drunk when he pinned her down and held her mouth to prevent her from screaming that she thought he was “going to accidentally kill me.” She believed he was going to rape her if she didn’t escape. But she said her strongest memory is of Kavanaugh laughing with his Georgetown Prep classmate Mark Judge, who she alleges was also in the room when it happened. “Indelible in the hippocampus is the laughter, the uproarious laughter between the two,” she testified. “I was, you know, underneath one of them while the two laughed — two friends having a really good time with one another.”
9.26 At the UN, Trump said “In less than two years, my administration has accomplished more than almost any administration in the history of our country.” The audience laughed. Trump later said the line “was meant to get some laughter”
9.25 Bill Cosby sentenced to 3-10 years
9.23 Tiger Woods has won the Tour Championship tournament in Atlanta, his first victory in more than five years.
