Saturday, April 12, 2025

What A Difference A Day Makes

 


Speaking of the people left on Twitter: 

This is really just for the headline:

Why Beijing is not backing down on tariffs
“Because they don’t have to?” (I mean, this ain’t rocket science.)

What a difference a day makes.
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All Because We Didn't Want a Black Woman Behind The Resolute Desk

NYTimes:

Adolf Hitler's “Mein Kampf” is still on U.S. Naval Academy shelves. “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” and “Memorializing the Holocaust” are not.

An order by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s office led to a purge of books that are critical of racism — but preserved volumes defending white power. 

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“Walk It Off, You Suckers And Losers!”

RFK, Jr says vaccines cause disease, because the FDA is not to be trusted. 

But a guy with no medical training and a brain worm, is. 🤷🏻‍♂️ 
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😈

Malinowski: The point is all of these countries saw what happened and that he is the one who now desperately needs to strike dozens of deals with dozens of countries in 90 days to justify what he did to the American economy.

If I'm the European union and they see this, I would drive a very, very hard bargain right now. So these are not going to be great deals for the United States if they happen at all.
Uhhhh... 😈😈😈

(I read quotes from a report on this “announcement” to the Lovely Wife and she said, quite seriously: “Oh, that’s not ‘The Onion’?” 😹)
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Someone Showed Him The Bond Market

And he shit his pants.

(We import a lot more than electronics from China.
Just sayin...)
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The State Department of Gilead

There was a professor in seminary who posted all manner of ads and comics on the wall outside his office door. Things like pictures of Jesus playing soccer with little blonde white kids, or the picture of Jesus I’m gonna post on Easter Sunday (no, I won’t show you yet!). And comics making light of several Christian doctrines, most of them both popularly held, and heretical. Pretty sure the State Department of Gilead would turn him out for displaying “anti-Christian bias” for his mockery of some people’s ideas of Jesus.

This is as blatant a violation of the First Amendment as there can be. If anyone in the State Department was caught reading my blog, for example (as if!), they could be accused of “anti-Christian bias.” (Pretty sure just my use of “Xmas” would be enough.) All Christians are equal, but some are more equal than others?

Yes, Americans voted for this, whether they meant to or not. But I’m pretty sure they didn’t vote for a complete abdication of Congressional oversight. For the moment, we have to rely on the courts (Trump still hasn’t so much as publicly noticed the 3 million people in the streets recently). But we need to remember Congress’ responsibility, and vote accordingly.


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Is That 24 Hours In Year-Round DST?

Or something? Because it’s been at least 48 hours in “regular time” since she said that.

I’d really like to know what she thinks the charges would be. Or why it’s ethical to announce a case like that.
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“Legacy”

 Not gonna do any better than this, today.

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Friday, April 11, 2025

🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣

 Well, of course:

An alert sent out to shippers from U.S. Customs and Border Protection "notified users of a glitch in the system that is used to exempt freight from tariffs, including shipments from China that were already on the water at the time of this week’s whipsaw in tariffs policy, and any trade from nations now under the 90-day pause put in place by the Trump administration," reported Lori Ann LaRocco. "The alert explained that U.S. Customs discovered that the entry code for U.S. shippers to use to have their freight exempted is not working and 'the issue is being reviewed.'"

"Normally, when a U.S. importer pays for their freight, they file both the cargo release forms and their financial papers, so they can pay for their cargo. To keep the cargo moving, Customs is advising importers to file the cargo release form now, and file the financial form later, once the glitch is corrected," said the report. "For now, that means the tariffs are not being collected by the U.S. government."
Well, the bond market is still completely fucked, and merchants still don’t want to place orders for Xmas because they have no idea what inventory will cost when it arrives, so…

…we’ll always have that.

What a pack of idiots.

😹😹😹😹
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So It Was A Metaphysical Exam?

I didn’t know Walter Reed could test for that. Congratulations, you did. No one can believe what you’ve done to the economy. Uh-huh.
The bond market sell-off escalated Friday to cap off one of the most volatile and unusual trading weeks in recent memory as President Trump's tariff whipsaw sent yields surging and investors fled safe haven assets.

Long-term Treasury yields skyrocketed, with the 10-year yield (^TNX) surging to its highest level since February to trade as high as 4.59%, a massive 72 basis point swing from Monday's low of 3.87%. Shortly after the closing bell, yields pulled back to around 4.49%.
The bond market is almost literally shitting bricks. What was that cognitive test again? Sure you did. Nobody understands what you’re doing because it doesn’t make sense and you can’t explain it and you change it every 24 hours. Besides:
The mighty dollar, ordinarily a safe haven during times of market-based stress, is falling apart, and its ongoing year-to-date slide is pointing to a much bigger problem for all U.S. assets.

That’s because the weakening greenback has been accompanied by a dramatic selloff in U.S. government debt and whipsaw action in all three major stock indexes on Friday, following a historic rally and big selloffs in equities over the past week. Such coinciding moves — falling dollar, bonds and equities — like the ones seen recently are “rare, ugly and worrying,” according to a team at Evercore ISI, a research arm of New York-based investment-banking advisory firm Evercore.
Gee, why all those “coinciding moves” at once?

You really are just dumb as a post, aren’t you?
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I Thought She Shut Down The Education Department

Why does she still have a job?

BTW: computers became ubiquitous in the classroom in this century.  IIRC, our school district started supplying them to students after the Golden Child graduated high school, so circa 2010. PC’s, as we used to call them, had been around for quite a while before that. 

I know why people are pushing AI for everything (and no, I don’t just mean Elmo): they want to be in on the next Microsoft/Apple. Best way to do that, they think, is to invest in AI and promote the hell out of it. Pretty much the way they did with Tesla, because electric cars were the next Macintosh.

And then it turned out Elmo wasn’t the next Steve Jobs.  (I’ve been seeing a reference to an article on how Jobs invested in his people and company, rather than contract, in the 2008 financial crisis. He brought Apple out of that to greater success with the iPad. Elmo laid off almost everybody at Twitter, and then forced Tesla to make his vanity project: an ugly thing he mockingly called a truck, and not enough people want one to even cover the investment in making them. None of his other cars have changed a whit, either. Apple has made, sold, and discarded more types of products than Elmo has ever sold.)

AI will be what it will be, but its place in the classroom won’t be clear for decades. I was the generation that took standardized tests (to this day I’m an expert at filling in the bubble); learned to speed read with machines (a useless skill I no longer have); watched “film strips” (“DING!”) and movies (“Our Friend The Atom”), stared at screens illuminated by opaque projectors and overhead projectors, and even cleaned chalk dust from erasers (without masks!😷)

My daughter wouldn’t recognize any of that, or really know what I was referring to. Most of it was a legitimate attempt to improve education. “Smart boards” were the new thing last I looked (but not in the college where I taught for 20 years).  A lot of the technology we used in public schools was just to keep us quiet and entertained across the absurdly long school day. The more time I spent teaching, the more I thought the school day was mostly for babysitting. College has you in class a few hours a day. So do the early grades of school. But then we decide students need to spend 8 hours there. Why? So they can stand it in an office? I still don’t have a better reason than that.

AI may have a place in the classroom someday, but not now. I’m encountering AI in my daily life, and I can smell it a mile away. It isn’t thinking, it’s just aping human communication (poorly) to keep people from doing such grunt work (or rather, to not have to pay people). AI in the classroom would not be much better than having first graders helping in college lecture halls; except AI wouldn’t get bored. 

It wouldn’t think, either. So, what’s the point?
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In Case There’s Any Doubt What It’s Always All About

Adding:
CNN's Boris Sanchez asked anchor Jim Sciutto about his "perspective" on how the White House was handling the situation, specifically the fact that Trump is demanding Chinese leader Xi Jinping reach out first for a phone call, and not the other way around.

"Can you get any more high school in matters of state? It's ridiculous," Sciutto scoffed, while anchor Brianna Keilar mocked, "He's gotta call me, Jim!"

Sciutto continued, "The Chinese impression is that they are willing to at least negotiate — not necessarily on Donald Trump's terms — but to talk. But their impression is that the U.S. is not open channels and not made an effort to open up channels to allow that. So, now you have the U.S. president saying, 'Well, you know, I'm not going to open those channels, China has to open them first.' It's kind of ridiculous at the end of the day, because you are playing with the interests of of American consumers, Chinese consumers, et cetera."

Sciutto added that in President Xi's statement, he claimed China would not go higher than 125 percent "because this is getting a little ridiculous."

"That's both a signal to say we're not going to get caught up in this tit-for-tat to the degree that the president is, but it's also an opening to say, okay, we're are capping this for now, and that perhaps offers a way forward that we could begin talking about how to bring these down," Sciutto said.

He added that China doesn't want to be seen as "kowtowing" to the West, "so, the browbeating is not a great diplomatic strategy."
There is no strategy. There is only Trump’s gaping maw of need.
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He Said So, It Must Be So!

 Government by Twitter:

DOGE staffer Antonio Gracias told "Fox & Friends" on April 2 that more than 5 million noncitizens who came to the U.S. illegally had received Social Security numbers "through an automatic system," and he then claimed they had then been added to voter rolls and cast ballots – which is already a federal crime and virtually nonexistent, reported NPR.

"Just because we were curious, we then looked to see if they were on the voter rolls. And we found in a handful of cooperative states that there were thousands of them on the voter rolls and that many of them had voted," Gracias said.
I’m old enough to remember when outrageous allegations had to be supported by evidence. Apparently I have lived too long.

“Noncitizens” includes people here legally and gainfully employed. Unless the employer is cheating the government by paying cash (and likely cheating the laborers, too), the employer is obligated to report and pay employment taxes (by which I mean SS/Medicare and income tax) for all employees.

And I can’t imagine why any state would need my SSN for voter registration. Or how this clown would gain access to state voter rolls. He certainly wouldn’t understand what he was looking at. 

I’ve known people this dumb and ignorant. I just never knew them to be rogue government employees.

As I say, the GOP Congress thinks this is just fine. Congress has the whip hand in this situation. They just won’t do anything with it.
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Where We Now At, Courtesy Of JMM

 Or: “Fraud, Waste and Abuse” Theater: 🎭 

Politico has this piece on th absurdity of trying to negotiate 75 bulateral teade deals in 90 days. But the piece wildly understates the problem. Trade deals are laws. They have to pass congress. https://www.politico.com/news/2025/04/10/bessent-global-trade-showdown-00285810

2/ Trump may not think so. But the other countries certainly do. Is any country going to reorient their trade with the US based on a promise from Donald Trump. In fact it goes even beyond that. Remember NAFTA, which Trump remade into USMC. That’s torn to shreds.

3/ Any trade deal with the US is basically meaningless as long as Donald Trump isn’t in prison.
Any minute now Trump is going to announce a “trade deal” with China, hoping the bond markets notice. He really doesn’t care about Congress. He’s used to sole proprietorships. He doesn’t understand government at all.

And the GOP Congress is fine with that. 
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Next EO Incoming

Trump is gonna ban the word “tariff.” 
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Thursday, April 10, 2025

I Guess Trump’s Headfake Didn’t Fool Anybody?

Or is this the “pain” he keeps talking about? Who didn’t see that coming?
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Ignorance Easily Couples With Stupidity

My wife received social security benefits from childhood through college. Her father died when she was about a year old. Her sister and brothers received the same benefits.

This isn’t new, IOW. It’s just new to ignorant people.
I’m only surprised this guy doesn’t work for the White House already. On the other hand: He’s not as stupid as this. After that we’ll know what has caused the stupidity epidemic in this administration. Oh, wait…
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Nothing Says ‘Dignity’

Just using that to quote this response to the Speaker’s remarks (remarks as empty and groundless as Elmo and DOGE denouncing “waste, fraud and abuse” without ever producing any evidence of it):
“Of course, nothing says ‘dignity’ like ripping healthcare away from poor people based on outdated, classist stereotypes,” wrote Wall Street investment banker Evaristus Odinikaeze. “Young men on Medicaid aren’t ‘playing video games all day,’ they’re often underpaid, overworked, or struggling in a rigged economy. This is just MAGA cruelty dressed up as moral judgment.”
And beyond that, like the Administration, no one responsible really cares about the cinsequences.
Annie Shoup of the nonprofit Protect Our Care wrote: “We know that people on Medicaid who are able to work already do. This will only hurt people and prevent them from getting the health care they deserve, including caregivers who are staying at home caring for family members.”

The organization Social Security Works added, “Medicaid pays for two-thirds of nursing home care in America. That’s what Mike Johnson wants to rip away from seniors and people with disabilities.”
As I said about secular morality (this can’t be called Christian morality except in the sense it was uttered by a Christian), it doesn’t ask the question of Christian morality so succinctly put by Tolstoy: “Hiw should we then live?” This secular amorality only asks: “Who’s in charge?” And immediately answers its own question: “We are. So fuck you!”
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I Really Don’t Think…



...it’s supposed to do that.
Economic uncertainty update:

The thing about veering wildly between policy positions, favouring and then discarding a new maverick advisor each week, and using contradictory justifications at every turn, is that even if one particular pivot is in the direction of sanity, chaos is the constant.
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Blasting From My Past

I’m warming myself up to revisit a post from 15 (!) years ago (!!). (Then, as soon-to-be, an Easter Sunday thing.) So I’m going to start with this comment as a springboard:

Strangely, I keep going back to the gospels with more interest (trying to improve my Greek and trying to pick up enough Aramaic to get through the Peshitta over the next decade), but the various "quests" to explain what really happened now leave me cold and uninterested.

For that reason I suppose I should thank my lucky stars I'm not a clergyman feeling like he has to somehow mediate all those scientific findings on the gospels to his charges to avoid being thought magical.

As it happens, I was reading from Meister Eckhart's outrageous, unimaginable commentary on Genesis from the first of the Classics of Western Spirituality series this morning on the bus, and I found him so much more compelling than our dour contemporary exegetes I had to wonder if I was just in terminal revolt against the reductionism and implicit cynicism of this age.
Now, Rick is my grate gud friend from ancient of days (more ancient by the day. I’m still in touch with four people who are not family who I’ve known longer than my wife, and I’ve known her for over 50 years.), and I’m not starting an internet row with him. I sympathize with him, even as I maintain my regard for Bultmann and Crossan and my seminary professors. Which takes me to my first story.

Seminary stripped away a lot of assumptions from me. I still carry the sense of crossing I line I couldn’t uncross (akin to marriage; you may divorce, but you never uncross the line of marriage as if it never happened), or becoming a parent (same explanation) up reading and then understanding Kristen Stendhal’s Paul Among Jews And Gentiles.  All my friends in seminary agreed that, once we understood Stendahl’s thesis, there was no going back to our old way of thinking. We’d stepped through a door, and it was closed behind us forever.

A minor object lesson in what seminary was like, and how much we all faithfully struggled to learn but not to get lost. Our thoughts were not our professors’ thoughts, and they didn’t want them to be. Well, mostly they didn’t.

I got into an intellectual row with a professor who couldn’t let my theological positions go. The year I took systematics (and I am NOT a systematic theologian. It was a school of thought as wrong-headed as Russell’s logical positivism. And now as dead; or should be), we didn’t have a systematics professor, so three professors taught the class and reviewed our papers. They told me they treated mine as a draft dissertation. I’m not bragging, that was 30 years ago and it never so much as bought me a cup of coffee. If anything, it shows I peaked uselessly and almost silently, long, long ago. But that set me in conflict with one of the three professors.

He was a disciple of Stuart Ogden and process theology (which had the half life of the “death of God” theological movement, with none of the notoriety. I read two of Ogden’s books in seminary. Don’t remember a thing about them.). He was trained as a chemist, so he brought an empiricist’s eye to everything theological. I didn’t, but that didn’t mean I knew better. It just meant I disagreed.

He was sure he knew better, and bluntly told me so. He wouldn’t even agree to disagree, and we had to fight over the issue. When I left, we were still fighting.

So it goes. 

My point is, I don’t care to convince people to agree with me. Persuade? Sure; I have that much ego. Mostly, though, I prefer to make people think for themselves. I was also, then as now, critically aware of my own thinking, and concerned that I wasn’t holding on to some pre-Stendahl (so to speak) ideas I couldn’t bear to examine critically, for fear I might lose them. I tried to listen to my professor’s critiques; but I also examined them. I didn’t want to say: “He’s the professor, he’s right.” But I didn’t want to say “What does he know?,” either.

I left seminary when they were through with me, and I tried to present a post-Stendahl Jesus (let’s call it) to my churches. This was not unlike being a lawyer after law school, and trying to explain to clients that the law wasn’t as simple as making up a solution to their problems, or just finding one ready made in the “law books.” Oh, and, your understanding of the law, Mr. Client, is as ignorant as the jawbone of an ass.

Granted, the law works within enforceable confines, and religion doesn’t (gone are those days). But congregations do like to engage in magical thinking, and put Jesus (and do God) in a mythical past, safely wrapped in cotton so He cannot be broken and only taken out in special occasions to be admired; before putting Him back into the box.

Placing Jesus concretely in 1st century Palestine can be a way of placing Jesus concretely in 21st century America. Or so I thought. I wanted to make Jesus real to the engineer and the architect and the business people. Starting there, maybe they could recognize Jesus (and so God; we’re still not that good at this doctrine of the Trinity) as here and now, not Then and Gone.

Much as I admire Eckhart and the mystics (Julian of Norwich, Teresa, the “Cloud of Unknowing”), it doesn’t preach near as well as Jesus the human in Nazareth.

Although I agree a lot of the scholarship of the Jesus Seminar was so bluntly aimed at American fundamentalism it had a short reach and shorter shelf life. Still, it made me the man I am today. An old, retired grump who airs his complaints on the internet. 🛜 

So it goes.

N.B.: I don’t disagree with Rick’s comment, and I am certainly Protestant enough to allow everyone their own way to God (I consider that an RC tenet as well. A church that embraces Aquinas and Augustine and Francis and Loyola, or just the mystics, is a church no more hellbent on drawing narrow boundaries than many Protestant sects are. It happens, but it really violates the spirit of Protestantism, or “catholic.”)  Let the reader understand.

And that’s the question of schools of biblical criticism. How does the reader understand? Historical criticism has its values, and its limitations. So does formal; and textual; even the various schools of literary criticism (that professor I mentioned despised biblical literary criticism. I was trained in literary criticism; he was trained in chemistry. No surprise we disagreed on that.) I don’t want any one of them to become an obstacle to understanding; I want them to aid understanding. After all, the authors of the Hebrew and Christian scriptures did not think exactly like us. They had presumptions about the nature of God and humanity and society we simply don’t share. Paul’s “house churches,” for example, are what we would call an “extended family.” Multiple generations, and servants, under one roof. A mutual friend of ours owned a “shotgun camelback” row house as his first house, in a city with more urban history than most in Texas. It had three rooms downstairs in a line (the “shotgun”) and a bedroom upstairs on the back (the “camelback”). He told me that earlier in the last century, as many as three generations of a family lived in that house. Not unlike, IOW, the housing situation common to the Empire. We imagine Paul talking to middle class businessmen, and probably miss the reference to Lydia, “a dealer in purple cloth,” in Acts. But purple cloth was reserved for royalty. Again, we don’t have a category like that anymore. Nor do we really understand a world where 95 to 99% of the wealth was held by less than 1% of the people.  When Jesus said “Makarioi hoi ptochoi,” he meant people who didn’t have a shopping cart to push under an overpass. And there were a lot more of them than there are now. At least in our “empire.”

I think if you want to understand what Jesus said, you have to understand who he was talking to.

I’m interested, in other words, in scraping the varnish off Jesus, the better to be confronted by him. I agree with Erasmus, but I agree with Leonard Cohen: “There are cracks, cracks in everything. That’s how the light gets in.” (Which I may be misquoting. I’m too lazy to Google.) I also agree with Jackson Browne, singing about Christmas and the Rebel Jesus; “I have no wish to come between this day and your enjoyment.” You can read that as anyone’s preference for the Christ, not just Xmas day. But I do want people to be confronted by Jesus because, as Paul said, Jesus is an offense. Also because reading scripture is an interpretation; it cannot be otherwise. What you assume I shall as good assume is fine poetry; but it’s terrible exegetical advice.

I wouldn’t have you assume any one school of criticism, even that of the Church Fathers, is fair or foul. I would just challenge you not to rest too comfortably on your assumptions. IMHTheologicalO, anyway, that’s very in line with the Rebel Jesus.


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There Really Isn’t A Bottom, Is There?

What day does he think it is? It really is just ignorance all the way down.
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The Bond Market Will Still Be There In 90 Days

So whither Trump’s tariffs now? Is he going to play this game of chicken over and over again? Or is he going to figure out changing the world is a bit more complicated than he thought?

Stocks rose after Trump partially pulled back on tariffs, recovering most of the losses his tariff announcement caused, but bonds did not.

US Treasuries calmed after Trump pulled back, but didn't recover recent losses.

The global loss of trust in the US, and the safety of US assets, remains.
And so are the tariffs:
TL;DR: The new U.S. tariff rate against our two largest trading partners is either 10%, 25% or 35%, and so far no one I've reached out to at the White House is able to tell me which.
As well as the gross incompetence of the Administration.
I know this is woke DEI, but could we have a national economic policy that's something other than the minute-by-minute whims of a deranged and malevolent old man?
And we’re only three months in.
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Wednesday, April 09, 2025

NYT Pitchbot Explains Why Trump Won

 In one post: 

Sure, Kamala Harris would have have preserved our global power and domestic prosperity. But she would have done so as a Black woman.

by Pete Hegseth and Stephen Miller
And the majority of American voters.
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Where Is Stephen Miller On This?

I thought Stephen assured us such people would be removed instanter, no courts involved. And if it were to pass the House and the Senate and Trump signs it, the courts would declare it unconstitutional ASAP. And then what? Cut their funding? Oh, wait…. They do? She said that? Does she know what they are? So close, and still so far away….  So...planned. It certainly makes this discussion a lot more credible. But this doesn’t:
“Henry..." is how Trump opened the call before launching into the conversation, according to two sources who were not authorized to discuss private conversations.

It was then that McMaster knew this familiar voice was indeed Mr. Trump. But he also realized something else: the commander-in-chief had not intended to call him at all.

McMaster goes by H.R., short for Herbert Raymond. Not Henry.

"Mr. President, this is H.R. McMaster," he said into the phone.

"Why the f*** would I talk to H.R. McMaster?" Trump asked dismissively, and then Trump launched into a scathing critique of his former aide, two sources said.

The call was brief.

Two sources told CBS News that the president intended to call South Carolina Governor Henry McMaster, not his former national security adviser.

It is unclear who bears responsibility for dialing the wrong McMaster. According to one person familiar with the call, the call was placed by an aide who works with the president.
Talk about the gang that couldn’t shoot straight. It’s the little things that throw light on the big things. Like this: So close, yet again so far away.

Ah, there’s Stephen! Reminding us that we’ve always been at war with Eastasia.
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"Am I Getting Through To You, Mr. Beale?"

“Queasy"?
What happened in the bond market overnight, the spike in yields on the 30-year and the 10-year bond, which showed that people were dumping our bonds," he noted. "And from what I understand, this is what forced the hand of this 90-day reprieve now."

"It's the bond market and the sort of lending markets that's the plumbing of the economy and those markets were imploding last night and that's why we have a 90-day freeze."
It wasn’t people getting queasy. It was a person.  Somebody told him he was meddling with primal forces:



He sure sounds like it:
"So I consider, I think in financial markets, because they've changed, look how much it changed today," he added. "We went from, you know, pretty moderate today, but over the last few days it looked pretty glum, to, I guess they say it was the biggest day in financial history. That's a pretty big change."

Nobody said that.

Bond markets are definitely not a language I speak, so I’ll let JMM put it plain terms:
The one additional thing to mention is why this happened. Every sign is that it was not about the equities markets but rather the bond market, where the demand for US Treasury bonds seemed to be softening as the global economy moved into crisis. That defies all the rules of the 21st century global economy. It means either something very, very bad or something armageddonly bad. The first is that banks and hedge funds and other big financial muckety-mucks were under so much cash-crunch stress that they were forced to liquidate Treasuries at any price. That points to a real danger of being on the precipice of a 2008-style financial crisis, albeit with very different drivers. The other possibility was that global buyers were losing the confidence in US Treasury debt itself which is basically the sheet anchor of the modern global economy. Take that away and things get much worse for the United States and our global primacy starts to evaporate.
I’ve seen the 2008 financial crisis used as the benchmark for “bad.” I’m pretty sure that would be good compared to the darker scenarios involving a collapsing bond market.

Primal forces, indeed. Will Trump try again in 90 days? The real question is: how long will the lesson of the bonds last?

I guess that depends on how the bond market reacts to Trump; today, and tomorrow; and tomorrow; and….
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“Is Our Children Learning?”

Sen. Rand Paul (K-Y) on Trump backing off on reciprocal tariffs for 90 days:

“I think that the marketplace has spooked them.”

“Hopefully there'll be some people talking some sense into the policy and being less extreme,” he added. “There should be a learning curve here. When you add a bunch of tariffs, you lose 6 trillion in the marketplace. When you get rid of the tariffs, guess what? It comes bounding back.”
Assumes a level of rational thought not in existence. Much better. Kissing the king’s ass always seemed to be the entire point of the drill. Of course, that was always a predictable consequence. Well, you could be this guy 👇 He knew who he was working for.
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Aren’t Factories Like Trailer Parks?

Pre-fab and you just roll ‘em up and plug ‘em in, right?
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Tuesday, April 08, 2025

Imagine…

...how many Americans are going to be happy about their drug prices going up and their insurance coverage going down. You really, really don’t. And yet he’s insisting they all lower their trade deficits with America to zero, because he’s an idiot. He might as well be asking them to change the gravitational constant of the universe. They won’t be kissing his ass; they’ll be marveling at how such an ass became POTUS.
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We’re Gonna Be So Rich We Won’t Know How To Spend All The Money!

He really doesn’t have a clue what he’s doing, does he? Maybe he thinks the market is a giant valve as big as this room…. 
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🎶”Shining Like A Red Rubber Ball”🎶

Well, Trump does lead the world in the manufacture of bullshit. The Centralia coal fire has entered the chat. Grandpa’s off his meds again. I’m a little surprised he doesn’t take credit for making the rain fall that ended the fires. But it’s actually scarier that he thinks this is what did it.

If it wasn’t for J.D. Vance, I’d want to see Trump 25thed in a heartbeat. He really shouldn’t be allowed anything sharper than a rubber ball.
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🎶This is the end, my friend, the end…🎶


 

Apologies. That’s probably hard to read, and besides, it’s written for lawyers (all professions are a conspiracy against the laity, yadda yadda yadda). Another “shadow docket” decision and, again, Sotomayor and KJB dissent on procedural grounds. The latter argues the application itself is faulty where the applicants for the stay have not demonstrated irreparable harm. The former would deny the stay; no further explanation is given.

Solid grounds, IMHLO, especially since this is yet another interim emergency appeal (meaning you need a stronger argument to get the relief sought). But the anecdotal truth (meaning observers of the court know it even if law professors can’t cite statistics to prove it) is, the courts generally yield to the interests of the government, especially as you climb the ladder of appeals.

The era of the Warren Court, IOW, which is the one so formative in the public memory/imagination, was the exception, not the rule. I learned as a lawyer that what I wanted the law to be, and what it would be, were two different things. Whether you like it or not, that’s the way it is. And the arguments of Thurgood Marshall and Ruth Bader Ginsburg wouldn’t get far with this Court.

Another emergency docket #SCOTUS win for Trump—albeit on incredibly narrow grounds in the OPM probationary firings case.

Majority holds that at least some of the groups who got the injunction here likely don’t have standing.

But this leaves other injunctions in place and says nothing re: merits.
This is a very narrow ruling and, IMHLO, standing is merely the toehold the Court uses to rule in favor of the application at all. My sympathies, as ever, are with KJB’s reasoning. I think the Court should have left this for regular order in an appeal from a final decision. The fact the Court is taking these applications at all shows more deference (or even bias) than any other party would be given.

I wouldn’t even call it a “win,” because the expectation this court will turn Trump back is expecting this court to act like the Warren Court. And that the Roberts Court will never do. The standing call is a poor one, especially at this stage of proceedings. But it’s hardly the end, or even the beginning of the end. It certainly doesn’t impact all the other cases on appeal or in the trial courts.

It coulda been worse. And, frankly, probably will be, soon enough.
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Internet Armchair Lawyers Are The Worst

 I don’t agree with (or even less relevant, approve) if the majority opinion in Trump v J.G.G. But any legal analysis of that opinion that doesn’t even mention the APA is not worth the paper it’s printed on.

Internet armchair lawyers are the worst.

Professor Vladeck puts the matter far more cogently:

And that leads me to my last point: This isn’t any old case; it’s the case in which the government has come the closest to outright defiance of a court order (something Chief Judge Boasberg is still in the middle of adjudicating). And it’s the case that led President Trump to call for the impeachment of a sitting federal judge for doing nothing other than rule against him (a statement that led to a surprisingly quick and aggressive rebuttal from Chief Justice Roberts). Not two weeks later, here’s Roberts providing the decisive vote to hold that, in fact, the case shouldn’t have been before that judge (or that court) in the first place, without even a hint that any of the government’s (profoundly disturbing) behavior in this case warrants any reproach. As Justice Sotomayor concludes her dissent, “The Government’s conduct in this litigation poses an extraordinary threat to the rule of law. That a majority of this Court now rewards the Government for its behavior with discretionary equitable relief is indefensible. We, as a Nation and a court of law, should be better than this.”

That the Court is not, in fact, “better than this” may come as little surprise to folks who have come to view everything this Court does with cynicism. For as harsh a critic of the Court as I’ve been, especially with respect to its behavior on emergency applications like these, it still surprises me. And it opens the door to the alarming possibility that the Court is not, in fact, ready to accept how profound a threat the Trump administration poses to the rule of law—not because the Court is upholding what the government is doing, but because a majority of the justices are willing to let the government win on procedural technicalities in contexts in which the real-world costs are increasingly severe. It’s not too late for the Court to reverse this pattern. But it’s getting late quickly.
Supreme Court opinions are lawyers talking to lawyers, because appellate opinions are decided on points of law (or should be). Trial court opinions are usually lawyers talking to lawyers and lay people, because those opinions have to find the facts and apply the law. Every legal ruling is a matter of how the facts and the legal reasoning lead to the conclusion. The conclusion is important; but the legal reasoning is just as important.

This case was decided on procedural issues, like the question of using the APA for injunctive relief, since that remedy is not available under the AEA. The APA is also how Boasberg was approaching certifying a class for the judicial efficiency of a class action suit. If you aren’t discussing those matters, but instead are arguing about what cited cases “actually” stand for, you aren’t just missing the point, you aren’t even in the debate hall. Cases cited in opinions ALWAYS rule on several different issues, and the one they are cited for may only be of minor importance in the original opinion. It’s just whinging that your preferred outcome, wasn’t the court’s outcome. The dissents here know better, and go after the argument with counter-arguments of their own.

The Administration wanted carte blanc to do as they pleased under the AEA. They didn’t get it. Professor Vladeck points out habeas proceedings will now have to be heard in the Southern District of Texas, with appeals going to the Fifth Circuit, the appellate court most likely to side with the government. But that’s also the circuit most overturned by the Supreme Court, lately. It’s hardly all sunshine and flowers. But neither is it all destruction and despair.

Congress still has the true whip hand over the Presidency. Whether we, the people, will give them the numbers and the backbone to use it, remains to be seen. But that is the true constitutional solution. There really isn’t another one. (Yes, that could even capture the unicorn of impeachment, but I really don’t think we can expect to replace that many Senators in one blow.)



rustypickup, in comments, identifies both the problem with the decision, and the problem pointed out in dissent: using the shadow docket (cases not fully developed in trial or in appeal; not briefed and argued to the Court; opinions based on reduction reasoning and quick conclusions), to do almost in secret what the Court should do on at least the appearance of hearing arguments and considering issues. The dissent said it: the Court threatens its own legitimacy with not just its rulings, but its actions.
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Monday, April 07, 2025

Being Very Afraid 😳

The au courant intertoobs nightmare is Trump directing the military to take Greenland by force. So, does this mean he’s going to just send troops to Gaza and set up military shop there?

Seems as likely as invading Greenland, but what do I know?
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Every Time You Think He Can’t Get Stupider

What could go wrong? Well, until the habeas petitions around the country get you on a new court docket for every individual detained. The trial court had provisionally certified a class, which would put them all in one court, on one docket. You’ve lost that, now. Enjoy. Same answer. All the detainees under Boasberg now are allowed habeas proceedings on new dockets, in the districts of confinement. In the immediate case, that’s Texas (Southern District, I assume, but I can’t be sure). The Court also required notice, after the date of their order, to give each detainee time to request habeas proceedings. I foresee litigation on how much time is “enough,” so I don’t think those detained are on the first plane to El Salvador. This is going to be in the courts for awhile yet.
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IMHO, Anyway

 Don’t criticize people as “dumb” by saying dumb things:

The administration is a perfect storm of dumb people who enjoy inflicting pain and are addicted to psychotic cruelty and quadrupling down. It ends in total ruin if you don't impeach him.
In the history of the country, no President has ever been removed from office. Nixon resigned, which just proves the rule. The way to end this Administration lies in the hands of Congress (not impeachment), and through the courts.

BTW, the 5 member majority did not hand the Administration a victory today (although Sotomayor thinks they did. And I think she’s right. But the two dissents are on procedural grounds. Not unimportant, but when non-lawyers think of “wins,” they mean substantive law.). The majority ruled the government must allow for habeas proceedings, instead of seeking injunctive relief (I told you it was procedural).  This will take the cases away from Boasberg, as habeas proceedings must be in the district where the defendant is confined (I’m just assuming that is not D.C. for each of them). I suppose that’s a “win” for Trump, but if that’s the hill you want to die on, you’re not doing any more good than MAGA.

The courts can do some of this (Trump wanted the AEA to give him absolute power to deport people; the Supremes didn’t give him that). The Congress has to do most of it. Trump hasn’t even dismissed, much less noticed, the protests over the weekend.  It is up to us to make Congress take notice, or to pay at the ballot box for not paying attention.

Please forget impeachment. It won’t work, and that which doesn’t kill the king, only makes him stronger. This is actually the clarity we need:
Donald Trump’s hefty new tariffs represent an unprecedented shock to the economy, and they are being accompanied by policies that run directly counter to the goal of promoting American economic dominance.
Because Trump is taking orders from Putin? Or because Trump is an idiot surrounded and supported by idiots? I’m pretty sure signs point to the latter. 

We should proceed accordingly. IMHO, anyway.
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End of the Game ♟️

 Endgame:

“Bessent’s view was, ‘The markets will keep melting unless you shift,’” one person familiar with the conversations told the outlet. “You’re not going to abandon the policy, but you have to talk about negotiating and what the endgame is.”
And so Trump did. His goal is an absolute balance of trade between the U.S. and all the countries of the world (well, except Russia. He’s fine with Russia).

A literal impossibility, but hey, nobody said it would be easy!

This is what happens when you leave the Peter Principle in control.
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In Other Words…

Trump was wrong in the ‘80’s, and hasn’t learned anything since.

So he’s still stuck deep in the past.  Thanks to the Senator for clearing that up.
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📉

Well, we can’t have that! The Dow quickly went back below its open. Seems the market was desperately seeking rationality:
This is the timeline of what happened that moved FOUR TRILLION DOLLARS on the market just now:

1) Kevin Hassett gives an unremarkable Fox interview at 8:24 a.m. ET

2) @atrupar clipped it, as he does, at 8:33 a.m. ET (and it gets not much notice)

3) @DeItaone "misinterprets" it at 10:13 a.m. and tweets the white house considering a 90 day pause

4) Market pops 7-10%

5) WH denies

6) @DeItaone claims the news is sourced to reuters and he deletes the original tweet
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Hammer Time

I would say Trump is acting with the authority of a stupid person who doesn’t understand complexity, and just wants to take a hammer to it.

The only question now is: how long will it take for Congress to decide it’s up to them to take the hammer away?

The outlook is not good….
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Benny Needs To Talk To Peter Navarro

(It’s almost entertaining watching Trump’s most sycophantic courtiers try to defend Dear Leader’s obvious incompetence. Fox Business News seems to be doing it by…ignoring business news.)
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We Are In The Hands Of Complete Morons

 Pete Navarro as the Voice of Sauron:

"Zero tariffs, that means nothing to us because it's the non-tariff cheating that matters!" he insisted. "They sell us $15 for every $1 we sell them. About $5 of that $15 is China trans shipping to Vietnam to evade their tariffs."

In reality, a country running a trade surplus with another country is not "cheating" that country. Rather, it is a reflection of the fact that the country with the trade deficit buys more overall goods from the country with the surplus than vice-versa.

Regardless, Navarro told CNBC that "any country that wants to come to talk to us, talk to us about lowering your non-tariff barriers."

Navarro then went on to cite examples of other nations' value-added taxes on goods as an example of stealth tariffs placed on American goods despite the fact that VATs apply to both foreign and domestically produced goods and thus do not penalize American products..
Meanwhile, Trump whistles past the graveyard.
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Echoing TC’s Comments

TC’s comments, and the echo: 
One man just wiped out $10 trillion in wealth, is destroying centuries-old legal protections, and seems determined to unravel humanity’s greatest public health achievement. In 3 months.

I don’t know how we get out of this. But if we do, one person can never have that kind of power again.
JMM:
This is a big deal. Spread the word. But it’s tiny compared to the totality of what’s happening at NIH. Cure Research for all cancers, Alzheimer’s, everything is being gutted. Intentionally. It’s all getting burned to the ground but the news isn’t getting out. The new cures won’t be there for you.
I can sort of understand world trade as Trump’s white  whale. It’s complicated, he’s stupid, and anything complicated a stupid person is wont to destroy. And as I type those words I realize that’s the explanation. Government is complicated, so he’s going to destroy it. Destroying medical research is not the goal, it’s just collateral damage. 

Trump is Godzilla rampaging through the buildings. As I recall, the original version was somewhat of a parable of how humanity created its own monster.
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Sunday, April 06, 2025

Their First Clue

CNBC
Investors were surprised first by the magnitude of certain rates applied to trading partners that appeared to be based on a formula without a valid rationale based on established economic theory. They were rattled further when China on Friday decided to retaliate first with a 34% tariff on all U.S. imports, instead of negotiating.
That was last week. Then Trump quit playing golf:
Investors did not receive the news over the weekend they were wishing for that the Trump administration was having successful negotiations with countries to lower the rates, or at the very least, was considering delaying the set of so-called reciprocal tariffs due to take effect April 9. The initial unilateral 10% tariff went into effect Saturday.

Instead the president and his key advisors played down the sell-off:

Trump said Sunday evening on the market sell-off: "I don't want anything to go down, but sometimes you have to take medicine to fix something."

Trump added, "We have a trillion-dollar trade deficit with China, hundreds of billions of dollars a year we lose with China. And unless we solve that problem, I'm not going to make a deal."

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick told CBS News that the tariffs would not be postponed. "The tariffs are coming... They are definitely going to stay in place for days and weeks."

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent noted to NBC News that more than 50 countries have approached the administration for negotiations, but cautioned "they've been bad actors for a long time, and it's not the kind of thing you can negotiate away in days or weeks."
Dow futures are down 1600 points on Sunday evening. The Dow dropped over 2300 points on Friday. Monday is already saying: “Hold my beer.” 🍺 

I guess the bit tonight about “medicine” was not reassuringly rational. I’m also sure the nearly 3 million people in the streets will not speak with a louder voice than investors will to Congress in the coming days.

The only question is, how long will the powers that be let this madman think he’s in charge? Who will ask: “At long last, sir, have you no shame?”

I really don’t think he can defy reality with his bullshit for very long. This is much bigger than he realizes:
5:50 pm PST:

Japan’s banking sector in free fall.

Complete meltdown across all major financial institutions with 14-17% drops not seen since 2008 financial crisis.

I really don’t think he can handle it for very long.

The future knows; the rest of us have to live through it.
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Try Again, Discount Goebbels

The judicial Power of the United States, shall be vested in one supreme Court, and in such inferior Courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish. The Judges, both of the supreme and inferior Courts, shall hold their Offices during good Behaviour, and shall, at stated Times, receive for their Services, a Compensation, which shall not be diminished during their Continuance in Office.
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Syntax Matters

No notes. "Business is a confidence game”? Pretty sure he meant “business requires confidence, i.e., trust. The one thing about business Trump is incapable of understanding. Ironically, also the fundamental thing government, through law, helps establish. Follow the laws, business thrives, trust is reliable and, when it isn’t, enforceable. Through government.

Trump understands none of this. That’s where the real problem lies.
Hmm...maybe crypto is not…trustworthy?

Speaking of which:
Um...okay. And how are we defining "strong"? Ok, he thinks he's strong. See? And that is what he told them. (The companies are coming because of Biden. No company would make such a major decision and be ready to act on it within 24 hours, as Trump suggests. The very idea is delusional.) He’s really not very good at math. And all he really knows is that “a trillion” sounds like a lot; and enough to be impressive.
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