The tariff rate would have to be 170%, not 20% or 25% or even 50%.
Those are not serious proposals.
Humoring Mad King Ludwig about this is an errand worthy only of fools.
Tuesday, April 1, 2025
US imports came to $4.11 trillion in 2024: You'd have to tariff this out of existence to pay for the nearly $7 trillion in federal outlays in fiscal 2024
GOP in both House and Senate seem to agree that re-upping the 2017 Trump tax cuts won't cost anything even though it did the first time lol, $1.9 trillion over ten years according to the CBO
The Party now says ignore the evidence of your memory.
Reported here:
... At this point, senior House Republicans privately say they think House Republicans will accept the Senate’s push to use the “current policy baseline” accounting tactic to extend the 2017 tax cuts and claim it costs nothing. The biggest hurdle now is the vast discrepancy between the Senate’s targeted spending cut minimums and the House’s $1.5 trillion spending cut target. ...
Judge Boasberg was correct to order the flights to El Salvador to turn around, Trump administration now admits it made a mistake deporting Kilmar Abrego Garcia
No person shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.
-- Fifth Amendment
Due process exists to prevent such mistakes. Dictator Trump didn't care about following it.
Who will be his next victim?
From the story here:
... The Trump administration acknowledged late Monday that it had inadvertently deported a man to El Salvador last month despite a court’s determination that he had a legitimate fear of persecution in his home country.
“This removal was an error,” a top Immigration and Customs Enforcement official wrote in a statement to a federal judge.
Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran, was on one of three deportation flights to his home country on March 15 amid a frantic legal fight over President Donald Trump’s decision to invoke war powers to hasten the deportation of more than 100 Venezuela nationals to El Salvador. In addition to the Venezuelans subject to Trump’s invocation of the Alien Enemies Act were other deportees with purported gang ties. ...
He was arrested by ICE on March 12 and sent to El Salvador on March 15, where his wife recognized him in a video showing the shackled and shaven prisoners being arrayed by Salvadoran authorities.
The Trump administration now says there’s nothing it can do to facilitate Abrego Garcia’s return to U.S. custody. ...
Monday, March 31, 2025
Kremlin Karoline admits she doesn't spend very much time with her eight-month-old son
In God She Trusts: Karoline Leavitt's Journey to the White House Podium
... "I spend every second that I possibly can with my son when I'm home on weekends and evenings. I try to make it home for bedtime as much as I can throughout the week."
Which doesn't leave too much time for sleep.
"Actually, it's usually about five to six hours a night is what I'm doing, which is all we need. As President Trump says, when you love your job and you love your life, you don't need to sleep much." ...
I wouldn't say Greenland's PM exploded at Trump, he issued a calm but strongly worded statement
"We must listen when others talk about us. But we must not be shaken. President Trump says the United States is 'getting Greenland.'
"Let me make this clear: The U.S. is not getting that. We don't belong to anyone else. We decide our own future. We must not act out of fear. We must respond with peace, dignity and unity.
"And it is through these values that we must clearly, clearly and calmly show the American president that Greenland is ours. It was like that yesterday. That's how it is today. And that's how it will be in the future."
Marine Le Pen's jail sentence will be an electronic tag lol, which lends credence to the charge that this is merely political and unserious
Reported here:
... Le Pen was also given a four-year prison sentence — two years
suspended and two wearing an electronic tag — and fined 100,000 euros,
although these will not be implemented while any appeals processes are
under way. The ban from public office is immediate, however. ...
Le Pen and 24 other members of her political party, Rassemblement National, were accused of diverting over 3 million euros ($3.3 million) of European Parliament funds to pay staff based in France instead.
Le Pen and her co-accused had denied the charges, while the party describes the trial as a politically-motivated witch hunt. ...
Marine Le Pen sentenced to jail in France, barred from running for office in 2027
Marine Le Pen Sentenced to Prison, Banned From Next Elections Over Embezzlement
... Judges handed down a sentence Monday that bars Le Pen from seeking public office for the next five years, upending France’s political order and thrusting her far-right party into limbo. Le Pen also received a four-year prison sentence, half of which was suspended. The ruling takes Le Pen out of contention for the 2027 race, when President Emmanuel Macron finishes his second and final term and she was expected to be the front-runner. ...
Sunday, March 30, 2025
Ukrainian-American Republican Victoria Spartz (IN-5), born in the former Soviet Union in 1978, thinks you are not entitled to due process if you violated the law
She didn't become a U.S. citizen until she was 28, but somehow she gets to decide important matters about spending my money and taxing my wallet without knowing that everyone within the United States is entitled to due process of law, whether here lawfully or not, under the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments.
You cannot just scoop people up and disappear them without a hearing before a judge in a court of law.
That points up the gravity of the crimes Biden committed by letting in so many people so lawlessly. The burden of removing all these people under our laws is heavy. The blame is all his.
But the law is the law.
Start violating due process for some people, and eventually you'll violate it for others, maybe even for ignorant immigrants such as Victoria Spartz who don't know what the hell they are talking about.
As presidential mandates go, Trump's is very small, smaller than Bush 43's second term and smaller than Carter's
The top mandates go to Nixon II at 1.61, Johnson at 1.58, Reagan II at 1.44, IKE II at 1.36, and IKE I at 1.24.
The top combined term mandates go to Reagan at 1.34, Nixon at 1.31, IKE at 1.30, Clinton at 1.17, and Obama at 1.12.
Bush 43 I and Trump I have the dubious distinction of sub-one mandates, meaning they failed to win the popular vote. JFK and Nixon I barely squeaked above 1.000.
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Some of what Dark Brandon said in 2022 is what some Democrats still want their leader to say today in 2025
... Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our Republic. ... there’s no question that the Republican Party today is dominated, driven
and intimidated by Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans. And that is a
threat to this country. ... MAGA Republicans do not respect the Constitution. They do not believe in the rule of law. ... They promote authoritarian leaders. ... They thrive on chaos. ... American
democracy only works only if we choose to respect the rule of law and
the institutions that were set up in this chamber behind me. ...
-- Joe Biden, 1 September 2022, Independence Hall, Philadelphia, PA
The voters' response to this in 2022 was to flip the Democrats' House 222 majority to a 222 Republican one.
In 2024, the Republican lead narrowed to 220-215. Special elections in Florida this week will either ratify that lead or narrow it some more.
All I can think of when I read about Democrats wanting a more angry, a more centrist candidate, a more combative leader who meets the moment, is that they had all that in Joe Biden and they dumped him
The outright treason against their own president is the Democrats' real problem with their own voters, who lost faith in them and voted for Trump instead.
Democrats are furious. And they want their leaders to get mad, too.
“I wish you’d be angry,” a constituent told representative Gil Cisneros, a Democrat of California, at a recent town hall. At an event in Minnesota featuring a panel of Democratic attorneys general, an activist voiced a similar sentiment: “Get angry, man,” punctuating the message with a profanity.
The anger roiling the party, slow to build, is now a forceful current coursing through the electorate and pulling in Americans terrified that the country is descending into authoritarianism. Democrats – with no leader to guide them and little power to wield in Washington – are scrambling to harness the sudden fury. ...
Of course, we all know that that Joe Biden, especially the centrist Joe Biden, didn't really have control of his own White House, covering up which until it couldn't be covered up anymore just shows that the incumbent wasn't really trustworthy either.
Trump & Co. already know they're going to lose in the mid-terms
It's going to be a wait that seems like an eternity.
Reported here:
... The same person added that Trump sees little downside politically: 'No. 1, the president is not running for reelection. And No. 2, we're probably gonna lose the House in the midterms.' ...
Senator John Kennedy (R-La.) was blunt in his warning: 'If tariffs did have an inflationary impact - or an impact on interest rates that caused inflation and the economy moved toward a recession - that would be a very bad thing… It would turn the Trump presidency from a four year term into a two year term, because we'd lose in the midterms.' ...
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick is the Trump administration sycophant who tells Trump whatever he wants to hear
Reported here:
... On the other side are Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and senior adviser Peter Navarro, the latter a long-time tariff evangelist.
Navarro has described the administration as operating in harmony, quoting the 2002 film Drumline: 'One band, one sound.'
'We are the greatest economic team and April 2nd will be a historic day for American workers,' Lutnick said.
But others inside the administration are less certain of Lutnick's motivations.
'He goes into the Oval and tells the president whatever he wants to hear,' said one Trump ally, calling Lutnick a 'f***ing nightmare' who backs Trump's instincts without considering broader consequences.
Lutnick's influence appears to be growing, even as concerns mount that his approach is untethered from policy grounding.
As the April 2 deadline looms, inflation continues to rise, according to new Commerce Department data released on Friday - even before the new tariffs take effect. ...
Saturday, March 29, 2025
Earthquake in Myanmar, aka Burma, kills over 1,000
The death toll from a powerful 7.7 magnitude earthquake in Myanmar jumped to more than 1,000 on Saturday as more bodies were pulled from the rubble of the scores of buildings that collapsed when it struck near the country’s second-largest city. ...
In neighboring Thailand, the quake rocked the greater Bangkok area, home
to some 17 million people, and other parts of the country.
Bangkok city authorities said so far six people have been found dead, 26 injured and 47 are still missing, most from a construction site near the capital’s popular Chatuchak market. ...
Earthquakes are rare in Bangkok, but relatively common in Myanmar. The country sits on the Sagaing Fault, a major north-south fault that separates the India plate and the Sunda plate. ...
Friday, March 28, 2025
Elon Musk hasn't saved the taxpayers anything, year-to-date spending is actually 7.4% higher in 2025 than in 2024
Reported here:
... The Hamilton Project, an economic policy think tank, tracks federal spending using daily treasury statements published by the government.
These data show that the federal government had spent $1.893 trillion in 2025 as of March 26, compared to $1.763 trillion at the same date last year. In other words, federal spending in on pace to come in 7.4% higher this year than last. ...
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