The Conversation -- April 13, 2025
Mad King to Re-impose Tariffs He Just Cancelled. Tony Romm, et al., of the New York Times: Donald “Trump signaled on Sunday that he would pursue new tariffs on the powerful computer chips inside smartphones and other technologies, just two days after his administration excluded a variety of electronics from the steep import taxes recently applied on goods arriving from China. The push came as Mr. Trump’s top economic advisers scrambled to explain their shifting strategy, after having insisted for weeks that they would shield no company or industry from any of the fees they have levied in a bid to reset U.S. trade relationships.” ~~~
~~~ Marie: What happened? Didn't Tim Apple pay enough tribute to the Dear Leader? This on-again/off-again/on-again chaos is INSANE. ~~~
~~~ Ah, a Fake "Clarification." Quinn Scanlan of ABC News: "Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said Sunday that the administration's decision Friday night to exempt a range of electronic devices from tariffs implemented earlier this month was only a temporary reprieve, with the secretary announcing that those items would be subject to 'semiconductor tariffs' that will likely come in 'a month or two.' 'All those products are going to come under semiconductors, and they're going to have a special focus type of tariff to make sure that those products get reshored. We need to have semiconductors, we need to have chips, and we need to have flat panels -- we need to have these things made in America. We can't be reliant on Southeast Asia for all of the things that operate for us,' Lutnick told 'This Week' co-anchor Jonathan Karl. He continued, "So what [... Donald Trump's] doing is he's saying they're exempt from the reciprocal tariffs, but they're included in the semiconductor tariffs, which are coming in probably a month or two. So these are coming soon.'" MB: Okay, big-tech manufacturers: Donnie has his hand out. Cross his palm.
Keith Bradsher of the New York Times: “China has suspended exports of a wide range of critical minerals and magnets, threatening to choke off supplies of components central to automakers, aerospace manufacturers, semiconductor companies and military contractors around the world. Shipments of the magnets, essential for assembling everything from cars and drones to robots and missiles, have been halted at many Chinese ports while the Chinese government drafts a new regulatory system. Once in place, the new system could permanently prevent supplies from reaching certain companies, including American military contractors. The official crackdown is part of China’s retaliation for ... [Donald] Trump’s sharp increase in tariffs that started on April 2.”
Josh Marcus of the Independent: “The U.S. has deported 10 more alleged Latin American gang members to El Salvador, where they will likely be detained in a notorious maximum-security prison accused of numerous human rights abuses. 'Last night, another 10 criminals from the MS-13 and Tren de Aragua Foreign Terrorist Organizations arrived in El Salvador,' Secretary of State Marco Rubio wrote on X on Sunday, praising the collaboration between the Trump administration and Salvadoran president Nayib Bukele as an 'example for security and prosperity in our hemisphere.'” MB: Yet somehow in this excellent collaboration, Rubio is unable to secure the return of a man the U.S. erroneously sent to the same El Salvador prison. The U.S. plane that carried the ten people of the prison presumably was sitting on a tarmac near the prison, so there is no possible reason -- other than that the government lied to a federal judge that Kilmar Abrego García was alive and well and resident in the prison -- that the plane could not have picked up Abrego and brought him home to his family. ~~~
~~~ Olivia George & Marianne LeVine of the Washington Post: “The Trump administration said Sunday that it is not required to engage El Salvador’s government in efforts to facilitate the return of a Maryland man mistakenly deported to a notorious prison there, striking a defiant tone in responding to a federal judge’s order that plans be made to bring him back to the United States. Federal officials said Sunday that the high court’s ruling required only that they 'remove any domestic obstacles that would otherwise impede' the return of Kilmar Abrego García. The administration also argued that Abrego García 'is no longer eligible' for the protection from deportation that should have prevented him from being sent to El Salvador in the first place, according to records filed Sunday evening in U.S. District Court in Maryland.” ~~~
~~~ Marie: Wait, wait! The government has not remove the "domestic obstacles," because the domestic obstacles are Donald Trump, Pam Bondi, Marco Rubio, Kristi Noem & others. So it undermines its own shameful argument.
Pennsylvania. Edgar Sandoval & Jeremy Peters of the New York Times: “Pennsylvania state authorities have arrested a 38-year-old Harrisburg man and said he set fire to the Pennsylvania governor’s mansion, forcing Gov. Josh Shapiro and his family to evacuate early Sunday before the blaze severely damaged part of the building. The man, identified as Cody Balmer, 38, jumped a fence and managed to evade state troopers as he broke in to the building and set the fire, the authorities said, adding that he had used homemade incendiary devices. He fled the scene and was arrested in Harrisburg on Sunday afternoon, officials said in a news conference.... Mr. Shapiro, who became emotional [during a news briefing] as he described his family’s ordeal, recalled the moment a state trooper banged on his door shortly after 2 a.m., woke him, his wife and children, and rushed them to safety from an arson attack that he called 'targeted.'”
Israel. Louisa Loveluck, et al., of the Washington Post: “Explosions at a United Nations guesthouse in Gaza that killed a European aid worker and severely wounded five others last month were very likely caused by two Israeli tank shells, according to experts who analyzed photos of the scene obtained exclusively by The Washington Post. The strike on March 19, which came a day after Israel’s surprise bombardment ended a two-month ceasefire, led the United Nations to substantially scale back its international workforce in the Gaza Strip. The U.N. has blamed Israel for the attack, an assertion some analysts have supported. Israel has denied responsibility.”
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Trump’s on-and-off-again tariffs leave the door wide open for billionaire corporations to suck up for corrupt deals — while leaving small businesses, farmers, and families out in the cold. --- Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), on X
If you’re a company that can donate money to Donald Trump, if you’re a company that can afford the big lobbyists, you don’t have tariffs applied to you.... More evidence that the tariffs have nothing to do with rebuilding American jobs. -- Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) ~~~
~~~ Tobi Raji & Shira Ovide of the Washington Post: “The Trump administration announced late Friday night that smartphones, computers and other electronic components are exempt from what the White House calls 'reciprocal' tariffs, days after the United States imposed the highest levies on foreign goods in a century. The directive, issued by U.S. Customs and Border Protection, lists nearly two dozen exemptions, including chips, flash drives and TV displays. For makers of electronics, particularly Apple, the break on tariffs is likely to be a huge relief. Apple has faced the prospect of a new import tax of roughly $700 or more on each $1,000 iPhone imported from China, based on tariff rates the White House increased to at least 145 percent.” The CNBC story is here. (Also linked yesterday.) ~~~
~~~ The WashPo story has been updated: “The exemptions also come days after U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer told senators that 'the president has been clear with me and with others that he does not intend to have exclusions and exemptions.'... The new exemptions appear to undermine [the] reshoring effort [i.e., manufacturing the products in the U.S.], but will probably be welcomed by makers of electronics....” ~~~
~~~ Marie (I wrote yesterday): I know that most people will be relieved by this exemption because it will save scads of money on products that most of us use. And that's fine. But let me tell you how monumentally stupid these exemptions are. Trump claimed that the purpose of his big beautiful tariffs was to induce manufacturing in the U.S. His Commerce Secretary, Howard Lutnick (or Nutlick, as Akhilleus prefers), spoke of the joy of "millions of Americans" whistling while they worked screwing tiny little screws into tiny little holes into tiny little electronic devices. Well, Donnie & Howie, if you remove the tariffs on electronic parts, you are not going to get millions of Americans screwing tiny little screws into smartphones & computers in shiny new factories dotting the great American landscape because we're going to keep on keepin' on importing those electronics. Idiots! ~~~
~~~ Update: Maybe they're not idiots. As Senators Warren & Murphy suggest, this is a racket. Dangling tariff exemptions in front of big corporations is a way for Boss Trump to exact protection money from the companies. Instead of asserting that Trump imposed the tariffs with no planning for them, we should acknowledge that he did have a plan: the careless tariff scheme was designed from the git-go as a corrupt ruse to enrich Trump. And thanks to the Supremes, since imposing tariffs is clearly an official act, Trump cannot be criminally charged for running a protection racket out of the Oval Office.
Lori LaRocco of CNBC: “Apple’s iPhone and other technology hardware, from chips to PCs, received a China tariff reprieve from ... [Donald] Trump on Saturday, but for much of the U.S. economy and small business owners, the damage will soon be irreversible from the 145% tariffs being imposed on Chinese imports. Canceled freight orders and abandoned freight from China are quickly becoming the norm in the trade war between the U.S. and China, according to supply chain executives, as businesses across U.S. industries put a full stop on container exports, with the tariffs hitting like a ton of bricks. 'Furniture producers in China have seen a complete halt in orders from U.S. importers, and we’re hearing the same across toys, apparel, footwear, and sports equipment,' said Alan Murphy, founder and CEO of Sea-Intelligence.... 'Almost everything is on hold as it relates to China business,' said Alan Baer, CEO of OL USA.” MB: IOW, even if you're willing to pay two-and-a-half times last month's price for an item you need that was made in China -- say, a child car seat -- you won't be able to find it for sale in the U.S. ~~~
Import Chinese battery: 145% tariff
Import Chinese battery inside Chinese laptop: 20% tariff
Import Chinese battery inside Vietnamese laptop: 0% tariffFuckin brilliant. A+ work here team. I am so glad there are such smart people working on our trade policy. -- Joey Politano on Bluesky, via Krugman ~~~
~~~ Paul Krugman: "The Trump Tariffs Just Got Even Worse.... (1) For electronics, at least, we’re now putting much higher tariffs on intermediate goods used in manufacturing than on final goods. This actually discourages manufacturing in the United States.... (2) Uncertainty created by ever-changing tariff plans is arguably a bigger problem than the tariffs themselves.... (3) The stench of corruption around these policies keeps getting stronger. There’s a lot of circumstantial evidence for massive insider trading around last week’s tariff announcement; the big beneficiaries from the latest move are companies that made big donations to Trump. Investing in plant and equipment looks like a bad idea given the uncertainty, but investing in bribes for the ruling family clearly yields excellent returns."
New York Times Editors: Donald Trump's “careless conduct of the public’s business has roiled stock and bond markets, threatened to cause a recession and damaged America’s global standing. The president’s decision-making has been so erratic that at one point this week, the administration’s top trade official was interrupted in the middle of testimony before Congress because the president had just changed the policy the official was defending.... The latest version [of Trump's tariff schedule] ... is imposing a 10 percent tariff on imports from most nations, along with higher rates on imports from America’s three largest trading partners: Canada, Mexico and China. The average tax on imports will rise to the highest level in more than a century, raising the prices on many consumer goods. The 145 percent maximum rate on Chinese imports is intended to isolate that nation economically, but the simultaneous tariffs on everyone else will undermine that goal. And while the stated purpose of all the tariffs is to expand American manufacturing, putting them in place immediately doesn’t give companies time to build factories. It will cause pain without any benefit....
“It is a bitter irony that even as Mr. Trump raises tariffs, he is axing federal support for these technologies, which are among the most promising areas of domestic manufacturing. Some companies are already abandoning their building plans. Mr. Trump’s use of tariffs is indiscriminate.... In addition to raising prices, tariffs are likely to slow economic growth. And another danger looms: There are warning signs that Mr. Trump’s provocations are reducing demand for Treasuries, forcing the government to offer higher interest rates to investors. If that continues, the federal debt will become even harder to repay.” (Also linked yesterday.)
Man of the People? Not So Much. David Smith of the Guardian: “After lighting a fuse under global financial markets, Donald Trump stepped back – all the way to a Florida golf course.... [While at Mar-a-Lago, he also donned a tux to headline a $1mm/plate fundraising dinner for his super PAC.] Trump returned to Washington from his four-day golfing weekend,] his first public event was a celebration of baseball’s World Series winners, the Los Angeles Dodgers, where he was presented with a 'Trump 47' baseball shirt. A week later, having just caved to pressure to ease his trade tariffs, the US president defended the retreat while hosting racing car champions at the White House.... It was a jolting juxtaposition that prompted comparisons with the emperor Nero..., or insane monarchs who lost touch with reality. It also provided a clear illustration of how Trump governs...: erratically, with little attention to convention, and often on the hoof from one public engagement to another surrounded by courtiers who never disagree with him.” (Also linked yesterday.)
Maureen Dowd of the New York Times: “Trump is engaging the full power of the presidency to settle scores. The White House was not meant for petty tyrants on revenge tours. In the biggest job in the world, Trump seems like a very small man. And he has surrounded himself with small people who elaborately flatter him and puff him up in risible cabinet meetings.... Now that Trump’s tariff scheme has gone horribly awry — and the administration’s attempt to spin it as an 'Art of the Deal' victory has fallen flat — it remains to be seen if this will be a 'Wizard of Oz' moment when the curtain gets pulled back on the con man.... Even before Trump opened a Pandora’s box of economic woe, we knew numbers weren’t his strong suit. He had six bankruptcies, and his father had to buy $3.4 million in chips to save one of his casinos.” (Also linked yesterday.)
AmerExit? A Foreshadowing. Mark Landler of the New York Times: “Britain has watched ... [Donald] Trump’s tariffs with a mix of shock, fascination and queasy recognition. The country, after all, embarked on a similar experiment in economic isolationism when it voted to leave the European Union in 2016. Nearly nine years after the Brexit referendum, it is still reckoning with the costs. The lessons of that experience are suddenly relevant again as Mr. Trump uses a similar playbook to erect walls around the United States. Critics once described Brexit as the greatest act of economic self-harm by a Western country in the post-World War II era.... Even Mr. Trump’s abrupt reversal last week of some of his tariffs, in the face of a bond-market revolt, recalled Britain, where Liz Truss, a short-lived prime minister, was forced to retreat from radical tax cuts that frightened the markets. Her misbegotten experiment was the culmination of a cycle of extreme policies set off by Britain’s decision to forsake the world’s largest trading bloc.... Mr. Trump was a full-throated champion of Brexit in 2016, drawing explicit parallels between it and the political movement he was marshaling.” ~~~
~~~ Will Hutton of the Guardian/Observer: “The game-changing geopolitical event last week was the near collapse of the immense $29tn market in US government debt, threatening the stability of the American and global financial system and the safe-haven status of dollar assets. The US president boasted as the collapse unfolded that world leaders were queueing to 'kiss his arse'. Twelve hours later, he was in the same humiliatingly weak position as the then British prime minister Liz Truss found herself after her tax-slashing 'mini-budget' in 2022.... Worse, he has killed the prospect of the rest of the world buying the avalanche of new US government debt that will follow from the huge tax cuts he plans in the autumn.... The EU, Britain and other rule-of-law capitalist democracies now have the balance of advantage. But they need to recognise it and work together to capitalise on the opportunity, rather than each sue for the most advantageous deal possible in their limited 'national interest'. This is a moment when the national interest is best pursued by hanging together. The situation remains dangerous.... The democracies must find a common front over the next 90 days as an exercise in damage limitation, and then go beyond that to fashion a new trade order from the ruins of the old – but necessarily without the US.” ~~~
~~~ Marie: Got that? Our long-time friends will plot against us. As they must. Buh-bye, USA. And we're alone in the world, trying to make DIY baby car seats from dollar-store bits. Oh, wait. That dollar-store stuff is made in China.
More Stupid Trump Tricks. Gabrielle Canon of the Guardian: “Donald Trump shows no signs of easing his assault on climate science as plans of more sweeping cuts to key US research centers surfaced on Friday. The administration is planning to slash budgets at both the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency (Noaa) and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Nasa), according to internal budget documents, taking aim specifically at programs used to study impacts from the climate crisis. Craig McLean, a longtime director of the office of oceanic and atmospheric research (OAR) who retired in 2022, told the Guardian that the cuts were draconian and would 'compromise the safety, economic competitiveness, and security of the American people'. If the plan is approved by Congress, funding for OAR would be eviscerated – cut from $485m to $171m – dismantling an important part of the agency’s mission. All budgets for climate, weather and ocean laboratories would be drained, according to the document reviewed by the Guardian, which states: 'At this funding level, OAR is eliminated as a line office.'... Noaa is facing a $1.3bn cut to overall operations and research, with various programs on the chopping block, and the National Ocean Service would be cut in half. Science done outside the agency would also be undermined with cuts to Noaa’s climate research grants program, which provides roughly $70m a year.” (Also linked yesterday.) The Washington Post's story is here.
Maya Ward of Politico: “A 60-foot wide strip of land along three southwestern border states will be placed under the jurisdiction of the U.S. military to help deter illegal immigration, the White House said Friday.... Donald Trump issued a memorandum directing the military to take temporary control over the Roosevelt Reservation, a corridor that runs along the border line in California, Arizona and New Mexico.... The memorandum marks an escalation in the president’s use of the military to facilitate his sweeping crackdown on immigration. And while unclear how far the administration will go, it could be an additional step to militarizing the nation’s southwestern border.... Immigration, military and legal experts have said that Trump’s move to militarize the border could raise legal questions about potential violations to the Posse Comitatus Act, a federal law that generally prohibits active-duty troops from being used in domestic law enforcement.” (Also linked yesterday.)
Trump Tries to Shake Down Ukraine. Luke Harding of the Guardian: “The US has demanded control of a crucial pipeline in Ukraine used to send Russian gas to Europe, according to reports, in a move described as a colonial shakedown. US and Ukrainian officials met on Friday to discuss White House proposals for a minerals deal. Donald Trump wants Kyiv to hand over its natural resources as 'payback' in return for weapons delivered by the previous Biden administration. Talks have become increasingly acrimonious, Reuters said. The latest US draft is more 'maximalist' than the original version from February, which proposed giving Washington $500bn worth of rare metals, as well as oil and gas.... Volodymyr Landa, a senior economist with the Centre for Economic Strategy, a Kyiv thinktank, said the Americans were out for 'all they can get'. Their bullying 'colonial-type' demands had little chance of being accepted by Kyiv, he predicted.'” MB: I suspect that the architect of the shakedown is Vladimir Putin, & that Trump plans to turn ownership of the pipeline over to Russia. (Also linked yesterday.)
Marie: Okay, I think I've found the art form Chairman of the Board Donald Trump will be introducing to the Kennedy Center: ~~~
~~~ Mixed Martial Arts! Maggie Haberman of the New York Times: Donald “Trump, some of his cabinet members and his adviser Elon Musk sat ringside in Miami late Saturday night at the Ultimate Fighting Championship event — a spectacle of violence, throbbing music and cheering crowds that the president has long admired.... Unlike World Wrestling Entertainment events, U.F.C. matches aren’t staged.... The scene on Saturday was emblematic of a president who is increasingly emboldened, brazen and encouraging of displays of force to carry out his agenda, particularly on immigration and crime.
“Mr. Trump and two of his older children walked into the Kaseya Center to the booming sounds of the Kid Rock song 'American Bad Ass' and to sustained, thunderous applause from the crowd. He sat next to Mr. Musk, who had brought one of his 14 children. They sat with the F.B.I. director, Kash Patel; Secretary of State Marco Rubio, a former senator from Florida; the director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard; and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his wife, the actress Cheryl Hines. Also in the Trump entourage was Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas. When Mr. Trump first arrived, he tried to shake Mr. Kennedy’s hand; Mr. Kennedy was looking in the other direction. Mr. Trump then walked past the outstretched hand of Ms. Hines, moving his gaze past her entirely despite appearing to see her.”
Trump Can't Remember Much about Memory Test He Claims He Aced. Alex Henderson of AlterNet: "Trump had an annual physical on Friday, April 11, including a cognitive test. Yet when [he] spoke to reporters aboard Air Force One, he was short on details. Trump told reporters, 'It’s a pretty well-known test. Whatever it is. I got every one right.' The president said of his overall health, 'I felt I was in very good shape. Good heart. A good soul. Very good soul.'" MB: Yes, because a physical almost always measures the quality of the patient's soul. Of course he might have meant "sole," not "soul." Maybe his bone spurs are finally all better.
Constitutional Crisis, Ctd.: ✓. Trump Administration Defies Court Order. Again. Spencer Hsu of the Washington Post: “Lawyers for a Maryland man mistakenly deported to a mega-prison in El Salvador asked a federal judge on Saturday to order the Justice Department to show by 10 a.m. Monday why it should not be held in contempt for failing to say what it has done or will do to immediately return him to the United States after a Supreme Court order. In a Justice Department filing at 5 p.m. Saturday, State Department official Michael G. Kozak confirmed that 29-year-old Kilmar Abrego García is being held in El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center under that country’s sovereign authority. However, the government did not update U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis of Greenbelt about what concrete steps it is taking to bring him home, as she had ordered Friday. Abrego García’s legal team wrote that the limited response was the latest sign of the government’s lack of urgency and failure to comply with her April 4 order for it to 'facilitate' Abrego Garcia’s release from custody, a decision the Supreme Court upheld 9-0 on Thursday evening.” ~~~
~~~ Kyle Cheney & Josh Gerstein of Politico: Saturday, “... Trump retreated from comments he made a day earlier in which he suggested that he’d direct Abrego Garcia’s return to the U.S. if the Supreme Court required that. 'These barbarians are now in the sole custody of El Salvador, a proud and sovereign Nation, and their future is up to President [Nayib Bukele] and his Government,' Trump wrote on Truth Social Saturday evening. 'They will never threaten or menace our Citizens again!'” ~~~
~~~ Marie: The Daily Beast (firewalled) has a great headline on its story: "Trump DOJ Flips Off SCOTUS in Brazen Update on Deported Dad."
~~~ Nicole Narea of Vox: The Trump administration's refusal to bring back Kilmar Abrego Garcia from an El Savadoran jail to which ICE “accidentally” deported him “is the second time that the Trump administration has effectively ignored a court order. The first time, it refused to turn around deportation flights headed to El Salvador midair, arguing that US federal courts had no authority outside the US. 'The idea that somehow this is something other than just picking up the phone and saying, “Get this guy back here,” is absolute poppycock,” said Paul Wickham Schmidt, a retired immigration judge and professor at Georgetown University Law Center. 'The idea that this is some sort of sensitive foreign relations is BS.'... The government’s actions are part of a larger picture of attacks on the rule of law, Schmidt said.” (Also linked yesterday.) ~~~
~~~ Greg Sargent of the New Republic, republished by Yahoo! News, points out that the federal government's choices in the Abrego case are not binary; i.e., either (a) obtain his release from the El Salvador prison or (b) not. Rather, there is a third choice: obtain his release from El Salvador AND try him legally in the U.S. for the various charges they claim against him. THEN the government could legally deport him (to someplace). So why not go the legal route? Sargent suspects it's because the government fears it will lose because their "evidence" is so "thin." Thanks to laura h. for the lead. MB: IOW, the government doesn't have a case against this man, they had an order not to deport him to El Salvador, they did it anyway (in hopes nobody would notice??) and when the government got caught, it refused to bring the man back and adjudicate his case because the government would lose the case & look bad. I know miscarriages of justice aren't all that rare in this country, but the DOJ is supposed to be above this backwoods sheriff-style thuggery. (Also linked yesterday.)
Maria Sacchetti & Jacob Bogage of the Washington Post: “White House adviser Stephen Miller has been strategizing with officials from the Department of Homeland Security and other federal agencies on an almost daily basis to meet [the] goal [of deporting one million immigrants this year]..., current and former officials said.... The administration is negotiating with as many as 30 countries to take deportees who are not their citizens.... Officials have already begun deporting people to countries where they are not citizens, including Mexico, Costa Rica and Panama.... But ... [reaching there goal] is not so simple. Most of the 11 million undocumented immigrants in the United States are entitled to an immigration court hearing before they can be deported, including criminals, and with the current backlogs, those can take months or years to resolve.”
Edgar Sandoval of the New York Times: “Two groups representing Harvard professors sued the Trump administration on Friday, saying that its threat to cut billions in federal funding for the university violates free speech and other First Amendment rights. The lawsuit by the American Association of University Professors and the Harvard faculty chapter of the group follows the Trump administration’s announcement earlier this month that it was reviewing about $9 billion in federal funding that Harvard receives. The administration also sent the school a list of demands that it must meet if it wants to keep the funds. The suit, filed in the Federal District Court in Massachusetts, seeks a temporary restraining order to block the Trump administration from cutting the funds. 'This action challenges the Trump administration’s unlawful and unprecedented misuse of federal funding and civil rights enforcement authority to undermine academic freedom and free speech on a university campus,' the lawsuit said.” The Harvard Crimson's story is here.
Juliana Kim of NPR: "A federal judge ordered the Trump administration to unfreeze federal funding that was allocated to Maine from the U.S. Department of Agriculture — funds that had been withheld following ... [Donald] Trump's clash with Maine Gov. Janet Mills over the issue of transgender athletes. U.S. District Court Judge John Woodcock granted Maine's request for a temporary restraining order on Friday. The USDA is just one of the agencies where federal funding for Maine has been threatened." (Also linked yesterday.)
Adam Cancryn of Politico: “HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s visit to the FDA Friday was supposed to introduce him as a trusted leader to agency employees. It did anything but. Over the course of 40 minutes, Kennedy, in largely off-the-cuff remarks, asserted that the 'Deep State' is real, referenced past CIA experiments on human mind control and accused the employees he was speaking to of becoming a 'sock puppet' of the industries they regulate.... He offered little in the way of a vision for how the agency would come away from the layoffs stronger — instead devoting much of his speech to railing against the agency’s past failings and repeating his assertions that the U.S. was far healthier during his childhood than it is now. 'This whole generation is damaged,' Kennedy said, according to the transcript, claiming that rising rates of chronic disease, allergies and other illnesses are the result of some 'environmental toxin.'” (Also linked yesterday.)
Chicago Crusader: "Kevin Young, the director of the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) in Washington, D.C., resigned as ... Donald Trump stepped up attacks with plans to overhaul the Smithsonian’s landmark museums and cultural institutions.... Young reportedly went on leave indefinitely on March 14 before the order was issued. Shanita Brackett, the museum’s associate director of operations, reportedly serves as the museum’s interim director."
Amanda Marcotte of Salon: It is the Christian right's and Elon Musk's misogyny that drives their disdain of empathy. "Much was made in the media, for good reason, of billionaire Elon Musk's crusade against empathy, an emotion he describes as 'suicidal' and the 'fundamental weakness of Western civilization.' Musk is an atheist, but in this attitude, he is increasingly joined by the Christian right, as Julia Carrie Wong documented at the Guardian this week. A growing chorus of evangelical leaders has taken to calling empathy 'sinful,' 'toxic,' and 'satanic.' Right-wing Catholics are going there, too, with Vice President JD Vance rejecting Jesus's exhortations to love your neighbor and welcome the stranger, drawing a rebuke from the Pope." An interesting read. Thanks to laura h. for the link. ~~~
~~~ Marie: Laura H. linked this column a couple of days ago. Please don't think that because I don't republish a link in the body of the Conversation that I think it not worth reading. Quite the opposite. It's just that so much is happening that I don't get to re-posting some of the most worthwhile news & opinion that readers take the time to link for the rest of us. So you should check out the Comments at least once a day because they usually include, over & above the worthy commentary, links to some good stuff other people have written.
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Idaho. Isabelle Taft & Pam Belluck of the New York Times: “A state judge in Idaho appeared to slightly broaden access to abortion there by ruling on Friday that an exception to the state’s ban does not require the woman to be facing impending death. Idaho’s ban, one of the strictest in the nation, prohibits abortion in almost all cases. One exception is when it is necessary to prevent the death of the pregnant woman. Judge Jason D. Scott ruled that abortions are allowed if a doctor deems that the woman is likely to die sooner without an abortion than she would otherwise — even if her death 'is neither imminent nor assured.' The ruling, which kept the law in place, handed a partial victory to reproductive rights advocates and Idaho doctors who said the ban had forced them to wait for patients to reach the brink of death before they could act, or rush them out of state to get care elsewhere.”
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Paris 2015/2023.
⭐~~~ France. Blue Skies, Nothing But Blue Skies. Naema Ahmed & Chico Harlan of the Washington Post: “Over the past 20 years, Paris has undergone a major physical transformation, trading automotive arteries for bike lanes, adding green spaces and eliminating 50,000 parking spaces. Part of the payoff has been invisible — in the air itself. Airparif, an independent group that tracks air quality for France’s capital region, said this week that levels of fine particulate matter (PM 2.5) have decreased 55 percent since 2005, while nitrogen dioxide levels have fallen 50 percent. It attributed this to 'regulations and public policies,' including steps to limit traffic and ban the most polluting vehicles.... The change shows how ambitious policymaking can directly improve health in large cities. Air pollution is often described by health experts as a silent killer.... Paris has been led since 2014 by Mayor Anne Hidalgo, a Socialist who has pushed for many of the green policies and has described her wish for a'Paris that breathes, a Paris that is more agreeable to live in.'”
Sudan. Declan Walsh of the New York Times: “Sudanese paramilitaries killed the entire staff of the last medical clinic in a famine-stricken camp in the western region of Darfur, Sudan, as part of a broader assault that killed at least 100 people, aid groups and the United Nations said on Saturday. The assault on the Zamzam camp, which holds 500,000 people in the besieged city of El Fasher, was notable even by the standards of a civil war that has seen countless atrocities as well as accusations of genocide. Paramilitaries with the Rapid Support Forces, or R.S.F., broke through the camp perimeter on Friday evening after hours of shelling. They then destroyed hundreds of homes and the camp’s main market before turning their attack on the camp’s last remaining medical clinic, according to Relief International, the aid group that runs the facility. Nine hospital employees were killed, including the head doctor, the aid group said in a statement on Saturday.”
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Reader Comments (9)
Like the original Hitler, our blubbery version has no love for Paris (or anything French, oh, except for the Bastille Day parade, especially were it, or one like it, enacted in his honor, for the bargain basement price of $100 million), and therefore likely will pronounce blue skies “woke”, not something to be emulated here, which, since he had eliminated the EPA, killed pollution restrictions, outlawed science, and cut off funding for environmental research and monitoring, should not be a problem. Besides, Trump Brand gas masks offered at the low, low price of $700 each, will be on every MAGAts Christmas list.
So forget Irving Berlin’s “Blue Skies”. State radio will be playing only “A Smoggy Day”, a Kid Rock rip off of the Gershwin song.
FH will likely issue an international decree that henceforth all major cities around the world will follow his genius lead and return to impenetrable, cancer inducing smog covered urban skies and he will demand to know, as his idol, the first Hitler did, “Is Paris burning”?
Franklin Foer, in The Atlantic, on T****'s (and Silicon Valley's) animosity toward the professional managerial class
Perils of banishing and stigmatizing expertise
"In its strange inversion of American politics, the Trump administration has come far closer to executing a Marxist theory of power than any of its progressive predecessors. It has waged class warfare, not against billionaires but against a far more ubiquitous enemy. And it has done so with a certainty that justifies terrible excesses, a desire to purge that it has only just begun to realize.
....
In a way, Trump is practicing his very own form of Maoism, a cultural revolution against the intelligentsia—what the Communist Party of China memorably deemed the “stinking ninth” class. Although Trump’s purges have been tame by comparison, there are parallels. Like Trump, Mao wanted to create manufacturing jobs in the homeland. Defying expert opinion and shunning economic common sense, Mao launched his Great Leap Forward—a disastrously unsuccessful policy of rapid industrialization—in the late ’50s."
@laura h. Thank you. A political scientist I read decades ago said that political ideology should not be viewed as a straight-line left-to-right continuum. Rather, that straight line should be fashioned into a circle where extreme left and extreme right meet. That is, there is not a lot of difference between extreme right and left. (They both tend to be totalitarian, don't they?)
Many a time I have observed good reasons to accept the circle model. Foer offers another one, though he doesn't seem to know it.
Skimming Foer, what pops out at me is his division of "classes" of careerists: bureaucrats, intellectuals, lawyers, factory workers. Every one of these groups, in Foer's telling -- and probably in actuality -- thinks his/her group is the best, most important, most enlightened, etc. The right encourages this kind of discrimination; it wants to pit these classes of workers against one another. That brings me to the column you linked a couple of days ago -- the one by Amanda Marcotte of Salon -- where she writes about the right's contempt for empathy as a manifestation of misogyny. Whatever the reason, that contempt for empathy first smacked me in the face when David Souter announced his retirement from the Supreme Court in 2009, and Barack Obama said he was looking for a person with "empathy" to fill Souter's seat. The right lambasted Obama for that remark. The criticism took me aback. I thought initially that it was simply the product of the right's having nothing to criticize Obama for. But no. Those lamebrains meant it. They saw empathy as the route to what they now call "woke." Empathy was the reason criminals were not in jail and lazy people got welfare. And so forth. Yet how much better off we would be if everyone had reasonable empathy for people somewhat unlike themselves, people who had made different choices or had landed in different roles. It really isn't difficult. And it's free!
Steve M.
"NOW THEY'RE SENDING DEPORTATION MESSAGES TO NATIVE-BORN AMERICANS"
All eyes will be on a New York courtroom next week as the Alaskan Harpy, ubiquitous ignoramus, and half-term gubernator, Sarah Palin gets a chance to go after The NY Times for “defaming” her sterling character, again! A case she’s already lost twice.
“The case was sparked by a 2017 Times editorial that, Palin's attorneys argued, had accused her of inciting murder six years earlier in the shooting in Tucson, Ariz. that killed six people and gravely wounded then-Rep. Gabby Giffords. No proof was ever found suggesting the shooter was motivated by, or even knew about, the Palin ad cited by the editorial.”
The Times rectified its mistake and her case has already been tossed twice. But because jurors got a peek at the judges’ comments about his decision via push notifications on their phones, that verdict has been set aside.
This case is red meat to Fat Hitler and a multitude on the right who wish to neuter a press they see as unfairly writing true things about all the horrible crap they get up to.
The danger lies in the possibility that the Nazi Court will set aside the landmark 1964 ruling in Sullivan v NYTimes, which protects the press from nuisance libel suits.
In fact, the original suit in Sullivan was part of a concerted effort in the South to go after northern based newspapers that were reporting on attacks on civil rights and the push to maintain segregation at all costs.
Alito and Thomas have already been screaming that Sullivan needs to go and if Palin loses again, there’s a very good chance this case will be appealed to those two haters of the First Amendment and the other Trump rubber stamps on the court.
FH has been going hard at the media, and winning. This could be a watershed moment for authoritarianism and the total demise of media independence in Trump’s Amerika.
President-C
Washington Post
"Events such as the Olympics and World Cup are among the biggest projects on earth, bigger than mega-dams or tunnel digs, and like any large structures you don’t build on poor soil, or they’ll collapse. They require stability, years of careful planning, and billions of dollars in commitments. The hosts-organizers have a duty — to both visitors and their own constituents — to be stable, hospitable ground, capable enough to bear the costs, and to have contingencies for “black swan events,” the term for unpredictable, high-impact occurrences.
The problem for the United States, which is slated to host next year’s World Cup and the 2028 Summer Olympics, is that so far President Donald Trump’s second term is itself a black swan.
The World Cup opens in North America on June 11, 2026, with the United States as co-host with Mexico and Canada, the latter which Trump has threatened to annex as a 51st state."
Who the hell is going to want to come to the US with all the examples of tourists being abused?
Last week I was on vacation, at a beach location. The main huge tvs in the beach house were tuned in to Norfolk/Virginia Beach/Hamptons/ eastern NC stations. Three out of the five of us decreed no MSNBC teevee, and that was carried out; the bedrooms had some weird things that play snippets of things, so I caught some snippets of things happening and being broadcast. My friend and I were talking on our way home about how their decree had reigned, and that we knew we would catch holy hell for turning the real networks on. "I just can't" was the refrain. All of us are confirmed liberals, who despise the Presidunce and all his "friends" and the big media and the "supreme court" and the stupid voters. So how come we were cast as rabble rousers and they were not, as they had their heads in the sand voluntarily? It makes me very afraid that the majority of our side thinks this will all go away if we just refuse to engage. As long as we all, knowing what we know, just don't talk about it, why, it will be okay eventually!
Right. We must keep our mouths shut as they drag us off to El Salvador or worse. And they won't need reasons. Pam Bondi provides no reasons, or made-up reasons. The good "Christians" will make our entire world kowtow to their ways of life, but that's okay?? And of course they will throw in the magic word antisemitism and think they are believed as they spout it, that they are being noble. Liars and idiots.
It all feels like a really bad dream.
Marie -
I suppose that ultra-wealthy white males have no need of empathy (anymore than they need fair and competent government) and, lacking empathy, they can't appreciate the value of it for others. If you come from the ruling class of South Africa, perhaps it is suicidal (to your way of life) to imagine how the ruled class lives.
I'll never understand the so-called Christians on the right rejecting empathy - as Amanda Marcotte wrote in the Salon piece - (doesn't everybody in every religion, and, atheists too, learn to practice the golden rule? - isn't that an expression of empathy?). Even more bizarre is the note in her piece that a "Trump has eclipsed Jesus himself as the object of worship on the Christian right". And it was only 59 years ago John Lennon made that remark that Beatles were more popular than Jesus and drew outrage from the right. Now they view this insane pretender as their savior? good grief!