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I'm old enough to remember the last economic crisis America suffered.

In 2008, I'd just broken into the business as a financial writer and had a front-row seat to the meltdown.

Day in and day out, I reported and analyzed all of the moving parts...

The subprime loans and bad mortgages, the sovereign debt and collateralized debt obligations, car companies that overextended themselves, the banks that bet against their own clients...

All of it.

I also remember the bailouts, like the $787 billion American Recovery Act and the protests that erupted in its wake.

You remember the Tea Party, too, right?

I'm sure Mark Meadows does. He was a member as a Representative of North Carolina, and the founder of the House Freedom Caucus.

In that capacity, he advocated to cut spending, resist raising the debt ceiling, and spearheaded the charge to shut down the government in 2013.

"President Obama continues to fail to heed the warnings of economists and the desire of the American people to reduce government spending and balance the budget," Meadows said. "With the national debt at over $20 trillion, the consequences of allowing our spending problems to continue to go unresolved are extremely dire."

But that was then; this is now.

Today, Meadows is serving as President Trump's Chief of Staff and was one of the chief architects of the $2 trillion stimulus plan that just sailed through Congress.

That's more than double the size of Obama's package, but if Meadows objected to the price tag, he certainly didn't say so publicly.

But this is different, right?

This is a time of real crisis. This is the time to throw caution to the wind and pull out all the stops.

As a fiscal conservative, Ive long been concerned about deficits and debt, Texas Sen. John Cornyn said. But I dont think thats a discussion we should be having when we are in a national emergency. We are already on a war footing, and weve got to beat this virus.

Sure.

Except that doesn't really track either not when the national debt already totaled $23.5 trillion before the Coronavirus even broke out in China.

And not when the federal deficit grew from $587 billion in FY2016 to more than $1 trillion in FY2020.

Indeed, this new fiscal albatross only came after the government racked up $624.5 billion in red ink in the five months from October to February.

And there's going to be more.

Americans haven't even received their first round of $1,200 stimulus checks and a second round is already being discussed.

We could very well do a second round, President Trump said Monday. It is absolutely under serious consideration.

Trump is also pushing for a massive infrastructure bill, prompting Democrats to dust off the $760 billion spending package they outlined in January.

Oh yes, you better believe the Democrats are on board.

You'll Never Be On The Inside!

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We must double down on the down-payment we made in the CARES Act by passing a CARES 2 package, which will extend and expand this bipartisan legislation to meet the needs of the American people, says House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

Make no mistake, we're going to have spent more than $5 trillion on stimulus by the time this is all over.

And while Americans will be more than happy to cash a few extra checks, the overwhelming majority of that money is going to go to businesses and corporations.

Of course, it's going to be hard to know the precise distribution, because earlier this week President Trump fired the guy who was charged with overseeing the $2 trillion pandemic stimulus.

Up until Tuesday, Glenn Fine was the Pentagons acting inspector general and head of the Pandemic Response Accountability Committee. The committee was built into the bill to create a watchdog that would submit quarterly reports and notify Congress if any agency refused to comply with its information requests.

It was literally his job to look out for malfeasance and ensure that the stimulus plan wasn't reduced to a slush fund for political allies and corrupt corporations.

But now he's gone.

So, too, is Michael Atkinson the intelligence community inspector general.

Trump fired him last week for notifying Congress of the whistleblower complaint that ultimately led to his impeachment something Atkinson was required by law to do.

And this week, in addition to firing Fine, Trump lashed out against Health and Human Services Inspector General Christi Grimm, whose office described widespread testing delays and supply issues at America's hospitals.

Now, Grimm is likely on the chopping block, as well.

To be clear, inspectors general have existed in the military since the countrys founding, but Congress established the position in statute in 1978 in response to Nixons abuse of executive power during the Watergate scandal.

But the president clearly has no tolerance for them or the oversight they're obliged to provide.

And yet, Congress continues to proffer up blank checks for the president to disburse.

Trillions of dollars flying out of taxpayer pockets, unchecked by Congressional oversight, and landing God knows where.

It's almost worthy of some kind of movement, some kind of rebellion, some public rebuke of government excess, corruption, and a surefire path to financial ruin...

If only one existed...

Fight on,

Jason Simpkins

@OCSimpkins on Twitter

Jason Simpkins is Assistant Managing Editor of the Outsider Club and Investment Director of The Wealth Warrior, a financial advisory focused on security companies and defense contractors. For more on Jason, check out his editor's page.

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What the Hell Happened to the Tea Party? - Outsider Club

If youre looking for something to do during your time isolating at home, having a family tea party can be a great way to get the whole family together for some magical fun! Not only is tea good for your health, but many blends can provide calming relief which can aid with stress during these uncertain times.

To make this activity even better Toynk has released an enchantingteapot inspired by Genies lamp on their website, that will be the perfect addition to your home tea party!

We absolutely love this teapot thats made to mimic the style and details of Genies lamp, from Disneys Aladdin the popular animated movie released in 1992.

Its polished gold finish will have you feeling like royalty every time you use it and lets face it Its truly impossible for your tea time to feel anything less than magical when youre channeling genie vibes! Although sorry to say, there are no wishes included with this lamp look-alike. When you arent using it to serve up your favorite cup of tea, this teapot would make a perfect Disney decor piece to highlight in your kitchen, or really any room of the house!

This Disney teapot is made to look like gold, but the true material is ceramic which helps with keeping the contents of the pot warm for an extended period of time. It can hold 32 oz. and is hand wash only.

This tea-time accessory is officially licensed by the Walt Disney company and is currently retailing for $29.99. You can shop the magic lamp teapot by clicking HERE.

Also note that Toynk offers free shipping everyday, site-wide with no order minimum. It truly cant get better!

-SHOP: Bring Disney Magic Into Your Home Office With These Magical Products

-These Beautiful Castle Art Pieces Will Transform Your Hallway Into Main Street, U.S.A

Continue reading here:
Add Enchantment To Your Tea Time With This Teapot Inspired By Genie's Lamp - Inside the Magic

Introducing our Spring 2020 special section, Know Your Enemy.

In a widely read New Republic article published in the first days of Barack Obamas presidency, Sam Tanenhaus, a journalist and biographer of Whittaker Chambers and William F. Buckley, Jr., declared that Conservatism Is Dead.

He argued that advocates of the postwar conservative orthodoxya fusion of libertarian economics, anti-communism, and Christian traditionalismcould provide no satisfactory answers for Americans struggling with precarious employment and the collapse of the housing bubble. For Tanenhaus, it was Obama who represented the politics of Burkean compromise best suited to a world in crisis and flux. Out of touch with its times, conservatism, he predicted, would be relegated to the wilderness, shadow-boxing with twentieth-century ghosts until tiring itself out and expiring.

Tanenhaus was wrong. He failed to anticipate the potent ideological adrenaline that the Obama presidency would provide to the movements and institutions of the right, which, despite their high-minded rhetoric, had always been propelled as much by disdain for (and fear of) the lower orders as by philosophical principle. Beneath a familiar veneer of constitutional originalism, the Tea Party catalyzed an amorphous fear of the first black presidentand his plans to take over American medicine on behalf of undeserving racial othersinto a genuine movement. It revitalized the Republican Party, infusing it with young legislative talent and cash from hardcore libertarian donors like the Koch Brothers. Conservatives dominated state legislative elections in the Obama years, enabling a spree of gerrymandering and structural reforms (like voter disenfranchisement and union busting) to ensure that, despite a dwindling white majority, conservatism would have a triumphant second life in American politics.

Whether you see Trumps victory in 2016 as the culmination of decades of racial backlash, prefigured by the counter-revolutionary rage of the Obama years, or a radical break with the movement conservatism that preceded it depends on how you view the intellectual history of conservatism: through the rosy spectacles worn by the editors of National Review and the American Enterprise Institute, or as the product of a class that recognizes its duty to forget the violence of its foundation.

The thorough marginalization of those voices on the right who have refused to embrace Trumpand see him as out of step with conservative traditionis indicative of the current orientation of the movement. Most of the writers who contributed to National Reviews February 2016 Never Trump issue have become defenders of the president. Those like William Kristol, Jonah Goldberg, Charlie Sykes, and Jennifer Rubin who remain opposed are relegated to the sidelines of conservatism, viewed with suspicion by their former comrades. They wield little if any influence over the direction of the GOP and are resigned to begging the Democrats to pick a sufficiently moderate nominee for them to support in 2020.

The contributors to this section seek instead to recover the connections between conservative history and Trump, along with the seemingly novel formations emerging on the right. In his essay, Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins offers an illuminating reappraisal of the evangelical questionhow did a religious community self-defined by puritanical virtue embrace a figure, in Trump, of pure vice and evident godlessness?by unearthing the white nationalism, Christian chauvinism, and American exceptionalism endemic to evangelicalism from its founding. Steinmetz-Jenkins confounds the recent effort by evangelical leaders to quarantine their doctrinal beliefs from the political adventurism of the rank-and-file; religious doctrine and secular politics are entangled, mutually constituting the political theology of evangelicalism.

This meld of faith and politics is evident in our forum of formerly conservative writers explaining why they left the right. Christian fundamentalisms of various flavors play a role in the upbringing and early politics of Matthew Sitman (co-editor of this section), Sarah Jones, Maximillian Alvarez, and Steinmetz-Jenkins. All found themselves mostly bypassing centrist liberalism as they moved from left to right, searching for a politics that repudiated the Iraq War and that took seriously the experience of economic precarity.

Other conservative intellectuals have sought to revive conservatism in order to appeal to the working class. In March 2019, a manifesto entitled Against the Dead Consensus was published by First Things, a redoubt of the Christian right that once provided the intellectual sustenance of George W. Bushs evangelical extremism. While stopping short of endorsing the president himself, the authors of the manifesto wrote that the Trump phenomenon has opened up space in which to pose these questions anew, asserting that any attempt to revive the failed conservative consensus that preceded Trump would be misguided and harmful to the right. In its place, they support a muscular faith-based politics, support for an idealized American worker, and anti-immigrant nationalism. They reject a pernicious individualism that they associate with the market fundamentalism of the right, the lefts embrace of transgender and abortion rights, and the pornographization of daily life in popular culture.

This post-liberal battle cry has found an unlikely champion in Harvard Law professor Adrian Vermeule, a respected and influential scholar who has become the countrys foremost advocate of integralismthe idea that the political priorities of the state should be subordinated to the moral aims of the Catholic Church. In a bracing essay, James Chappel finds the roots of Vermeules theocratic illiberalism, counterintuitively, in the technocratic jurisprudence he has elaborated elsewhere with the moderately liberal Cass Sunstein. If the administrative state can be used to nudge (in Sunsteins phrase) individuals toward optimal economic and public health outcomes, why couldnt agencies staffed by integralists nudge the public toward appropriate moral behavior?

Ross Douthat is known for translating these internecine conservative debates into terms that liberal New York Times readers can understand. In an interview with Sitman and Sam Adler-Bell, we press Douthat to explain how his own conservatism fits within the currents of post-liberalism, populism, and nationalism roiling the right, and whether a Trumpism without Trump is possible. Douthatlong an advocate of pairing economic populism with social conservatismoffers perhaps too sanguine an account of how a post-fusionist GOP might rebuild itself after Trump, glossing over some real disagreements about the best way to imagine the national community. Our dialogue also draws out some of the overlap between left and right critiques of individualism, posing the question of whether a social democratic president like Bernie Sanders might offer a different answer to the crisis of liberalism than Trump has.

Kirsten Weld concludes the section by widening our historical and geographic aperture to examine the ascendant Latin American right and its origins in the continents postcolonial histories. Her essay reminds us to look well beyond the twentieth century for answers to our contemporary predicaments. The racial, religious, and gendered hierarchies that conservatives across the globe seek to reconstitute and fortify are, ultimately, the inheritance of empire. And the task for the international left, as ever, is to eradicate the vestiges of colonialism and slavery from the structures of our societies.

Conservatism is hardly dead, and it may never die. The beneficiaries of existing social and economic hierarchies will always fight to maintain them against egalitarian movements for change. So too will the conservative longing for a lost or threatened sense of security, certainty, and rootedness serve as a powerful framework for opposing the imaginative promises of the egalitarian left.

But the certainty of resistance only raises our obligation to fightand to know our enemy.

Sam Adler-Bell is a freelance writer in New York City and co-host of Know Your Enemy, a podcast sponsored by Dissent.

Matthew Sitman is associate editor of Commonweal, a frequent contributor to Dissent, and co-host of Know Your Enemy.

Lauren Stokes is an assistant professor of history at Northwestern University, where she teaches German history and writes about the politics of migration and gender.

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The Once and Future Right - Dissent

THIS month sees the return of a day designed to combat isolation, even more important during the coronavirus lockdown.

National Cup of Tea Day is on April 21 and is the fifth anniversary of the initiative and this year, as a result of the current pandemic, will be moving to a virtual platform, aiming to host Britains biggest virtual tea party via Facebook on April 21.

National Tea Day 2020 has created a pledge scheme to ensure that no one is left out, and every 10 donated will go towards providing par-tea packs to NHS trusts including tea, cakes, biscuits, bunting and balloons. Donations will also provide 4 to Mind, which helps those suffering from isolation and loneliness.

Diaz Ayub, National Tea Day founder, said: Your generous pledges will help us provide care homes and NHS hospitals with more than 10,000 party packs and make a difference to many more through our charity partnership with Mind.

Go here to read the rest:
National Cup of Tea Day hoping to set up country's biggest virtual tea party - Worcester News

The Monday Merch Meeting is now in session, and we have a lot to catch up on! Grab your morning beverage of choice, lock yourself in a childless room, and lets get started.

On Sunday, April 12th, shopdisney.com released their exclusive Limited Edition Park Pins for Easter online and they are so cute, I cant even. The Walt Disney World version features a stained-glass-style Cinderella Castle and the Disneyland version the same style of Sleeping Beauty Castle. Both are encased within a beautifully decorated golden egg for $17.99 each.

Last week we saw the introduction of the Class of 2020 Bangle from Alex and Ani, however, this weeks line up includes these adorable Class of 2020 Mickey Ears ($29.99) complete with sequined ears, graduation cap, and tassel. I want them, and I dont even know anyone graduating from anywhere this year.

The Mickey Mouse Ear Hat Graduation Cap for Adults 2020 is $27.99 and would make a great gift for anyone missing their graduation ceremony due to the current isolation restrictions. Both are available from ShopDisney.com now.

If you are a secret fan of the Goofy characters, this week, D23 celebrated the 25th Anniversary of A Goofy Movie with a recap on available Goofy merchandise, along with a new limited-release pin from the movie.

Do you love the nostalgia of the Disney Princess classics? This faux-leather mini backpack from Loungefly ($80), might just be perfect for you. Its got that retro feel with vintage-style poster art from Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, and Cinderella.

You all know I love a Disney dress. I dont know what it is about them, but I want them all, and I want them now. Well, be still my beating heart, Disney has released their new summery Flamingo Halter Dress ($128), with hot pink waist sash. Team it up with the new Aloha Shirt ($59.99), and the Mickey Mouse Pineapple Mini Backpack by Loungefly ($75), and you will be unstoppable when it comes to bringing in those summer good-time vibes.

Everyone loves a bit of color, especially when celebrating their favorite Disney park. This week, ShopDisney.com introduced the following styles in both Disneyland and Walt Disney World styles. This apparel collection includes the Neon Lime T-Shirt for Adults ($24.99), Neon Blue Spirit Jersey for Adults ($69.99), Yellow Spirit Jersey for Kids ($49.99) and the Dip Dye Spirit Jersey ($69.99).

Ready to add in some accessories? Of course, Disney has you covered. You can add to your neon look with a Neon Lime Belt Bag ($29.99), Neon Visor Baseball Cap for Adults ($24.99), Neon Yellow Mickey-shaped Crocs ($49.99), Pool Ears Headband ($29.99), Mickey Mouse Icon Watermelon Belt Bag ($29.99), and my personal favorite, the Disney Parks Rain Jacket for Women ($54.99).

If you are the sort of person that needs a new Vinyl character for every occasion, match your new look with the Mickey Mouse Neon Vinyl Figure by Jerrod Maruyama Special Edition, which retails online for $29.99.

With the Disney parks currently closed due to the virus-that-shall-not-be-named, Disney Parks Pin Trading limited edition pins are temporarily available exclusively online at ShopDisney.com, and weve found the best ones starting with the Limited Edition Disneyland and Walt Disney World Star Wars Pins ranging from $17.99 for the smaller ones and $54.99 for the Jumbo BB8 or Jumbo R2-D2 (not pictured) that actually open up!

Weve also seen the release of exciting new individual pins like the Donald Duck Pin ($9.99), Minnie Mouse Cheerleading Pin ($9.99), Ludwig Von Drake Pin Doctors Day 2020 Disneyland ($17.99), as well as Limited-Release Sets like the Monsters University Insignia Pin Set ($27.99) and the Limited Edition Minnie Mouse: The Main Attraction Pin Set Mad Tea Party ($19.99) that we first saw back in March.

Youre at home and planning your epic return to the Disney parks. Making notes of all of those things you promised yourself you wont miss out on next time, and wondering how to mark the occasion with a little extra flair. Ive got what you need. Its bright, its sparkling, it has a bow and a unicorn horn, as well as an organza train of awesomeness. Its all-around extra.

Its the Minnie Mouse Unicorn Sequined Ear Headband ($29.99) now available on shopdisney.com ready to make all of your dreams come true. Ta da!

If there is one thing I have come to appreciate over these last few weeks at home, it is the importance of finding a way to feel good and happy while living in sweatpants and sweaters. That was when I found this new Winnie the Pooh Pullover ($42.99), that comes in these pretty pastel colors that just make me happy.

Want to expand on that happy-at-home feeling that Disney merchandise gives you? Have a look at these new additions to the Forever Disney Collection from Oh My Disney. The new line up includes Winnie the Pooh Pencil Set and Pencil Holder ($16.99), Winnie The Pooh Sleep Set ($29.99), Winnie The Pooh Tumbler ($16.00), Travel Blanket ($24.99), Chip n; Dale Hooded Jacket ($44.99), and Winnie the Pooh Plush Fashion Bag ($49.99).

That does it for this weeks Monday Merch Meeting. Nows the time to start clicking and find all these incredible new products before they sell out starting with that dress!

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The Monday Merch Meeting Week of April 13th - The DIS