GDP growth slowed to a 1.6% rate in the first quarter, well below expectations​

PUBLISHED THU, APR 25 20248:31 AM EDTUPDATED 3 HOURS AGO

Jeff Cox@JEFF.COX.7528@JEFFCOXCNBCCOM
WATCH LIVE
KEY POINTS

• Gross domestic product, a broad measure of goods and services produced in the January-through-March period, increased at a 1.6% annualized pace, below the 2.4% estimate.
• The personal consumption expenditures price index, a key inflation variable for the Federal Reserve, rose at a 3.4% annualized pace for the quarter, its biggest gain in a year.
• Consumer spending increased 2.5% in the period, down from a 3.3% gain in the fourth quarter and below the 3% Wall Street estimate.

Right here:

Sings a 120MM extension in Motor City. 77MM guaranteed. Attaboy, ARSB.

Fight on!

From Max Tuerk's family..

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Truth in 5 minutes​

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The Trump indictment is Bragg’s version of ‘stop the steal’ regarding the 2016 election.​

You just didn’t know it was going to be about 2016, not 2020, and that the election denier is Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg, not Trump.

That is the untold story about the trial that starts in earnest in New York on Monday, with opening statements expected, followed by witness testimony.

We have spent much time on the manifold flaws in Bragg’s prosecution, including:

• A business-records-falsification indictment against Trump that Bragg, the paragon progressive prosecutor, would bring against no one but a political enemy.
• The impropriety that Bragg, a state prosecutor, is purporting to enforce federal campaign law — without a peep of protest from the collusive Biden Justice Department, naturally — in a matter that both DOJ and the Federal Election Commission (the federal agencies with actual jurisdiction over the matter) decided not to pursue against Trump.
• The fact that Bragg is accomplishing this by making up his own version of what federal law requires, again, without any pushback from the feds — although you can only imagine the howling we’d be hearing if this were being done to a Democrat.
• And the fact that this criminal case, mirroring New York attorney general Letitia James’s outrageous civil fraud case against Trump, involves an alleged fraud scheme in which the state can prove no fraud victims — i.e., Trump is charged with falsifying his records with fraudulent intent, but the state is not claiming that anything or anyone, including the state itself, lost a penny.

Any one of these infirmities — and I’ve just hit the main ones — should be enough to explode Bragg’s prosecution, to say nothing of all of them in concert. But in focusing on the trees, we miss the forest: Alvin Bragg is an election denier.

That’s what this case is about. It is an elected progressive Democratic district attorney’s version of “stop the steal” — the fraud that Democrats claim leaves “our democracy” hanging by a thread. Don’t take my word for it. Just read the Statement of Facts, so-called, that Bragg published in conjunction with the indictment.

Chris Hawkins hammered with 4 year show cause penalty…

https://www.cbssports.com/college-f...e-penalty-for-ncaa-recruiting-violations/amp/

Was joined by the LA Times' Ryan Kartje for an all-encompassing assessment on what we learned (and didn't learn) this spring. I'll aim to get that up tomorrow.

I had mentioned earlier that Anthony Ruta was likely to follow Muss from Arkansas, along with his son Michael Musselman.

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No official visit set yet, however

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Here ya go ...

In summation, they really need to find a true point guard, look like they'll be undersized in the Big Ten but have plenty of shooting and scoring capability. I'd expect this to be a very up-tempo team.

heard he entered the portal. Rumors he may follow coach Lynn?

One thing about the argument really puzzled me: why Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar insisted upon distinguishing January 6 from other types of obstructive protests. I understand what, legally, she thought this would accomplish — but her approach runs the risk of being a disastrous misreading of the justices, and one that may have been driven more by the demands of her client than by a sound strategy for winning the case.

‘Otherwise’

The core question before the Court in Fischer is whether 18 U.S.C. Section 1512(c)(2) makes it a crime to obstruct or impede a proceeding before Congress by preventing Congress from meeting. Here’s Section 1512(c), with italics added:

(c) Whoever corruptly—

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(1) alters, destroys, mutilates, or conceals a record, document, or other object, or attempts to do so, with the intent to impair the object’s integrity or availability for use in an official proceeding; or

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(2) otherwise obstructs, influences, or impedes any official proceeding, or attempts to do so,
shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both.

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The statute was written in 2002 in response to the Enron scandal, which involved the company’s auditors at Arthur Anderson destroying records. It aimed largely to close perceived loopholes in federal obstruction-of-justice laws by strengthening the rules against document destruction in court cases and investigations. The “official proceeding” language in both (c)(1) and (c)(2), however, is broad enough that it explicitly covers proceedings before Congress.

Most everyone agrees that the language of (c)(2), if you read it by itself, is broad enough to cover a mob that obstructs and impedes a proceeding by causing it to be delayed or rescheduled. The lawyers for Fischer and other January 6 defendants, however, argue that if you read the whole statute, it’s supposed to cover a list of different ways to mess with the evidence in a proceeding, rather than taking a sharp turn between (c)(1) discussing documents and records to (c)(2) saying “or anything else that gets in the way of a court or Congress doing its business.”

The Court has to decide if “otherwise” in this context means “in some other, similar way” or “in some totally other way.” It’s a close call involving a lot of attention to the tools that courts use to make sense of the language of statutes. It has consequences not only for hundreds of people charged under this law for participating in breaching of the Capitol that day, but also for Donald Trump, who has been charged under Section 1512(c)(2) on a related but different theory.

The Law Is the Law

New contributor Aaron Heisen has his take on Jayden Maiava's spring game performance: