Jim Bush

Husband, father, grandpa. Striving to be resilient amidst the new normal.

[Jim Bush @Jim_Bush]

@HunterBiden Very much with you on all your points – but one: “go birds”. Lions fan here. Keep up the great tweets!

[Jim Bush @Jim_Bush]

Priceless

[Republicans against Trump @RpsAgainstTrump]

Ted Cruz, 10 years ago today:

“I want to tell you what I really think of Donald Trump. This man is a pathological liar...He lies practically every word that comes out of his mouth…The man cannot tell the truth, but he combines it with being a narcissist at a level I don't think this country has ever seen”

[Jim Bush @Jim_Bush]

@Lynn_Henning One more really depressing story.

[Jim Bush @Jim_Bush]

Thank you @Lynn_Henning for taking on this tiresome debate, so factually and effectively. Your post and your counters to the many inane relies is a comprehensive primer for rebutting all the BS out there questioning election integrity. I urge everyone to read the entire thread.

[Lynn Henning @Lynn_Henning]

There is nothing wrong with our voting system. There is nothing wrong with mail-in votes. Nothing wrong, or inaccurate, with any voting procedure in any state. All secure and safeguarded. What's wrong is a madman's devotion to a lie, and the ongoing price American democracy pays.

[Gandalv @Microinteracti1]

Robert Mueller died last night.

He was 81 years old. He had a wife who loved him for sixty years. He had two daughters, one of whom he met for the first time in Hawaii, in 1969, on a few hours of military leave, before he got back on the plane and returned to Vietnam. He had grandchildren. He had a faith he practiced quietly, without performance. He had, in the way of men who have seen real things and survived them, a quality that is increasingly rare and increasingly mocked in the country he spent his life serving.

He had integrity.

And tonight the President of the United States said good!

I have been sitting with that word for hours now. Good. One syllable. The thing you say when the coffee is hot or the traffic is moving. The thing a man who has never had to bury anyone, never had to sit in the specific silence of a room where someone is newly absent, reaches for when he wants the world to know he is satisfied. Good. The daughters are crying and the wife is alone in the house and good.

I want to speak directly to the Americans reading this. Not the political Americans. Just the human ones. The ones who have lost a father. The ones who know what it is to be in that first hour, when you keep forgetting and then remembering again, when ordinary objects become unbearable, when the world outside the window seems obscene in its indifference. I want to ask you, simply, to hold that feeling for a moment, and then to understand that the man you elected looked at it and typed a single word.

Good.

This is not a country having a bad day. I need you to understand that. Countries have bad days. Elections go wrong. Leaders disappoint. Institutions bend. But there is a different thing, a rarer and more terrible thing, that happens when the moral center of a place simply gives way. Not dramatically. Not with a single catastrophic event. But quietly, in increments, until one evening a president celebrates the death of an old man whose family is still warm with grief, and enough people find it acceptable that it becomes the weather. Just the weather.

That is what is happening. That is what has happened.

The world knows. From Tokyo to Oslo, from London to Buenos Aires, people are not angry at America tonight. Anger would mean there was still something to fight for, some remaining faith to be betrayed. What I see, in the reactions from everywhere that is not here, is something older and sadder than anger. It is the look people get when they have waited a long time for someone they love to find their way back, and have finally understood that they are not coming.

America is being grieved. Past tense, almost. The idea of it. The thing it represented to people who had nothing else to believe in, who came here with everything they owned in a single bag because they had heard, somehow, across an ocean, that this was the place where decency was written into the walls. That idea is not resting. It is not suspended. It is being buried, in real time, with 7,450 likes before dinner.

And the church said nothing.

Seventy million people have decided that this man, this specific man who has cheated everyone he has ever made a promise to, who has mocked the disabled and the dead and the grieving, who celebrated tonight while a family wept, is an instrument of God. The pastors who made that bargain did not just trade away their credibility. They traded away the thing that made them worth listening to in the first place. The cross they carry now is a costume. The faith they preach is a loyalty oath with scripture attached. When the history of American Christianity is written, this will be the chapter they skip at seminary.

Now I want to talk about the men who stand next to him.

Because this is the part that actually breaks my heart.

JD Vance is not a bad man. I have to say that, because it is true, and because the truth matters even now, especially now. Marco Rubio is not a bad man. Lindsey Graham is not a bad man. They are idiots, but not bad, as in BAD! These are men with mothers who raised them and children who love them and friends who remember who they were before all of this. They are not monsters. Monsters are simple. Monsters do not cost you anything emotionally because there is nothing in them to mourn.

These men are something more painful than monsters.

They are men who knew better, and know better still, and will get up tomorrow and do it again.

Every small compromise they made had a reason. Every moment they looked the other way had a justification that sounded, at the time, almost reasonable. And now they have arrived here, at a place where a president celebrates the death of an old man and they will find a way, on television, to say nothing that means anything, and they will go home to houses where children who carry their name are waiting, and they will say goodnight, and they will say nothing.

Their oldest friends are watching. The ones who knew Rubio when he still believed in something. Who knew Graham when he said, out loud, on the record, that this exact man would destroy the Republican Party and deserve it. Who sat next to Vance and thought here is someone worth knowing. Those friends are not angry tonight. They moved through anger a long time ago. What they feel now is the quiet, irrecoverable sadness of watching someone disappear while still being present. Of watching a person they loved choose, again and again, to become less.

That is what cowardice costs. Not the coward. The people who loved him.

And in the comments tonight, the followers celebrate. People who ten years ago brought casseroles to grieving neighbours. Who stood in the rain at gravesides and meant the words they said. Who told their children that we do not speak ill of the dead because the dead were someone's beloved. Those people are tonight typing gleeful things about a man whose daughters are not yet done crying. And they feel clean doing it. Righteous. Because somewhere along the way the thing they were given in exchange for their decency was the feeling of belonging to something, and that feeling is very hard to give up even when you can no longer remember what you gave for it.

When Trump is gone, they will still be here.

Standing in the silence where the noise used to be. Without the permission the crowd gave them. Without the pastor who told them their cruelty was holy. They will be alone with what they said and what they cheered and what they chose to become, and there will be no one left to tell them it was righteous.

That morning is coming.

Robert Mueller flew across the Pacific on military leave to hold his newborn daughter for a few hours before returning to the war. He came home. He buried his dead with honour. He served presidents of both parties because he understood that the institution was larger than any one man. He told his grandchildren that a lie is the worst thing a person can do, that a reputation once lost cannot be recovered, and he lived that, every day, in the quiet and unglamorous way of people who actually believe what they say.

He was the kind of American the world used to point to when it needed to believe the story was true.

He died last night. His wife is alone in their house in Georgetown. His daughters are learning what the world is without him in it. And somewhere in the particular hush that falls over a family in the first hours of loss, the most powerful man and the biggest loser on earth sent a message to say he was glad.

The world that loved what America was supposed to be is grieving tonight. Not for Robert Mueller only. For the country that produced him and then became this. For the distance between what was promised and what was delivered. For the suspicion, growing quieter and more certain with each passing month, that the America people believed in was always partly a story, and the story is over now, and there is nothing yet to replace it.

That is all it needed to be.

A man died. His family is broken open with grief.

That is all it needed to be.

Instead the President said good.

And the country that once stood for something looked away 🇺🇸

Gandalv / @Microinteracti1

[Diane Swonk @DianeSwonk]

I have been an economists for a very long time. I have always been a little surprised by how some people will talk about recession as a necessary reset or a “cleans.”

There is this “let them eat cake” kind of mentality that emerges that somehow a recession is like a fast for a day and healthy. Recessions are painful, especially when accompanied by inflation.

I became an economist as a fluke - it was the only class open when I registered & it sounded interesting. I loved the math and the intuitive study of collective human behavior. It gave me an understanding for the train wreck of an economy I experienced growing up in the modest suburbs of Detroit as a kid.

My best friend’s dad died of cancer when I we were in high school. She stopped bringing lunch to school - there was no money for food. Her family dug up their backyard to plant a garden & put food on the table. Her yard was bigger than the postage stamp of my own, but the ground was toxic. Many of her siblings died of cancer very young.

I still remember the smell of baked bread - it was the only bread they could afford. My mom, who was on her own tight budget, gave me money to buy her lunch each day.

Stagflation and recession were brutal. The scarring effects of all those years ago linger. Families broke down & vicious cycles of poverty emerged in towns that became known as the Rust Belt for their rusting factories.

Recessions are ugly, unpredictable and leave a scar. Those accompanied by inflation are worse.

The economy is not a single body that can be fit from a “cleans,” as I have so often heard in my career. It is a complex system that has increasingly seen inequality worsen in the wake of recessions.

Income inequality hit a low as measured by the Gini coefficient in 1979 in the US. We have been seeing a rise in inequality ever since, with more sidelined for long periods after recessions, with perhaps the brief surge in hiring we saw in the wake of the pandemic. That is over.

We are already flirting with a payroll recession, which is showing up as losses in payroll employment. I would like to believe that rate cuts could cure what ails us, but I fear what we are enduring is systemic. Lower interest rates cannot spur hiring with firms dealing with so much uncertainty.

That means the Fed should focus more on inflation. I hate to think of what a recession to derail the inflation we are enduring would look like, although I think about it a lot. It is not pretty.

The economy is about people’s lives and livelihoods. It is what you deal with when you walk in your front door if you have one to walk through. It is worrying about feeding and sheltering your kids. It is about all the choices we make every day.

It is a living organism that does not do better when pain is broader. I will never say a recession is good. Recessions are hard.

We may have to suffer one to derail inflation - I hope not but worry that may end up being the case. That is a horrible place to be.

Food for thought. I have seen talking heads talk about a recession with a cavalier attitude. I find that hard to witness.

The tails risks of recessions are large. They hurt people.

Break bread not ties. Empathy is a gift to few share. Time to fill our cups with it.

[Jim Bush @Jim_Bush]

@jasonbenetti I’m pretty sure it’s pronounced DEM’ uh tur

[Jim Bush @Jim_Bush]

@MalloryMcMorrow You would be great in the Senate!

[Chris Murphy 🟧 @ChrisMurphyCT]

I’ve had my team cataloguing Trump’s corruption campaign since the start. Here’s the chart I used in my Senate floor speech laying out the stunning graft from just the first 6 weeks of his presidency.

[Jim Bush @Jim_Bush]

@NewsCentralCNN please, whenever you have a guest who says the national debt is our greatest, an existential problem, please ask them how they can favor further tax cuts for the wealthy. Please. Re: the congressman Briana just interviewed.

[Mike Nellis @MikeNellis]

Musk has no idea what he’s doing.

He paid some kid to play video games for him, and now he’s paying some kids to cut government spending for him too.

Musk admitted today that he didn’t even know these kids are illegally cutting things like cancer research.

The guy is a fraud.

[Jim Bush @Jim_Bush]

@PamelaBrownCNN you left out the most important question for that Georgia congressman: given his concern about the deficit, shouldn’t billionaires pay more in taxes? So he’d like to eliminate school lunches to support further cuts for the richest among us? This is the real issue.

[Jim Bush @Jim_Bush]

@jeffrosenfeld5 @CNN Exactly.

[Jim Bush @Jim_Bush]

CNN has so many great journalists, and yet somehow Don Lemon is on #cnnthismorning. It’s like chalk scraping across a blackboard to listen to him do an interview. He’s clueless. I mute him or change the channel. So many alternative anchors available. Victor Blackwell maybe?

[Jim Bush @Jim_Bush]

@MrWells2011 @CNNPR @jimsciutto @JohnBerman @KateBolduan @sarasidnerCNN @brikeilarcnn @Boris_Sanchez @AlisynCamerota I hope she’s not just filling in at 10 pm and then gets cast aside entirely. The announcement didn’t say she’d anchor that hour, just “focus” on it. She’s one of their best.

[Jim Bush @Jim_Bush]

@pennyblab @CNNPR @JohnBerman @KateBolduan @sarasidnerCNN @brikeilarcnn @Boris_Sanchez @jimsciutto @CNN @VictorBlackwell I especially don’t get that move either.

[Jim Bush @Jim_Bush]

@Acyn You go, Mr. Secretary! Superb response.

[Jim Bush @Jim_Bush]

@stabenow Thank you for your long and exceptional service. I remember all the way back when you were on the Ingham County board, and I lived around the corner from you on Victor and was working at the state Capitol. Been gone from Lansing a long time, but always was happy to vote for you.

[Jim Bush @Jim_Bush]

@charles_gaba Had the very same thought. Kinda surprising there was that much "future think" amidst all the chaos.

[Jim Bush @Jim_Bush]

@MariManoogian Or lying.