MINNEAPOLIS—Tom Homan,
the White House border czar, arrived here with a series of demands for
Minnesota’s Democratic leaders. Topping the list: an agreement from them
to turn over more immigrants from the state’s prisons and jails, people
familiar with the matter said. ... Walz
has said the premise of the demand is false. “They’re taking credit for
people that we’ve had in jail for a long time,” he told reporters
Sunday. “We always hand them over.”
Oh, so that's why Border Patrol was in front of Glam Doll Donuts on Saturday. They were just looking for inmates.
... It is not merely that his high-wire act supports and intensifies the
drama and excitement that made him the dominant figure in American and
then global politics for the past decade. It is also that his ability,
real or perceived, to change the course of world politics on a whim
increases his leverage at home and abroad. When a man can make war or
peace, promote or block trade, make you rich or freeze you out, other
people do what they can to stay on his good side. ...
And you don't put protective tariffs on trade when you have nothing to protect.
“We’re
in charge,” he told reporters. “We need total access. We need access to
the oil and to other things in their country that allow us to rebuild
their country.”
Then: "The U.S. properly worked for China's inclusion".
Now: "An era of folly began in the new century. Leaders of both political parties supported China's entry into the World Trade Organization".
I can't wait for the Wall Street Journal to admit that America's decline actually began under Reagan forty years ago, not twenty-five, because at this rate I'll be dead before they do.
... On the eve of the 1976 election, President Gerald Ford wanted to hold a motorcade parade in Grand Rapids, where he grew up ... filled with boarded-up buildings ... a downtrodden place ...
America
on the eve of 2026 feels an awful lot like Grand Rapids in 1976.
There’s a palpable sense that the country is struggling, if not starting
to fail. It isn’t only the sorry state of big cities. It’s the state of
the nation’s schools as kids fall behind in basic math and reading.
It’s the state of the body politic as division and violence spread. It’s
the sorry feeling that we’re a nation without a rudder, drifting toward
inevitable decline. According to Pew Research, about half of Americans
say the U.S. can’t solve many of its important problems. ...
So fast forward to today where we get another chart crime, this one for the consumer price index which omits the month of October, and another dose of skepticism about the Trump Regime's honesty about government data.
They warned us they would do this, too, even though during the first Trump Regime they collected both the employment and the inflation data during the 2018-2019 government shutdown.
This is all deliberate obfuscation.
... Because the October CPI was canceled, Thursday’s report did not have
all the usual data points of a typical CPI release. The BLS said it was
unable to retroactively collect the October data, but did use some
“nonsurvey data sources” to make the index calculations.
Economists
may be hesitant to read too much into this report as the start of a
downward trend in inflation because of the lack of October comparison
data in the release. ...
... The
effort to keep up with higher prices feels relentless to Teri Kopp, who
lives in Southbury, Conn., and works as an administrator at a
synagogue. “I’m tired,” she said.
Kopp
and her husband Bill, an HVAC technician, earn a combined $115,000 a
year. They often sit in the dark with only strings of LED lights on to
save on electric costs. She is considering painting rocks to send to
friends as Christmas gifts. Their biggest vacation this year, a road
trip to Maine, was mostly covered by cash back from a shopping-rewards
program.
Kopp,
59 years old, doesn’t see any way to quickly pay off the $15,000 in
credit-card debt the family took on largely to cover medical bills for
knee surgeries. She also has $30,000 in debt from her daughter’s
undergraduate degree in biology, which has yet to yield any job offers
in a tough labor market for new graduates.
Kopp
voted for Trump last November in part because she wasn’t happy with how
Biden handled the economy. She approves of the job Trump is doing but
is skeptical that it will lead to any relief on costs soon. “I think
Trump has a hard nut to crack to bring all this stuff down,” she said. ...
Do the two Rachels at the Wall Street Journal who write this sob story about the middle class "buckling" realize that about half the country makes $45k or less? What about those people? Well, they don't read the Journal anyway, right?
You have to be in the 64th percentile to be like Teri and Bill, the high end of the middle 33-66%.
... Duterte was arrested in March by Philippine authorities on a warrant
issued by the ICC. He is now being held at an ICC facility in the
Netherlands.
Supporters of Duterte criticized the
administration of President Ferdinand Marcos Jr., Duterte's political
rival, for arresting and surrendering the former leader to a court whose
jurisdiction his supporters dispute. ...
I suppose it depends on a future president giving Trump up to arrest by the International Criminal Court somehow.
... The
strikes on Venezuelan narcoterror smuggling boats provide one possible
avenue. Shortly after the U.S. Navy destroyed the first such vessel, Ken Roth,
a former head of Human Rights Watch, endorsed ICC intervention. “Trump
just did what the International Criminal Court has charged former
Philippines Pres. Duterte with doing—ordering the summary execution of
alleged drug traffickers,” Mr. Roth tweeted. Venezuela is a Rome Statute
party, which in the court’s thinking gives it jurisdiction over U.S.
officials and servicemen involved in the attacks. The ICC has already
launched an investigation against a nonmember state (Israel) based on a
single boarding of a vessel flagged by a member state, so it has all the
precedents it needs.
Mr.
Trump has thus far taken an incremental approach to the ICC. He revived
a first-term executive order authorizing sanctions against the court
and applied it against four ICC officials. None of this has
significantly reduced the risk to the U.S. or led the ICC to change its
ways.
The
ICC’s supporters don’t see the existing sanctions as an “existential
threat.” The tribunal can easily ride it out by lying low until a
Democratic president lifts the sanctions, as Joe Biden
did. The court takes a long view—its prosecutors and judges have
nine-year terms, and its other staffers are part of a global deep state
who can expect to remain at their jobs indefinitely.
International
lawyers are already developing multiple lines of attack against the
administration and its officials. ...
... A
last note. If I were a fervent Trump supporter, I would worry about
that movement’s hyperemotionalism. We have written in this space that
with the rise of social media, Americans are becoming a people of
feeling and not of thinking, a people in search of sensation and not
reflection. It isn’t promising that this is increasingly true in our
political sphere. I follow on social media fixtures of the MAGA
movement. They say of each other in public what in politics 40 years ago
people said in private and when drunk. FRAUD, LIAR, GRIFTER, WHORE.
What a hothouse. Do they expect that with a nature like that they can go
into the future as a serious force and a movement that coheres? They
don’t seem to worry about it. Why not? ...
Isolationism
is essentially emotional. You’re angry at the cost in blood and
treasure of your country’s international forays and adventures and want
to withdraw from the world. Emotionalism can hold sway and dominate
politics for a time, even an era, but you can’t build anything on it. It
doesn’t last because emotions change because facts change. ...
We all know this. We don’t even know what to do with what we know. But the assassination of Charlie Kirk
feels different as an event, like a hinge point, like something that is
going to reverberate in new dark ways. It isn’t just another dreadful
thing. It carries the ominous sense that we’re at the beginning of
something bad. Michael Smerconish said on CNN Thursday afternoon that
normally after such an event the temperature goes down a little, but not
in this case, and he’s right. There are the heartbroken and the
indifferent and they are irreconcilable. X, formerly Twitter, was from
the moment of the shooting overrun with anguish and rage: It’s on now. Bluesky, where supposedly gentler folk fled Elon Musk, was gleefully violent: Too bad, live by the gun, die by the gun.
But what a disaster all this is for the young. ...
No, we are not in big trouble.
We are simply in the same trouble we've always been in, but that doesn't sell newspapers or drive clicks.
But surrendering to hysteria will misguide us, as surely as Tyler Robinson's feelings misguided him when he pulled that trigger, allegedly.
Didn't the country just get over surrendering its mind to its feelings?
Or are we, left, right, and in between, going to do this all over again?
Fear of death made 270 million Americans trust a completely novel vaccine in 2021, only for over 20 million new infections in early 2022 to rip the mask off the whole thing.
We found out that we were not going to die.
We found out that the experts oversold the threat and the vaccine, ka-ching ka-ching, that after taking it "the virus didn't stop with me". We got sick anyway, and we continued to spread it. The adults knew that the virus was mutating to spread at the cost of its deadliness, but the adults were not in charge. We ended up learning the hard way.
The virus of violence is endemic to the world. Woke is a counterfeit. Summer 2020 was not a summer of love. Christianity is Uberwoke and explains that hate lives in us all.
The spectrum of hate's evidence is wide: By intentional homicide rate, Canada ranks 111th in the world in 2023. Mexico ranks 18th, and the United States ranks 66th.
But in 1975 the intentional homicide rate in the United States was 9.6 per 100,000. 9.6 is 43rd in 2023, Iraq-like. In 2023 the United States is 5.8. The rate is down 40%.
We have become far less violent, not more, in the last fifty years, even as religious faith supposedly has declined.
Maybe we should rethink that. Or maybe for starters we should just think.
Brethren,benotchildrenin understanding:howbeitin malicebe ye children,butin understandingbemen.
... Twelfth-graders’ average math score was the worst since the current test began in 2005, and reading was below any point since that assessment started in 1992. The share of 12th-graders who were proficient slid by 2 percentage points between 2019 and 2024—to 35% in reading and 22% in math. ...
This isn’t socialism, in which the state owns the means of production. It is more like state capitalism, a hybrid between socialism and capitalism in which the state guides the decisions of nominally private enterprises.
China calls its hybrid “socialism with Chinese characteristics.” The U.S. hasn’t gone as far as China or even milder practitioners of state capitalism such as Russia, Brazil and, at times, France. So call this variant “state capitalism with American characteristics.” It is still a sea change from the free market ethos the U.S. once embodied.
We wouldn’t be dabbling with state capitalism if not for the public’s and both parties’ belief that free-market capitalism wasn’t working. That system encouraged profit-maximizing CEOs to move production abroad. The result was a shrunken manufacturing workforce, dependence on China for vital products such as critical minerals, and underinvestment in the industries of the future such as clean energy and semiconductors.
The federal government has often waded into the corporate world. It commandeered production during World War II and, under the Defense Production Act, emergencies such as the Covid-19 pandemic. It bailed out banks and car companies during the 2007-09 financial crisis. Those, however, were temporary expedients.
Former PresidentJoe Bidenwent further, seeking to shape the actual structure of industry. His Inflation Reduction Act authorized $400 billion in clean-energy loans. The Chips and Science Act earmarked $39 billion in subsidies for domestic semiconductor manufacturing. Of that,$8.5 billion went to Intel, giving Trump leverage to demand the removal of its CEO over past ties to China. (Intel so far has refused.)
Biden officials had mulled a sovereign-wealth fund to finance strategically important but commercially risky projects such as in critical minerals, which China dominates. Last month, Trump’s Department of Defense said it would takea 15% stake in MP Materials, a miner of critical minerals.
Many in the West admire China for its ability to turbocharge growth through massive feats of infrastructure building, scientific advance and promotion of favored industries. American efforts are often bogged down amid the checks, balances and compromises of pluralistic democracy.
In his forthcoming book, “Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future,” authorDan Wangwrites: “China is an engineering state, building big at breakneck speed, in contrast to the United States’ lawyerly society, blocking everything it can, good and bad.”
To admirers, Trump’s appeal is his willingness to bulldoze those lawyerly obstacles. He has imposed tariffs on an array of countries and sectors, seizing authority that is supposed to belong to Congress. He extracted $1.5 trillion in investment pledges from Japan, the European Union and South Korea that he claims he will personally direct, though no legal mechanism for doing so appears to exist. (Those pledges are already in dispute.)
There are reasons state capitalism never caught on before. The state can’t allocate capital more efficiently than private markets. Distortions, waste and cronyism typically follow. Russia, Brazil and France have grown much more slowly than the U.S.
Chinese state capitalism isn’t the success story it seems.Barry Naughtonof the University of California, San Diego has documented howChina’s rapid growth since 1979has come from market sources, not the state. As Chinese leaderXi Jinpinghas reimposed state control, growth has slowed. China is awash with savings, but the state wastes much of it. From steel to vehicles, excess capacity leads to plummeting prices and profits.
State capitalism is an all-of-society affair in China, directed from Beijing via millions of cadres in local governments and company boardrooms. In the U.S., it consists largely of Oval Office announcements lacking any policy or institutional framework. “The core characteristic of China’s state capitalism is discipline, and Trump is the complete opposite of that,” Wang said in an interview.
State capitalism is a means of political, not just economic, control. Xi ruthlessly deploys economic levers to crush any challenge to party primacy. In 2020,Alibabaco-founderJack Ma, arguably the country’s most famous business leader, criticized Chinese regulators for stifling financial innovation. Retaliation was swift. Regulatorscanceled the initial public offeringof Ma’s financial company, Ant Group, and eventuallyfined it $2.8 billionfor anticompetitive behavior. Ma briefly disappeared from public view.
Trump has similarly deployed executive orders and regulatory powers against media companies, banks, law firms and other companies he believes oppose him, while rewarding executives who align themselves with his priorities.
In Trump’s first term, CEOs routinely spoke out when they disagreed with his policies such as on immigration and trade. Now, they shower him with donations and praise, or are mostly silent.
Trump is also seeking political control over agencies that have long operated at arm’s length from the White House, such as the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Federal Reserve. That, too, has echoes of China where the bureaucracy is fully subordinate to the ruling party.
Trump has long admired the control Xi exercises over his country, but there are, in theory, limits to how far he can emulate him.
American democracy constrains the state through an independent judiciary, free speech, due process and the diffusion of power among multiple levels and branches of government. How far state capitalism ultimately displaces free-market capitalism in the U.S. depends on how well those checks and balances hold up.
I remember the days when every grocery item came with a price tag.
When those went away there was an outcry, saying shelf pricing would be manipulated to get you to buy the item at a lower displayed price but charge you more for it at the register because the price displayed was wrong.
You used to get the item for free if that happened.
Now it happens all the time, but all you get is a refund for the difference, IF YOU STAND IN LINE AT CUSTOMER SERVICE TO GET IT.
Every transaction is going to become a negotiation like we're a goddamn third world country.
... Prices can change up to 100 times a day at Reitan’s REMA 1000-branded grocery stores across Norway—and more often during holidays. The idea is to match or beat the competition with the touch of a button, says REMA 1000’s head of pricing, Partap Sandhu. “We lower the prices maybe 10 cents and then our competitors do the same, and it kind of gets to [be] a race to the bottom.”
It is a matter of time before Americans also see dynamic pricing on groceries, industry experts say. “All one has to do is visit the Netherlands or Norway,” says Ioannis Stamatopoulos, an associate professor who studies retail technology at the University of Texas at Austin’s business school. “That’s a window to the future.”
The prospect has raised alarms among U.S. lawmakersand consumerswho fear electronic shelf labels in grocery stores will open the way for prices to go up as well as down—and even unleash surge pricing in the aisles. ...
As digital labels spread to U.S. stores, American consumers will likely see price changes as they shop in the future, says David Bellinger, a senior analyst at Mizuho Financial Group who covers retailers. He expects the changes will be infrequent or outside of store hours to avoid confusing or upsetting shoppers, and says they should primarily only go down: “Up would probably cause a lot of problems.” ...
A couple dozen provisions have been removed. No ruling yet on the biggest one, which could mean $3.7 trillion in fake ‘savings.’
The estimate of the Senate Finance Committee’s tax provisions reflect
a cost of $441 billion over ten years, according to the Joint Committee
on Taxation’s estimate over the weekend.
How, you might ask, could the Finance Committee have extended all the
Trump tax cuts, expanded some of them, added a bunch of other new tax
cuts, made some temporary business tax cuts permanent, and still only
cost $441 billion? The trims to clean-energy tax credits and other
rollbacks, you would presume, weren’t SO costly that they would nearly
wipe out all of the costs!
The answer, friends, is a big gimmick known as the current policy baseline.
Senate Republicans are claiming that, because the Trump tax cuts are in
place now, as current policy, it costs $0 to extend them. An analogy
would be if Congress passed a bill to institute Medicare for All for one
day, at the cost of $4 to $8 billion,
depending on your estimate, and then the next day they passed a bill
extending M4A permanently, which would cost … nothing. The same
Republicans who would scream bloody murder at that dastardly maneuver
are the ones now employing this absurd maneuver.
The reality is that the Trump tax cuts, under a current law baseline
that compares the policy to the change to current law, really cost
$3.76 trillion over ten years. If you add that to the $441 billion
estimate, you have a tax section that costs over $4.2 trillion. This is
$400 billion higher than the House version that the Freedom Caucus
already found intolerable, and that some self-styled Republican budget
hawks in the Senate are grumbling about. ...
In most cases, the parliamentarian looks at whether provisions have a
purely budgetary purpose, rather than policy dressed up as a budget
item. (This is known as the Byrd Rule, after the longtime Democratic
senator from West Virginia, Robert Byrd; the process by which the
parties debate the provisions and by which a ruling is made is known as
the “Byrd bath.”) ...
For context, the House version costs $3.3 trillion
over a decade, according to the latest estimates. We’re verging on $4
trillion for the Senate bill—unless the Republicans’ wish to have the
$3.7 trillion in tax cuts entered as zero passes muster with the
parliamentarian. ...
Update Wed Jun 25:
Real Clear Politics put this back up in the rotation this morning, lol.
It took Israel just two days to get control of the skies over Western Iran. With that accomplished, destroying the rest of the launchers should come more easily.
