[guest post by Dana]

Those Democrats love them some dead babies!

This week, Bernie Sanders went on record as wholeheartedly engaging in the idea of abortion as a means of population control. At the climate change town hall, there was this exchange with an audience member:

Martha Readyoff: Good evening. Human population growth has more than doubled in the past 50 years. The planet cannot sustain this growth. I realize this is a poisonous topic for politicians, but it’s crucial to face. Empowering women and educating everyone on the need to curb population growth seems a reasonable campaign to enact. Would you be courageous enough to discuss this issue and make it a key feature of a plan to address climate catastrophe?

Sanders: Well, Martha, the answer is yes. And the answer has everything to do with the fact that women in the United States of America, by the way, have a right to control their own bodies and make reproductive decisions.

And the Mexico City agreement, which denies American aid to those organizations around the world that are — that allow women to have abortions or even get involved in birth control, to me is totally absurd. So I think, especially in poor countries around the world where women do not necessarily want to have large numbers of babies, and where they can have the opportunity through birth control to control the number of kids they have, it’s something I very, very strongly support.

(Note: Mexico City only excludes abortion advocacy groups from family-planning funding, in line with federal laws that ban the funding of abortion as a method of family planning. In plainer terms, the Mexico City policy does not prevent funds from going to birth control and other non-abortion means of family planning.)

There’s nothing quite like a powerful white male suggesting how poor women of color throughout the world should go about their reproductive business, am I right?? But exceptions are allowed when it’s the earth’s very survival we are talking about… Clearly Sanders believes in the wider utilitarianism of abortion: it would save the planet from overpopulation, and it would allow poor women everywhere to have fewer births. Win-win. Save the Earth: One Dead Baby At A Time! – what a campaign slogan.

Obianuju Ekeocha, a popular African pro-life activist, had this to say about Sanders’comments:

With upcoming US election, I’m see that a Democrat president will mean tyrannical American funded population control & slaughter of Africa’s unborn babies.

And, as if to underscore his annoyance at these overpopulation buggers who threaten the very survival of the earth, here’s Sanders telling a baby to pipe down:

.@BernieSanders tells a crying baby to "keep that down a little bit." pic.twitter.com/jc2g5eZFgg

— Washington Examiner (@dcexaminer) September 4, 2019

(Cross-posted at The Jury Talks Back.)

–Dana

[guest post JVW]

Faced with ongoing red ink and the inability to find a new left-wing sugar daddy, er, corporate buyer, the progressive website ThinkProgress will be closed down today according to an announcement from the Center for American Progress, its current owner. The CAP, which lest we forget is a policy research center with close ties to the Clinton Crime Family, as told The Daily Beast that the site will henceforth be used as a vehicle for disseminating the left-wing opinions of CAP researchers, rather than disseminating the left-wing opinions of journalists.

ThinkProgress launched in 2005, and almost since then this blog has chronicled some of their partisan lies, tendency to cry wolf, odd choice of victims, outright garbage, double-standards, and woke nonsense that they have spread among their gullible readers. ThinkProgress has been the launching pad for Faiz Shakir, currently Bernard Sanders’ campaign manager; Alyssa Rosenberg and Andrea Peterson, last seen slinging nonsense for The Washington Post; and the increasingly tiresome Vox juiceboxer Matthew Yglesias. Their slanted reporting was received favorably by and often mindlessly repeated in mainstream media outlets, even after it became clear that Legum and CAP staffers were oftentimes little more than thinly-disguised political operatives rather than the progressive policy wonks they desperately tried to portray themselves as. Considering the fact that today’s media is now almost completely bifurcated between MAGA and Resistance, it would seem that ThinkProgress was no longer needed in these increasingly dumb times.

– JVW

Tiana Lowe at the Washington Examiner:

On [its] face, the August jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics doesn’t look too bad for the economy. The economy added 130,000 jobs, missing the 150,000 mark expected by economists. Unemployment is steady at an excellent 3.7%. But buried in the numbers are key details that indicate a fragile economy.

For one thing, 25,000 of those 130,000 jobs are temporary ones created by the government for the sole purpose of the 2020 census. For another, the BLS revised downward the reported employment gains in the already mediocre June and July jobs reports by a cumulative 20,000 jobs. Still, the average jobs gains in the past three months are 156,000 per month, meaning that August constituted a slight but sure drop.

There’s some very good news below the surface, to be sure. The most important metric indicates that while industry may be spooked by President Trump’s trade war, we’re likely not on the cusp of a recession in earnest. The BLS found that annual wage growth has increased by 3.2%, beating expectations, and significantly, the hours worked by all employees and manufacturing workers alike marginally increased.

The New York Times echoes the message that the numbers are mixed:

Paul Ashworth, chief United States economist at Capital Economics, said the headline number in August was “flattered” by the big increase in census hiring. “But even allowing for that, there has been a clear slowdown in trend employment growth, with the three-month and six-month averages both at around 150,000 now, down from about 230,000 a year ago,” he said.

Despite the middling headline number, there were positive signs elsewhere in the report. The labor force participation rate rose to 63.2 percent, from 63 percent, suggesting that workers who had been on the sidelines are gradually being lured back into the labor market. Average hourly earnings increased by 0.4 percent, which is more than analysts had expected. And the length of the average workweek increased after falling in July.

Tariffs are not good. They can’t possibly help an economy. I’m glad there are no signs of recession at this point. We’ll see how long that remains true.

[Cross-posted at The Jury Talks Back.]