unraveling

28.May.2025

The National Emergency

There's been a lot of water under the bridge since my last post here, 9 days ago. (And I have a number of bridge photos to show for it, after a long weekend visiting family in the region.) Catching up is not really an option, but while (sort of) watching the news, and catching up with some of my (too many) feeds, I checked Robert Reich's Blue Sky stack and imagine some sort of succinct summary out of it.

His 3½ minute video, America's REAL National Emergency boils it down. Spoiler alert: the eight "emergencies" we're (declared to be) in have a common denominator, guess who.

The Republican budget bill earmarks a staggering $45 billion for immigrant detention centers. The private prison industry—CoreCivic and GEO Group in the vanguard—are set to make out like bandits. Speaking of bandits,

"Trump pardoned Paul Walczak, a nursing home executive who illegally withheld millions from his workers' paychecks (while buying a luxury yacht).

"The pardon came after his mother attended a $1M-per-person Trump fundraiser at Mar-a-Lago last month.

"Everything is for sale."

And this, summarized:

"Trump's DOJ has granted Boeing a non-prosecution agreement over the 737 MAX crashes, despite the company's repeated attempts to deceive regulators.

"Boeing donated $1M to Trump's inauguration and has paid AG Pam Bondi's former lobbying firm at least $480K.

"Follow the money."

And, speaking of a lot of money, this:

As Trump's family businesses invest heavily in crypto...
-He's instructing the government to ease up on regulating the industry
-His SEC is dropping major lawsuits against crypto companies
-His DOJ terminated a team focused on crypto crimes.

Update:
Today's segment on the Newshour illuminates the depth and breadth of trumpian corruption: weakening the US dollar is a boon to the crime family crypto scam.

Update #2:
Make that seven emergencies, after a three judge panel of the Court of International Trade ruled that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act does not give the president the legal authority to spin the Roulette Wheel of Tariffs however much he feels like.

19.May.2025

The (empty) shell game

Our oldest president is running out of mental gas. Worse than Ronald Reagan at the end of his anti-government crusade and that backroom deal with terrorists. Trump can't stay on topic, keeps nodding off, veering into nonsense, failing to answer the simplest and most obvious questions, and worse. Asked if he has to "uphold the Constitution," says, "I don't know." (He has skeevy lawyers telling him "not really.")

People are starting to notice. His poll numbers are sinking. Overall approval after 100 days is down to 42%, the second-worst approval rating for any president in 80 years. (Trump 1.0 was a point lower.)

"Consumer sentiment" dropped another 1.4% after "four consectuive months of steep declines," down almost 30% since January. People see prospects for unemployment (their own, and others') as bad as 2009's Great Recession. The sentiment index is at the second-lowest level in the history of the survey, going back nearly 75 years. (Lowest was June 2022, in the late pandemic, and after Russia's full scale invasion of Ukraine.)

"Moody’s Ratings on Friday downgraded the credit rating of the United States" from its top AAA (held since 1917) to AA1. "This aligns it with Fitch Ratings and S&P, which downgraded US debt in 2023 and 2011, respectively."

Robert Reich, on The real cause of our growing national debt. (Spoiler alert: "The real cause is the growing political power of the super-rich and big corporations to lower their taxes at the expense of most Americans.")

The latest vehicle is the trumped-up "Big, Beautiful Bill" which is of course a greasy sack of Republican fever dreams to punish the poor and aid the wealthy. It's a Bonanza for Billionaires bill . Extending the 2017 tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations will balloon the deficit for years to come. Deceptive timing is everything. Heather Cox Richardson notes "the tax cuts would go into effect immediately, the cuts to Medicaid are currently scheduled not to hit until 2029, enabling the Republicans to avoid voter fury over them in the midterms and the 2028 election."

How bad is the proposed attack on Medicaid? JOSH HAWLEY came out against it, as "morally wrong and politically suicidal."

So of course the distraction machine has to be juiced up, and more squirrels thrown out for the media to chase after. At the retail level of chaff, "targeted advertising" to distract the rubes. HCR's May 16 letter noted a likely means for the targeting:

"In their advertising efforts, Musk’s mining of U.S. government records is deeply concerning, for the treasure trove of information he appears to have mined would enable political operatives to target political ads with laser precision in an even tighter operation than the Cambridge Analytica program of 2016."

The failed pick for D.C.'s U.S. Attorney still has legs, with his doesn't-need-confirmation job in charge of the “Weaponization Working Group,” with plans to investigate anyone with the temerity to criticize Trump. ProPublica dropped a dime on The Untold Story of How Ed Martin Ghostwrote Online Attacks Against a Judge — and Still Became a Top Trump Prosecutor.

"CNN hired him in September 2017 to be a pro-Trump on-air commentator, only to fire him five months later after a string of controversial on-air remarks. He attacked a woman who had accused Alabama U.S. Senate candidate Roy Moore of molesting her as a child, praised Trump for denigrating Sen. Elizabeth Warren as “Pocahontas,” and described some of his CNN co-panelists as “rabid feminists” and “Black racists.”

"Unbowed, Martin went on to make more than 150 appearances on the Russia Today TV channel and Sputnik radio, both Russian state-owned media outlets, first reported by The Washington Post. On RT and Sputnik, Martin railed against the “Russia hoax,” criticized the DOJ investigation led by special counsel Robert Mueller and questioned American support for Ukraine after Russia’s invasion by saying the U.S. was “wasting money in Kiev for Zelensky and his corrupt guys.” The State Department would later say RT and Sputnik were “critical elements in Russia’s disinformation and propaganda ecosystem.”

MAGA and DOGE have come after "the modern government that works for ordinary Americans" in their quest to abandon democracy and fire up a new oligarchy. After "Walmart announced it would have no choice but to raise prices, and the Michigan Consumer Sentiment Index dropped to its second lowest reading on record," big Don's response was to threaten the world's largest retailer, telling them they'd just have to eat the tariff-is-a-tax that what do you know, other countries aren't the ones paying.

18.May.2025

Oft-told tales on the day

Before I started to tell it again, here on the 45th anniversary, I thought I'd check and see if I'd already done this? Very briefly in 2002 and 2005 and 2008 and 2010 (30 year anniversary); and then actually getting into some detail in 2012 ("32 years downwind"), with a regional map of the ash distribution and stuff; 2016 with the winner headline, "In eastern Washington, mountain climbs you"; and pretty much how I would have told it today, for the 40th anniversary, five years ago. So I guess that about covers it. So to speak.

I did see that the link pointing to the 1990 book published by the US Geological Survey, "Eruptions of Mount St. Helens : past, present, and future" still works! The online business, last updated in 1997 isn't particularly alluring though. The good news is that our library has a circulating print copy.

Bonus history, connected only by proximity to the 2012 entry, was Frank VanderSloot's fine whine about Obama's criticism of his business, which turned out to be good for his business. In case you don't know what that business is, take the jump, or just savor the punchline and the MAGA foreshadowing:

"We're getting a ton of national support, unbelievable, unexpected. The phones are ringing off the hook, everyone wanting to know about Melaleuca, people wanting to buy our product, they don't even know what we're selling."

15.May.2025

Free press

You've heard the metaphor of "drinking from a fire hose," I'm sure. I've never been that close to a fire hose in action, but the daily flood of email feels like the next best thing. Part of the flow is a (free, so far) subscription to Popular Information, whose home page currently features the "big, beautiful" budget bill with a poison pill. Remember when the IRS got ever so slightly fussy about investigating nonprofits during the Obama years, and the Republicans took a go at working the refs to make it a scandal? (Remember there were scandals?!) The Wikipedia summary describes the lack of there there, back in the days of the Tea Party astroturf farming, and something that just glided through the endless zone-flooding of Trump 1.0, in which the administration used lawsuit settlements to reward the folks they liked:

"In October 2017, the Trump administration agreed to settle a lawsuit filed on behalf of more than four hundred conservative nonprofit groups who claimed that they had been discriminated against by the Internal Revenue Service for an undisclosed amount described by plaintiffs' counsel as "very substantial." The Trump administration also agreed to settle a second lawsuit brought by forty-one conservative organizations with an apology and an admission from the IRS that subjecting them to "heightened scrutiny and inordinate delays" was wrongful."

Page 380 of the filibuster-proof bill the House Republicans are cooking up includes next-level weaponization of government, with a provision to

"grant the Treasury Secretary the power to terminate the tax-exempt status of any nonprofit group they deem a "terrorist supporting organization." A "terrorist supporting organization" is any nonprofit that provides "material support" to a designated terrorist group. The term "material support" is broadly defined, and includes "any service," "expert advice," or "personnel" — regardless of whether that support is connected to violent acts. Nor is there any standard of evidence regarding what kind of information the Treasury Secretary can consider when deciding whether a nonprofit provided "material support."...

"The nonprofit would have 90 days to respond to the Treasury Secretary or challenge the designation in court. But it shifts the burden of proof onto the nonprofit to establish its innocence."

Some form of due process, but after the fact, and standing the usual presumption of innocence on its head. In simpler terms, unprecedented weaponization of government.

Also on the PI home page at the moment, The murder business. "I'm very troubled by the reports to date about Jamal Khashoggi," said Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi on October 12, 2018, when he decided not to attend Saudi Arabia's FII investment conference. Now the oligarchs are all in.

"On Tuesday, Khosrowshahi accompanied President Trump to a lunch in Saudi Arabia with MBS and other Saudi leaders."

That NYT story has a list of attendees, starting with our illegal immigrant and head DOGE saboteur, Melon Usk.

Then there's Why Qatar is bribing Trump, Inside Trump's $1 trillion military bonanza, and you get the idea. (Like Pandora's box, there is a little something nice at the bottom: Republican candidate for North Carolina Supreme Court finally concedes.)

Getting to the main point (as I like to do occasionally), the inbox item from PI that led to all that started with an off-blog preamble, calling out the publisher of the New York Times, A.G. Sulzberger for his Free People Need a Free Press opinion, lamenting the "direct attack" "to curtail and punish independent journalism," that "essential ingredient for democratic self-governance."

A third of the way into his somewhat lengthy speech (delivered at the Kellogg Institute at the University of Notre Dame’s Keough School of Global Affairs on Tuesday), he "pauses":

"to say plainly that as a champion of independent journalism, I believe our job is to cover political debates, not to join them.

"We’re not the resistance. We are nobody’s opposition. We’re also nobody’s cheerleader. Our loyalty is to the truth and to a public that deserves to know it. That is the distinct role that independent news organizations like The Times play in our democracy.

"That means we will cover the Trump administration fully and fairly, regardless of what attacks it sends our way. We will continue to provide unmatched coverage of its abuses and failures. We will also cover its successes and achievements and explore its support across a large and diverse swath of the country."

It's a strong speech, I think, but judge for yourself (with that limited persistance NYT gift link). Legum's complaint was that "The media's job is to communicate facts clearly to readers. If an outlet is focused on maintaining an image of being above the fray, that job becomes impossible."

I didn't get the same "above the fray" out of what Sulzberger said, but Legum's negative example of "headlines like this" concerning the "once-fringe birthright citizenship theory" would be well-taken. Legum notes that the headline "elevates the views of John Eastman, a lawyer whose license has been suspended because the California Bar found, after a 35-day trial, that he was guilty of "failing to support the Constitution," "mislead[ing] a court," and "moral turpitude."

"The theory that individuals born in the United States are not entitled to citizenship is still a "fringe" legal theory and has been rejected by courts and legal scholars across the ideological spectrum. That did not change when Trump returned to the Oval Office. But the New York Times story, to signal impartiality, obscures that fact."

14.May.2025

Blogiversary

25 years ago today, I kicked off this blog with this pithy "This is what those thousands of years of evolution were all about: being able to share our thoughts with a million other humans."

Not that my personal readership ever approached that pie in the sky, and "be careful what you wish for"; it didn't turn out quite as sunshine and roses as it seemed it might at the turn of the millennium.

Also, twenty-five years, damn. Time flies. Make the most of it.

Speaking of anniversaries

It was somewhere in the neighborhood of twenty years ago when I was on the board of the Funeral Consumers Alliance of Idaho, and volunteered to redesign its minimal website, and host it on my domain. It was on fcai.fortboise.org until this morning, when the cutover to their new deal, at idahofunerals.org was made complete, and the old pointed to the new. Fare well, my fellow consumer advocates.

13.May.2025

Corruption like the world has never seen

When I think of pinball, my mind goes back to Echo Bowl on Port Washington Road, and of course "my" eponymous rock opera. Oh boy, those were the days. Just reading the Wikipedia synopsis gave me chills again. (As compared to an up-to-date virtual tour of the utterly homogenized Port Washington Road via Google Maps just now; I see that my "home" bowling alley came in to being not long after I did, just after my first birthday, and ended in 2004. "The site is now home to a Walgreens." In company with other Brand Names you'd recognize, and perhaps just one indigenous survivor, Kopp's Frozen Custard, home of two vice presidential visits.)

The fast-forward 55 years (in round numbers) connection is TILT, the current state of our geopolitical Zeitgeist thanks to Agent Orange's power-mad grifting spree. To say it's hard to keep up beggars understatement. Our first president was raised into a god by Constantino Brumidi, six and a half decades after he died, younger than I am now, in 1799. Our current president appears set to be raised higher still in a good old Jumbo Jet by the "generosity" of the same emirate that bailed out his son-in-law's crazy bad mortgage on 666 Fifth Avenue (after Saudi Arabia and the UAE helpfully blockaded the country to "encourage" the bailout), and more recently paid Pam Bondi six figures a month to lobby Congress on their behalf.

That was before she was nominated to be Attorney General, and whoops didn't mention that potential conflict of interest or the others in the jambalaya of her having represented Amazon, Uber, and private prison company The GEO Group, which has "ICE is its largest source of revenue."

Now Eric Trump, executive vice president of grifting, inc. said "We are incredibly proud to expand the Trump brand into Qatar," most recently with the May Day deal to build a $5.5 billion Trump Internation Golf Club in Qatar, while Qatar is doubtless incredibly pleased to expand their brand into Trump with such a generous gift.

Marc C. Johnson: The Art of the Grift. "There is a fix for this level of putrid wrongdoing, but the fact that presidential corruption on this vast scale is not worth even a thought bubble among congressional Republicans is all the proof we need that the United States is no longer a functioning republic."

Judd Legum spells it out: Why Qatar is bribing Trump. Who knew, "Qatar is the second-largest purchaser of U.S. military equipment, just behind Saudi Arabia," and is home to the Al-Udeid Air Base, "the larget US military facility in the Middle East."

The NYT went so far as to rise a headline eyebrow at "Strains Bounds of Propriety," but was too embarrassed to keep that in the online version, where it "Heightens Corruption Concerns", ya think? Schlump 2.0 is "blowing through limits on the mixing of public office and personal benefits." Charlie Savage's run-down includes the hundreds of $millions in the inaugural committee; the $TRUMP memecoin cryptocurrency, which he's using to auction off access; disbanding a DOJ unit investigating cryptocurrency crimes, and omg "ordered the [DOJ] to suspend enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which makes it a crime for companies that operate in the United States to bribe foreign officials."

Heather Cox Richardson noted "the biggest news over the weekend was silence: the silence of Republicans."

"They refused to disavow White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller’s statement that the administration is looking at suspending the writ of habeas corpus, that is, essentially declaring martial law. They have also stayed quiet after the administration announced it was planning to accept a gift of a $400 million luxury Boeing 747-8 plane from the Qatari royal family. President Donald J. Trump would use the plane as Air Force One during the rest of his presidency and take it with him when he leaves office.

"This is in keeping with the refusal of 53 Republican senators to answer questions from Rolling Stone’s Ryan Bort after NBC’s Kristen Welker asked Trump, “Don’t you need to uphold the Constitution of the United States, as president?” and he answered: “I don’t know.” Only Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) went on the record, posting on social media: “Following the Constitution is not a suggestion. It is a guiding force for all of us who work on behalf of the American people. Do you agree?”...

"This is corruption, and not just in the sense that a government official is getting a payoff. It is corruption in the old-fashioned meaning of the term, that the body politic is being corrupted—poisoned—by a sickness that must be cured or it will be fatal. That corruption is the old-world system the framers tried to safeguard against, and it is visible anew in the relationship of the Trumps with Qatar."

8.May.2025

The dismal science, still

The main question at this point is not so much CAN HE BE STOPPED, as HOW MUCH DAMAGE WILL HE AND HIS TEAM DO ON THE WAY DOWN? My notion that the downward trajectory is so extreme that he WILL be stopped could well be wishful thinking. He certainly SHOULD have been stopped a long, long time ago, take your pick of awful milestones passed and gone without accountability, starting with the down escalator (talk about your reality TV foreshadowing!), through impeachment, insurrection and re-impeachment. And, incredibly, through the Supreme Court's channeling Richard Nixon to make his rotting chestnut sprout authoritarianism: "When the president does it, that means it is not illegal."

We laughed that off back in the day, as yet another political lie from a discredited leader. Now it isn't that we're inured to it all, it's that we're overwhelmed, in a swamp that has been well and truly flooded with excrement. How can this be happening? We were exceptional, after all. The only superpower left standing after the Cold War. Once upon a time.

That's as far as I got on a well-formed blog post yesterday, before going off on a long bike ride, and then having Jeanette recommend Binyamin Applebaum's brilliant piece for next Sunday's NYT Magazine, online early: Can Trump Turn Back the Economic Clock? "The president thinks he can return America to manufacturing glory — but the cycles of economic history are hard to break."

Applebaum proceeds to give us a working overview of recent centuries' economic history, following the lead of French historian Fernand Braudel, who finished the third volume of his epic “Civilization and Capitalism” in 1979, before his death in the mid-80s. That was when Braudel "judged that New York was entering the “autumn” of its era as the center of the global economy. Commerce and industry were fleeing the city, leaving behind a thriving financial center..."

"Donald Trump became Donald Trump in that city, building towers and bankrupting casinos as Wall Street boomed and the working class faded away, and he emerged with a similarly bleak view of America’s prospects. His career as a political figure has been built on his conviction that America is losing its wealth and its power. If Ronald Reagan filled voters with hope, Trump offers to keep them company in their misery. He has an intuition for the things that people fear and is comfortable saying what other politicians won’t. Where other presidents intone that it’s still Morning in America, Trump has touched a nerve by insisting that it’s not long before midnight."

It's a weird "keeping company in misery," isn't it? While the big man makes international deals and hides corruption in cryptocurrency, he complains about low water pressure in his shower, "just like you." (Full disclosure: our restricted flow showerhead works just fine. Maybe he just needs a better plumber.) The nut of a psychopathic agenda:

"The heart of Trump’s economic agenda, and his political agenda, is that other people are hurting the United States and that we can solve our problems by hurting other people."

Which is to say, the man who's been cheating all through his life and his business career thinks other people are cheating him. Funny. (Not "ha ha.")

Postscript:
While writing today's blog post, I had occasion to go back in time to the first three weeks.

"Much of Donald Trump’s approach to life is to systematically fail the marshmallow test at every opportunity."

And assorted prescience from Applebaum.

6.May.2025

Contagion

There is something profoundly broken about RFK Jr. Who knows if it was his favorite fishing pond getting paved over, the bad drug experiences, the brain worm, what, but thanks to the +rump regime nominating him to own the libs, and the quisling Republicans in the US Senate confirming him, his brokenness is metastasizing through one of the most important departments of the federal government.

At the National Institutes of Health, 27 grants for Alzheimer's research have been canceled, with $90M of authorized funds as-yet unspent. 55 grants for cancer research, $137M. 239 HIV-related grants, $813M. 114 grants for vaccine research, $679M. Among the 789 total grants reported cancelled with $1.95 billion left to spend. Kidney disease. Tuberculosis. All across the country. RFK Jr's big lie: "We're not getting rid of any of the critical research..."

5 x 5 = 25

No evidence has emerged

A lot of people have been "just saying" stuff that doesn't have evidence behind it. (Some got sued for a lot of money, and lost, bigly, in fact.) So we have to say it again, and make sure the kids who weren't paying attention back in the day know what's what. Philip Bump provides the (didn't-)cheat code for your Oklahoma schoolwork: No evidence has emerged of even small-scale efforts to steal votes in the 2020 presidential election.

Not for want of trying: the band of losers tried more than FIVE DOZEN lawsuits in various venues, and they all went nowhere. That's because, wait for it, no evidence emerged.

On the other hand, you could have a look at the 2000 presidential election, where there was a significant effort to not count valid votes, abetted by the Supreme Court (and, "coincidentally," I'm sure, three future Supreme Court Justices), and resulting in the swinginest swing state swinging to George W. Bush for another one of those "lost the popular vote but won the election" deals.

May the Fourth, 2025

The crime family

ICYMI, BlueSky is the Twitter-like successor after the original was transformed into a propaganda shithole by Elon Musk. An account going as "Nice and normal" highlights one of the many Chaos and Corruption stories you might have missed (distracted by the Cruelty, probably), boiling it down to 99 characters:

"With everything else you kind of forget that the president of the united states is a crypto scammer"

As usual, it helps to follow the backstory. CBS Evening News found me in the daytime with this little ditty, reporting from a report that says Trump family's net worth has increased by $2.9 billion thanks to crypto investments. With links from the CBS story:

"[T]he group State Democracy Defenders Action estimated in a new report that the president's crypto holdings now represent nearly 40% of his net worth — or approximately $2.9 billion. That increase is due in part to his release of the $TRUMP and $MELANIA meme coins, in addition to a large stake in World Liberty Financial, a crypto exchange affiliated with the Trump family that launched in October 2024. State Democracy Defenders Action identifies itself as non-partisan, but it is overseen by frequent critics of President Trump, with an agenda focused on "the autocratic threat to our nation."

Oh, and while our gaslighter in thief is telling us all the businesses in the country will be just fine if they move all production onshore, his "net worth is expected to get another bump,"

"with World Liberty Financial's announcement this week that a Abu Dhabi-backed firm will invest billions of dollars in the Trump family-affiliated crypto fund. The Emirati firm, MGX, will purchase $2 billion in a stablecoin product offered by World Liberty, the company said in a statement to CBS. The currency, called "USD1" will then be used to invest in Binance, one of the world's largest cryptocurrency exchanges."

Cool, cool, with the orange man marketing that you "Shape a New Era of Finance" by Be[ing] DeFiant." As far as we'll know, This Is Fine. "[T]he Securities and Exchange Commission has paused investigations into a dozen crypto companies since his inauguration, a CBS News analysis found."

May Day, 2025

It's the corruption, stupid

Oh look, after the first 100 days of corruption, unlike the rest of the world's richest countries, our economy is southbound. Minus 0.3% on the GDP-ometer, even before your ships stop coming in and store shelves start emptying. Who would've thought the guy who bankrupted a casino could screw things up so quickly?

Senator Chris Murphy's "top 40" of grifting starts with Amazon's $40 million to license Melania's "documentary" (before the inauguration), and then January 17, "maybe the most corrupt act in the history of the White House – this is the creation of the Trump meme coin. This is just a backdoor way for anybody with business before the Trump administration to send him millions of dollars in total secret." With income laundered by running it through an unregulated Chinese exchange, no less. Fast forward to last Saturday:

“April 26th, Trump's family... announces the launch of a private club called the Executive Branch, a new private club in Washington. The initiation fee is around half a million dollars. It is advertised as a place where you can hold secret audiences with the Trump administration, as long as you pay Donald Trump's family and their financial backers over $500,000 in membership fees. It is apparently already sold out."

"Sold out," get it?

“This is not normal. None of this is normal. This is outlandish, this is illegal, this is unconstitutional, brazen corruption, and this is only the first 100 days. I just detailed 40 instances of mind-blowing corruption in just 40 days, capped off by an attempt to just sell access to the White House to people who put money in the pocket of Donald Trump's personal businesses.

“Donald Trump wants to numb this country into believing that this is just how government works. That he's owed this. That every president is owed this. That government has always been corrupt, and he's just doing it out in the open. But this is not how government works...."

Well, it certainly never worked this brazenly, this personally, at least while I've been alive. It seems absurdly quaint to remember Richard Nixon foundering on national television to tell us all that "People have got to know whether or not their president is a crook. Well, I am not a crook." He was a crook, as it turned out, but nothing like the crooketty crook convicted felon we've got now!

If you're feeling left holding the latest bag, and need an ever-bigger lie to get you through, Felon47 is on it! IT'S JOE BIDEN'S ECONOMY he was barking yesterday.

You mean the one that "left other rich countries in the dust," as The Economist put it last October? Paul Krugman included that link (and probably can see behind the paywall, unlike me), noting that "America had historically low unemployment and inflation only slightly above ... 2 percent" when the Don took over in January, and started an idiotic trade war. Just 100 days ago.

Take the jump to Krugman for the boffo New York Post cover, and the MUSICAL CODA from one of my favorite groups these days.

Postscript: It wasn't until later in the day that I read HCR's April 30 Letter (and corrected my misread that the GDP delta was a full 3% rather than 0.3%), quoting the Gas Man saying "Tariffs will soon start kicking in" as if that were going to fix the plug the hole in the Trumptanic. He said the problem was the Biden “Overhang,” don't you know.

"This will take a while, has NOTHING TO DO WITH TARIFFS, only that he left us with bad numbers, but when the boom begins, it will be like no other. BE PATIENT!!!"

First of all, Biden didn't leave us with bad numbers, and secondly, nothing says BE PATIENT quite like the BANG BANG BANG of his alt-reality Liarrhea.

Theres' more in the HCR, which you should be subscribing to (maybe even a paid subscription, hmm?) and reading. The televised two-hour Cabinet meeting that was so deep in brown sauce that Ann Coulter derided the "Kim Jong il-style tributes," for example. Or the fact that "China produces 80% of the toys sold in the U.S. and 90% of the Christmas goods," so guess who's going to be the Grinch who stole Christmas this December?! Yikes.

Speaking of CHAOS, "Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent says that uncertainty is strategic, intended to give the administration a leg up in negotiations." Yeah, that's it. It's strategic.

raveling

Tom von Alten