“If it looks like a pig, smells like a pig, acts like a pig….” John Buss, @repeat1968
Today, we celebrate the Indigenous tribes of America. Joe Biden was the first president to recognize the day in 2021. We still haven’t dropped Columbus Day, which glorifies a man who truly represents the worst of European colonization of other continents.
Christopher Columbus has become a controversial figure over the years, despite the federal holiday in his honor. While many credit the explorer with “discovering” America, many others condemn Columbus for forced conversion of native peoples to Christianity, the use of violence and slavery, and the introduction of new diseases that would cause serious and long-lasting harm to Indigenous people.
In 2021, former President Joe Biden became the first president to recognize Indigenous Peoples Day, celebrating it in tandem with Columbus Day. In 2025, President Donald Trump issued a proclamation condemning critics of Columbus.
Yes, you read that right. Trump issued one of his ugly proclamations, criticizing those of us who don’t stand by whitewashed history. Yam Tits and his ugly band of White Christian Nationalists reject the idea that anyone but them created places worth saving and celebrating.
On Oct. 9, Trump issued a proclamation titled “Columbus Day, 2025.”
Trump celebrated Italian explorer Columbus as “the original American hero” in the proclamation, accusing his critics of slander.
“Outrageously, in recent years, Christopher Columbus has been a prime target of a vicious and merciless campaign to erase our history, slander our heroes, and attack our heritage,” reads the proclamation.
Meanwhile, in the world of bill paying and trying to live, it’s still the Economy Stupid! This is from Reuters. “How the United States is eating Trump’s tariffs.” This is reported by “Francesco Canepa and Howard Schneider.”
U.S. companies and consumers are bearing the brunt of the country’s new import tariffs, early indications show, contradicting assertions by President Donald Trump and complicating the Federal Reserve’s fight against inflation.
Trump famously predicted that foreign countries would pay the price of his protectionist policies, wagering that exporters would absorb that cost just to keep a foothold in the world’s largest consumer marketBut academic studies, surveys and comments from businesses show that through the first months of Trump’s new trade regime it is U.S. companies that are footing the bill and passing on some of it to the consumer – with more price hikes likely.
“Most of the cost seems to be borne by U.S. firms,” Harvard University professor Alberto Cavallo said in an interview to discuss his findings. “We have seen a gradual pass-through to consumer prices and there’s a clear upward pressure.
A White House spokesperson said “Americans may face a transition period from tariffs” but the cost would “ultimately be borne by foreign exporters.” Companies were diversifying supply chains and bringing production to the United States, the spokesperson added.
Cavallo and researchers Paola Llamas and Franco Vasquez have been tracking the price of 359,148 goods, from carpets to coffee, at major online and brick-and-mortar retailers in the United States.
They found that imported goods have become 4% more expensive since Trump started imposing tariffs in early March, while the price of domestic products rose by 2%.The biggest increases for imports were seen in goods that the United States cannot produce domestically, such as coffee, or that come from highly penalised countries, like Turkey.
These price hikes, while material, have been generally far smaller than the tariff rate on the products in question – implying that sellers were absorbing some of the cost as well.
Yet U.S. import prices, which don’t include tariffs, showed foreign exporters have been raising their prices in dollars and passing on to their U.S. buyers part of the greenback’s depreciation against their currencies.
“This suggests foreign producers are not absorbing much if any of the U.S. tariffs, consistent with prior economic research,” researchers at Yale University’s Budget Lab think-tank said in a blog post.
National indices of export prices paint the same picture. The cost of goods exported by China, Germany, Mexico, Turkey and India have all risen, with Japan the only exception.
Dr. Paul Krugman has a serious economic analysis of the evolving trade relationship between the US and China today in his Substack. “How Trump Is Making China Great. Why we’re going to lose the trade war, and much more besides.” Yes, we’re still practicing the dismal science, but being forewarned is better than being caught unprepared.
There is, however, one big difference between Trump’s trade policy and China’s. Namely, the Chinese appear to know what they’re doing.
It should have been obvious from the beginning that if America were to get into a full-scale trade war with China, the Chinese would have the upper hand. For one thing, in real terms China has the bigger economy.
Furthermore, while our economies are interdependent, America is more vulnerable to a rupture than China is. True, Chinese industry has relied to an important degree on sales to the United States. But the U.S. economy is dependent on China for critical inputs, above all those rare earths. And here’s the thing: China can quickly compensate, at least in part, for the loss of the U.S. export market by stimulating domestic demand. Given time, America could wean itself from dependence on Chinese inputs — but doing so would take years.
That said, a year ago the United States still had some important advantages over China. Although China has made great strides in science and technology, America still had a commanding position, thanks in large part to our unmatched research establishment, our great research universities, and our ability — thanks in large part to the openness of our society — to recruit talent from all over the world.
Furthermore, America had allies — which, as Phillips O’Brien emphasizes, are a vastly underrated source of national power. China may sometimes make alliances of convenience, but no more than that. The U.S. could and did build a powerful alliance system, because America was more than a nation: It was an idea and a set of values, values we shared with the rest of the democratic world. And you should always bear in mind that Europe, in particular, while it sometimes acts weak, is an economic superpower in the same league as China and America.
OK, you know what’s coming: Since taking office, Trump and his minions have been systematically demolishing each of these pillars of U.S. strength.
The first pillar mentioned, and the most obvious, is the destruction of the institutions and incentives that support scientific research, which include universities, private industry, and government agencies. You may read more details on that at the link. It’s been rather obvious to most of us, but his list is a good, quick reference.
This administration is characterized by cruelty and incompetence. The absolute destruction of government institutions and specialists made to enhance advancements that private industries can’t afford to fund profitably is a hallmark of both. Nowhere is this felt more than in institutions that support Public Health. Firing experts, then attempting to either rehire or replace them, is unbelievably disruptive to any science-based endeavor. This article is from CNN’s Brenda Goodman and Meg Terrill. “More than half of CDC staffers recently fired by Trump administration have been reinstated.”
Hundreds of staff fired from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention late Friday have been reinstated, according to the American Federation of Government Employees.
After a new round of layoff notices sent late Friday night to around 1,300 workers at the CDC, approximately 700 were reinstated on Saturday, while about 600 remain laid off, according to the union, which represents federal workers.
“The employees who received incorrect notifications were never separated from the agency and have all been notified that they are not subject to the reduction in force,” said Andrew Nixon, director of communications for the US Department of Health and Human Services.
Among reinstated employees are staff that publish the agency’s flagship journal, Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, according to Dr. Debra Houry, who recently resigned as the agency’s chief medical officer and deputy director for program and science. Houry and other high-level CDC officials resigned in August in protest over the firing of recently confirmed CDC Director Dr. Susan Monarez.
Athalia Christie, the incident commander for the measles response, was among hundreds of employees mistakenly fired on Friday. The annual total of measles cases in the US – now up to 1,563 cases since January – is the highest by a significant margin since measles was declared eliminated in America a quarter-century ago.
Staff were also reinstated at the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, the Global Health Center, and the Public Health Infrastructure Center, which manages more than $3 billion in grants to 107 state and local governments to help build local public health workforces, said Dr. Brian Castrucci, who is president and chief executive officer of the de Beaumont Foundation, a nonprofit that advocates for public health workers.
Staff and officers at the CDC’s Epidemic Intelligence Service who were able to check their emails have also received notices that their firings were in error, according to a CDC official with knowledge of the situation who asked not to be named for fear of retaliation.
An analysis of the jobs and people reinstated is provided in the article. Meanwhile, the inhumanity and violence surrounding operations by ICE continue. Andrew Schwartz reports this headline. Documents Allege a Federal Agent at Portland ICE Threatened to Shoot an Ambulance Driver. Feds delayed medics who had come to pick up an injured protester. Then, according to confidential incident reports, the agents became aggressive.”
Late on Oct. 5, a Portland ambulance crew informed dispatchers over the radio that it was attempting to transport a patient from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to Legacy Emanuel Medical Center but that ICE officers were impeding its departure. Six minutes later, at 9:40 pm, according to publicly archived radio records, the medic driving the vehicle delivered an update: “We are still not being allowed to leave by ICE officers.”
Two confidential incident reports obtained by WW offer insight into what was going on inside the South Portland ICE facility at the time. The written accounts were filed by the ambulance crew members shortly after the incident—one report to their employer, American Medical Response, and another to a union representative—as documentation, as one report puts it, of a “conflict with federal agents.”
The two reports, filed by different medical workers, mirror each other’s accounts, and are consistent with publicly available audio recordings of emergency medical services radio communications, as well as 911 calls and dispatch reports obtained under public records law.
Both reports say that federal agents, in an effort to block the ambulance’s departure, stood directly in front of the vehicle. As the delay dragged on, according to the reports, the ambulance operator put the vehicle into park, causing it to lurch forward slightly.
The reports indicate the federal agents did not like this—so much so that an agent threatened to shoot and arrest the driver. The driver, frightened, asked why. An agent, according to the reports, responded that the driver had attempted to hit him with the ambulance.
“I was still in such shock,” the driver later wrote, “that they were not only accusing me of such a thing, but crowding and cornering me in the seat, pointing and screaming at me, threatening to shoot and arrest me, and not allowing the ambulance to leave the scene. This was no longer a safe scene, and in that moment, I realized that the scene had not actually been safe the entire time that they were blocking us from exiting, and that we were essentially trapped.”
The latest child abduction by ICE has occurred in Boston. This is from MASS LIVE. “Mass. 13-year-old was picked up by ICE after a police interaction and now he’s hundreds of miles from home.” The story was filed by Adam Bass. Is this really the kind of country we want to live in?
A 13-year-old boy from Everett who was arrested and detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has been transferred to a juvenile facility in Virginia.
Andrew Lattarulo, of Georges Cotes Law, said his firm received an email from the U.S. Attorney’s Office confirming the child was transferred on Friday at 9:30 a.m. He forwarded the email to MassLive.
The boy is still in custody, Lattarulo said.
The transfer occurred on the same day Judge Richard G. Stearns of the Boston federal court ordered the boy’s release by Tuesday unless ICE and the Department of Homeland Security could provide grounds for continued detention, according to court documents
ICE arrested the boy, whose family is from Brazil, after an interaction with the Everett Police Department, the Boston Globe reported.
The boy’s mother received a call on Thursday to pick her son up from the department; however, an hour and a half later, she was told ICE had taken her son, the Globe reported.
Something is very wrong with a human being who can support this level of cruelty. Meanwhile, The Hill‘s Emily Brooks reports on the callous and snivelling Speaker of the House’s latest shrug. “Johnson: ‘We’re barreling toward one of the longest shutdowns in American history’.
Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) said Monday the government shutdown is on its way to being one of the longest in history unless Democrats accept the House-passed, GOP-crafted stopgap bill to reopen the government.
“We’re barreling toward one of the longest shutdowns in American history, unless Democrats dropped their partisan demands and passed a clean, no-strings-attached budget to reopen the government and pay our federal workers,” Johnson said in a press conference on the 13th day of the government shutdown.
Congressional leaders have been locked in a standoff over government funding as Democrats demand that Republicans make concessions on health care, notably Affordable Care Act tax credits that are expiring at the end of the year. Republican leaders have refused to negotiate on health care during a shutdown, arguing that that Democrats must accept the “clean” funding stopgap the House passed in September — and which has failed to advance in the Senate seven times.
The shutdown, 13 days and counting, already marks one of the longest federal government funding lapses in modern history.
The longest government shutdown, which was also the last time a federal funding lapse occurred, was from 2018 to 2019 during President Trump’s first term, lasting 35 days.
Things are not going to get better until we’re rid of these tinpot Republicans. The signs of stagflation and the accompanying suffering are on the increase. I’m going wonky on you again with this article from Investors Observer. “This is stagflation (literally): U.S. hiring crashes to recession levels as ‘second stagflation mountain’ rises.”
Stagflation is no longer just a rhetorical device to describe the U.S. economy in 2025.
Real signs of its toxic mix of stagnant growth and stubborn inflation are emerging across both the labor market and consumer prices, painting a grim near-term outlook.
According to Apollo chief economist Torsten Slok, the U.S. hiring rate, a number of hires as a percentage of total employment, has fallen to recessionary levels.
A recent Apollo chart comparing the quits rate and hiring rate shows that hiring has plunged to levels last seen during the 2020 pandemic crash, and is now approaching lows from the Global Financial Crisis.
With slower job growth and rising unemployment, Slok warned that the labor market is nearing a virtual standstill, “where workers are not getting hired or changing jobs.”
At the same time, inflation remains stubbornly high. A separate Apollo analysis found that 60% of the CPI basket is currently rising at an annualized rate above 3%, well above the Federal Reserve’s 2% target.
While that marks an improvement from recent months, when 72% of CPI components ran above 3%, the persistence underscores how broad-based inflation remains.
“Is a second inflation mountain emerging?” Slok asked, referencing the first inflation surge that began in 2021 and peaked in mid-2022 with headline CPI at 9.1%.
Together, the data of higher inflation and slower growth strengthen the case that the U.S. is now grappling with stagflation, a scenario the Fed may find difficult to reverse without triggering deeper economic pain.
One and done! One of the most disruptive institutions since the Trump regime of Terror has been the Supreme Court. This report by Adam Lipak finally shows how the Republican Appointees really are christofascists trying to hide behind the cloak of Conservatism and Originalism. We’ve seen more radical interpretations by the Roberts court than not. This was published in the New York Times. “Originalist ‘Bombshell’ Complicates Case on Trump’s Power to Fire Officials. As the Supreme Court seems poised to expand the president’s power, a leading scholar whose work the justices have often cited issued a provocative dissent.”
The Supreme Court will hear arguments in December about whether President Trump can fire government officials for any reason, or no reason, despite laws meant to shield them from politics.
There is little question that the court will side with the president. Its conservative majority has repeatedly signaled that it plans to adopt the “unitary executive theory,” which says the original understanding of the Constitution demands letting the president remove executive branch officials as he sees fit.
But a new article, from a leading originalist law professor, has complicated and perhaps upended the conventional wisdom. The legal academy treated the development like breaking news.
“Bombshell!” William Baude, a law professor at the University of Chicago who himself is a prominent originalist, wrote on social media. “Caleb Nelson, one of the most respected originalist scholars in the country, comes out against the unitary executive interpretation” of the Constitution.
Professor Nelson, who teaches at the University of Virginia and is a former law clerk to Justice Clarence Thomas, wrote that the text of the Constitution and the historical evidence surrounding it grants Congress broad authority to shape the executive branch, including by putting limits on the president’s power to fire people.
Professor Nelson’s article was published Sept. 29 by the Democracy Project, an initiative at the New York University School of Law that plans to release 100 essays in 100 days by an ideologically mixed group.
The article is particularly notable, said Richard H. Pildes, who is a law professor at N.Y.U. and one of the project’s founders.
“If a highly respected originalist scholar like Professor Nelson, on whom the court relies frequently, denies that originalism supports the unitary executive theory,” Professor Pildes said, “that inevitably raises serious questions about an originalist justification for the court’s looming approach.”
Professor Nelson’s scholarship has been exceptionally influential. It has been cited in more than a dozen Supreme Court opinions, including ones by every member of the six-justice conservative majority.
Read more at the link.
It’s getting really difficult to be an American these days.
What’s on your Reading, Blogging, and Action list today?
“He’s not ever leaving as long as Republicans turn a blind eye.” John Buss, @repeat1968
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
Texas Democratic Delegates have fled to Illinois to stop the redistricting of Congressional Districts, preventing a quorum on a vote. Legislators in both California and New York are gearing up for similar action in response. It’s likely Florida will try the same maneuver. Trump ordered the action to prevent likely Republican losses in the midterms. Usually, Congressional Districts are redrawn every 10 years to reflect changes shown by the most recent census. This is definitely a move to disenfranchise people of color. It has become clear that our institutions are in a process of democratic backsliding due to extremists and cowardly Republicans. Even the People’s House is losing its historic look as Yam Tits paved over the gifts of flowers from our allies that filled Jackie Kennedy’s Rose Garden. A huge, tasteless ballroom to the east of the edifice is the next planned monstrosity. Nothing is safe or sacred.
This is the headline from NBC News. “Texas Democrats decamp to Illinois to deny Republicans a quorum on redistricting. In response, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott threatened to try to remove the Democrats from the state Legislature and said some of them may even be “felons.” This coverage is from NBC News.
A showdown over redistricting in Texas played out here on Sunday as dozens of state Democrats took refuge roughly 1,000 miles away from home, saying they had fled Texas to deny a quorum to Republican efforts to add as many as five congressional seats to their map.
It culminated with Texas’ governor, a Republican, threatening to expel the Democrats from the Texas state House and potentially extradite them, saying they may be “felons.”
The Texas state House Democrats filed off of buses and Ubers into a crammed county party headquarters at a strip mall Sunday night, standing alongside Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker to rail against what they charged was a racist, unfair and undemocratic attempt to overhaul the Lone Star State’s political map.
Texas House Democratic Caucus Chair Gene Wu said that he believed about 57 Democrats have left the state, with the bulk staying in Illinois for at least the immediate future. Other House Democrats were in Boston and Albany, New York.
“Gov. Abbott is doing this in submission to Donald Trump so that Donald Trump can steal these communities’ power and voice,” Wu said. “We will not be complicit in the destruction of our own communities. We’re not here to play political games. We’re here to demand an end to this corrupt process.”
After the news conference, Wu said there was real fear that some of their members could be arrested for defying a special session call.
“We have discussed this. This is a topic of serious concern. We know the governor has no authority to send state troopers over here but we don’t know what Donald Trump’s going to do,” Wu said.
He argued there was no legal basis for arrests but then pointed to questionable actions taken by immigration officials in their nationwide sweeps.
“That’s not far-fetched from arresting state legislators because they feel like it, and consequences be damned,” he added.
This is not the first time this has happened. You may remember that the same strategy was used in 2003 for the same reason. However, this action has roots deep in Texas History, according to the Texas Tribune. Hayden Betts reports that “Denying quorum has been a Texas political strategy since 1870. While the Democrats could technically derail the GOP’s redistricting map, such efforts have been largely symbolic and had limited success blocking past legislation, experts say.”
In June 1870, 13 Texas senators walked out of the Capitol to block a bill giving the governor wartime powers, depriving the upper chamber of the two-thirds quorum required for voting. Though the fleeing members were arrested, and the bill eventually passed, the “Rump Senate incident” established quorum-breaking as a minority party tactic that has persisted in Texas politics ever since.
After significant quorum breaks in 1979, 2003, and 2021, Texas House Democrats are once again employing this nuclear option, fleeing the state Sunday to block passage of a congressional redistricting map that would give Republicans five additional seats in the U.S. House. The attempt represents the latest chapter for the maneuver that political scientists say, barring exceptional endurance on the part of the democratic delegation, is likely to be symbolic rather than directly effective in preventing redistricting.
“It’s a messaging move,” said Brandon Rottinghaus, a political science professor at the University of Houston. “It’s a last resort for Democrats who have run out of options legislatively and even legally.”
Partisan Republicans stacked into the Supreme Court are making moves to diminish the Constitution and our democratic republic, also by signalling willingness to dismantle the Voting Rights Act. This is from Slate. Robert L. Hasen reports this. “The Supreme Court Just Signaled Something Deeply Disturbing About the Next Term.” It’s a lawsuit against the redistricting that happened recently in Louisiana because the courts determined that Louisiana redistricting had disenfranchised minorities in Louisiana.
Reading the tea leaves from cryptic Supreme Court orders can be perilous business because the justices are not bound by the questions they ask at oral argument, the offhand comments they make at a judicial conference, or even their monumental “shadow docket” rulings on emergency petitions that have become all too common. But a technical briefing order in a long pending case out of Louisiana, posted on the court’s website after 5 p.m. on a Friday in August, was ominous. The order was likely intended to obscure that SCOTUS is ready to consider striking down the last remaining pillar of the Voting Rights Act, known as Section 2. Such a monumental ruling, likely not coming until June 2026, would change the nature of congressional, state, and local elections all across the country, and likely stir major civil rights protests as the midterm election season heats up.
Louisiana v. Callais, the case that was the subject of last Friday’s order, is a voting case over the drawing of the state’s six congressional districts. Louisiana has a one-third Black population, but after the 2020 census the state Legislature drew a districting plan, passed over a Democratic governor’s veto, that created only one district in which Black voters would be likely to elect their candidate of choice. Before Callais, Black voters had successfully sued Louisiana in a case called Robinson v. Ardoin, arguing that Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act required drawing a second congressional district giving Black voters that opportunity. Section 2 says minority voters should have the same chance as other voters to elect their candidates of choice, and courts have long used it to require new districts when there is a large and cohesive minority population concentrated in a given area, when white and minority voters choose different candidates, and when the minority has difficulty electing its preferred representatives.
After Robinson and more litigation, the Louisiana Legislature drew up a new plan, which created the second congressional district. The state drew the second district to otherwise favor Republicans in the state overall, including House Speaker Mike Johnson. A new group of voters then sued in the Callais case, arguing that Louisiana’s drawing of the second district violated the U.S. Constitution’s equal protection clause by being a racial gerrymander. Since 1993’s Shaw v. Reno, the Supreme Court has found racial gerrymanders when race is the central factor in drawing district lines and the state has no compelling interest in drawing such lines.
When the court first held oral argument in the Callais case in March, it appeared to be another in a long series of cases (many out of Louisiana) in which the justices considered whether race or partisanship predominated in the drawing of district lines. I’ve long written that this is an impossible exercise in places like Louisiana, where the factors overlap—most white voters in the state are Republicans and Black voters are Democrats, so when the state discriminates against Democrats, it is also discriminating against Black voters. It appeared from the initial March oral argument that the court was going to once again determine whether race or party predominated.
But instead of deciding the case at the end of June, when the court ordinarily disposes of the cases heard during the term, the court set the case up for reargument. That’s a rare move, but it’s not unheard of. Back in 2010, SCOTUS set the Citizens United case up for reargument the following September. But when the court issued its June order in Citizens United for reargument, the same order informed the parties that the court wanted something new to be briefed and argued on reargument: whether to overrule a line of cases allowing limits on corporate spending in elections. The court the following January then overruled these cases in one of the most consequential election law decisions of our time. It has had significant reverberations for our politics ever since.
Fifteen years later, something similar seems to be happening with Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. In June of this year, rather than deciding the case it heard in March, the court issued an order in Callais setting the case for reargument and stating, “In due course, the Court will issue an order scheduling argument and specifying any additional questions to be addressed in supplemental briefing.” Justice Clarence Thomas impatiently dissented from the order, saying that this was the time to recognize that Section 2 of the VRA and the court’s racial gerrymandering case are on a collision course and to kill off Section 2 or rewrite it to be toothless.
Orange Caligula is searching for someone to fudge the numbers at the Bureau of Labor. This is from the New York Times. I’ve gifted the article so you may read the entire thing. It is reported by Tony Romm. “Trump to Appoint New Top Labor Official Within Days. President Trump fired the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics on Friday after the agency released dour monthly jobs data.”
President Trump said on Sunday that he would announce a new commissioner for the Bureau of Labor Statistics “over the next three, four days” after he fired the head of the agency last week over a gloomy jobs report.
Mr. Trump fired the top labor official in charge of compiling statistics on employment, Erika McEntarfer, on Friday after the B.L.S. released monthly jobs data showing a significant slowdown in hiring. Mr. Trump accused Ms. McEntarfer, without evidence, of rigging the numbers.
Ms. McEntarfer had worked as a government economist for decades and was confirmed by the Senate in a bipartisan vote last year. Mr. Trump gave no further details about the announcement of her replacement.
Earlier Sunday, Kevin Hassett, the director of the White House National Economic Council, insisted that the administration was “absolutely not” shooting the messenger on the heels of the jobs report.
Mr. Hassett repeatedly declined to furnish detailed evidence that would substantiate the president’s claims that the data had been manipulated to hurt him politically.
“The president wants his own people there, so that when we see the numbers, they’re more transparent and more reliable,” Mr. Hassett told NBC’s “Meet the Press,” explaining at one point that the president sought to ensure jobs numbers could be “trusted.”
In a second appearance, on “Fox News Sunday,” Mr. Hassett claimed there were “partisan patterns” in the jobless data, and said that “data can’t be propaganda.”
Since Ms. McEntarfer’s sudden dismissal, economists across the political spectrum have offered a more worrisome assessment, warning that Mr. Trump’s actions threaten to pollute the nonpartisan work at B.L.S. to measure the trajectory of the economy.
Her dismissal came only hours after the statistics agency reported the slowdown in hiring in July, on top of two substantial downward revisions to its previous estimates of job growth in May and June.
The methodology has been used for over 50 years. The reason for the updates, which usually occur over 2-3 months after the original release, is that many businesses and individuals cannot get their surveys back to the Bureau in a timely manner. Anyone who uses the data for research or making business decisions is aware of this. It is absolutely nothing new. The current data reflects the chaotic Tariff introductions by Trump. The simplest practice of running a business is that you must have a rational and stable economic policy that provides information and an atmosphere to make good decisions. Trump can’t even make the simplest decisions or leave things alone long enough to prevent the instability that freezes any moves by business decision-makers. Noah Berlesky writes this at Public Notice. “The looming Trumpcession. Orange man bad (for the economy).” This guy bankrupted casinos and himself so many times that you’d think everyone would know this by now.
The July jobs numbers, released last Friday, could not have been much bleaker.
The economy undershot the projection of 100,000 new jobs significantly, adding only 73,000. Even worse, the numbers for May and June were revised down by a ghastly 285,000 jobs. That means that the economy created only 33,000 jobs in May and June combined — anemic growth the likes of which we haven’t seen the final months of President Trump’s first term. In contrast, under President Biden, the economy gained some 420,000 jobs in May and June 2024.
Trump’s response was as unhinged and authoritarian as you’d expect. In an unprecedented move, he abruptly fired Erika McEntarfer, the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and as an excuse, lied that the job numbers were “phony.”
Of course, the numbers were not phony. They were actually exactly what you’d expect given Trump’s relentless effort to destroy the robust economy left to him by Biden.
The president usually has limited control over the economy, with downturns being caused by events beyond their control. In this case, however, Trump’s policies are directly responsible for job losses, rising prices, wavering confidence, and a speedrun toward what looks like stagflation.
Flashing red
The jobs report is bad news. But it’s hardly the only sign that the economy is heading to a dark place.
The overall unemployment rate last month ticked up to 4.2 percent, but more worrying is the increase in Black unemployment to 7.2 percent. That’s the highest rate since December 2021, when the economy was still struggling to emerge from the covid pandemic. Black workers are often the last hired and the first fired. As a result Black unemployment rates often shoot up first when a serious economic downturn is on the horizon.
The economy is also struggling with stubborn inflation that will only be exacerbated by Trump’s inflationary tariff policies. Current inflation indicators are all bad. The personal consumption price index has prices rising 0.3 percent from May to June, which means they’ve risen 2.6 percent from last year.
Usually, a hot job market can mean increased inflation, while lower inflation can lead to slower job growth. In the final years of Biden’s presidency, the US managed to achieve both low inflation and record low unemployment. But Trump has reversed that. And now we may be looking at the worst of both worlds — stagflation, when jobs stagnate and prices spike.
The last time the US experienced serious stagflation was in the late 1970s under Jimmy Carter — and that’s a big part of what led to Carter’s landslide loss to Reagan in 1980.
Berlesky cites a very interesting study by Yale.
While Trump claims that his senseless tariff fetish will somehow lead to awesome trade deals, the truth is that he’s simply imposing massive arbitrary taxes on consumer goods. Taxing goods raises prices. The nonpartisan Yale Budget Lab has concluded that the effective tariff rate under Trump is around 18.3 percent, the highest since 1934. That means that households will be paying an extra $2,400 each in taxes to the government on purchases.
Tariffs are a regressive tax — they are hardest to absorb for lower income households, since the taxes are a higher percentage of their income. Even worse, lower income households tend to be especially dependent on imported goods, which are often cheaper than domestic products. Ernie Tedeschi, director of the Yale Budget Lab, told NPR that Trump’s tariffs seem “almost tailor made” to harm lower income workers the most.
I know I’ve been jumping up and down about this since January, but the economic performance has brought us an economy that even an Econ 101 student could predict. Former Republican and still conservative voice Bill Kristol has this to say in The Bulwark today. “Democracy dies in Daylight.”
In the last few days, it seems as if we’ve reached a new stage in the attempted authoritarian takeover of American democracy. It’s not just that the multi-faceted assault on the truth, on the rule of law, on a free society has picked up steam—though it has. It’s that the assault, from our own government, now proceeds so openly and unashamedly.
Once, if there were bad economic statistics, the president and his supporters tried to spin them. Now the president and his supporters simply deny them. And those who produced them are punished. And so President Trump fires, with no pretense of real cause or justification, the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, a career civil servant who has supervised a host of other career civil servants in producing these statistics, as they have for decades. And he brazenly lies in accusing her and a host of other civil servants of “rigging” their findings.
This is part of a broader pattern of the transformation of government information into pure propaganda. Kash Patel and Tulsi Gabbard—using the resources of the federal agencies they direct—have taken the lead in this. But they are only the tip of the Trump spear.
Once, if a president or his subordinates wanted to cover up a problem, even a crime, they made labored efforts at obfuscation and concealment. Coverups were, as the term implies, pursued under the cover of darkness. That’s why the Washington Post, with the experience of Watergate in mind, came up at the beginning of Trump’s first term with the slogan “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” But that slogan applies to a different era.
Now Ghislaine Maxwell, one of two organizers of a massive and horrendous child sex trafficking ring of which Donald Trump appears to have had considerable contemporaneous knowledge, meets with the deputy attorney general of the United States—who had previously been Trump’s private lawyer—and the White House openly embraces it. A week later, contrary to the normal rules for a prisoner convicted of her crimes, Maxwell is transferred to a minimum security “Club Fed” facility. This was presumably as a down payment on not spilling the beans about Trump, and perhaps as an interim step on the way to a pardon. This coverup is happening in broad daylight.
Once, state legislators redistricted congressional seats every ten years, after the constitutionally mandated census. These reapportionments were often accompanied by gerrymandering. But, with a notable exception, the partisan power grabs were at least adjacent to a regular and lawful process. They were at least somewhat constrained by calendars and custom.
Now the governor of Texas has decided, at the public urging of the president of the United States, to have his state legislature carry out a gerrymander mid-decade, so as to try to preserve a Republican majority in the House of Representatives for the final two years of Trump’s term. And it seems other red states will follow.
There is no pretense here other than a grab for power. It is the unconstrained use of the instrumentalities of government, state and federal, to hold on to control of the House.
The New York Times quotes “one person close to the president” as summing up the approach of the Trump White House as “maximum warfare, everywhere, all the time.” It’s important to add that it’s not just maximum warfare by one party against the other. It’s warfare by the government of the United States against the justice system, against the presentation of true facts, against free and fair elections. It’s maximum warfare against the norms and institutions of a liberal democracy and republican self-government.
All of us who have written for and followed Sky Dancing Blog know that we’ve been canaries shrieking in a coal mine. I cannot figure out what is not obvious to everyone, and that’s damned depressing. I’m going to close with a certain sign that this country is in trouble. It’s posted at Maddow Blog and written by Steven Benen. This is a certain sign that justice is not being served in the United States. “The 3 biggest problems with the new and unwarranted investigation into Jack Smith. For years, Team Trump treated the Hatch Act like a joke. To target former special counsel Jack Smith, they’ve apparently changed their mind.”
It’s a serious enough problem when Donald Trump publicly endorses investigations into his perceived political foes. But when the president’s targets actually become the subject of investigations, it’s far worse. NBC News reported:
Federal officials are investigating former special counsel Jack Smith after President Donald Trump and other prominent Republicans have alleged that his investigations into then-candidate Trump amounted to illegal political activity. The U.S. Office of Special Counsel, an independent federal agency, confirmed to NBC News on Saturday that it’s investigating Smith for alleged violations of the Hatch Act, a law that prohibits certain political activities by government officials.
Right off the bat, let’s not overlook the most glaring problem with these developments: There’s literally no evidence whatsoever of Smith engaging in any kind of wrongdoing. Then-Attorney General Merrick Garland tapped Smith to serve as a special counsel in November 2022 — two years before the 2024 presidential election — at which point he oversaw the federal investigations into Trump.
The prosecutor proceeded to collect voluminous evidence, secure indictments and charge Trump with a great many felonies, but at no point did Smith engage in any partisan political activities, making the basis for such an investigation from the U.S. Office of Special Counsel absurd.
Just as notably, it seems rather obvious that this move against Smith is part of a larger partisan vendetta from a party that’s eager to retaliate against those who dared to try to hold Trump accountable for his alleged crimes. Indeed, it was Republican Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas, a close White House ally, who requested that the OSC investigate Smith for “unprecedented interference in the 2024 election,” despite the complete lack of evidence pointing to any interference.
But even if we put these relevant angles aside, there’s a broader point that’s hanging overhead: Since when does the Trump administration care about alleged Hatch Act violations? I’m reminded of this New York Times report from nearly four years ago:
Thirteen of President Donald J. Trump’s most senior aides — including his son-in-law and his chief of staff — campaigned illegally for Mr. Trump’s re-election in violation of a law designed to prevent federal employees from abusing the power of their offices on behalf of candidates, a government watchdog agency said Tuesday. Henry Kerner, who heads the Office of Special Counsel, made the assertion in a withering report that followed a nearly yearlong investigation into ‘myriad’ violations of the law, known as the Hatch Act.
In a 63-page report, the Office of Special Counsel concluded, “Senior Trump administration officials chose to use their official authority not for the legitimate functions of the government, but to promote the re-election of President Trump in violation of the law.”
Richard Painter, who served as the chief White House ethics lawyer in the Bush/Cheney White House, described Team Trump’s routine transgressions at the time as “disgusting” and “unprecedented in the history of the Hatch Act.” Painter added that the entire Trump administration, at the most senior levels, was “devoted to illegally using federal offices to promote the president’s political campaign.”
Each one of us had better get serious about voting, action, and finding out what these cartoonish villains are doing, because we’re not just democratic backsliding. We democratic falling off a cliff.
What’s on your Reading, Blogging, and Action list today?
The Nightmare, by Henry Fuseli
Trump’s speech last night was long and full of lies. I didn’t really watch or listen to it; I had it on TV with the sound muted. I turned it on when I noticed he was lying about Social Security, and then I tuned out again. Here’s what he had to say about the popular program that for 80 years has kept old people from starving on the streets.
We’re also identifying shocking levels of incompetence and probable fraud in the Social Security program for our seniors, and that our seniors and people that we love rely on.
Believe it or not, government databases list 4.7 million Social Security members from people aged 100 to 109 years old. It lists 3.6 million people from ages 110 to 119. I don’t know any of them. I know some people who are rather elderly but not quite that elderly. 3.47 million people from ages 120 to 129. 3.9 million people from ages 130 to 139. 3.5 million people from ages 140 to 149. And money is being paid to many of them, and we are searching right now.
In fact, Pam, good luck. Good luck. You’re going to find it. But a lot of money is paid out to people, because it just keeps getting paid and paid and nobody does — and it really hurts Social Security, it hurts our country. 1.3 million people from ages 150 to 159, and over 130,000 people, according to the Social Security databases, are age over 160 years old. We have a healthier country than I thought, Bobby.
Including, to finish, 1,039 people between the ages of 220 and 229. One person between the age of 240 and 249 — and one person is listed at 360 years of age. More than 100 years — more than 100 years older than our country. But we’re going to find out where that money is going, and it’s not going to be pretty. By slashing all of the fraud, waste and theft we can find, we will defeat inflation, bring down mortgage rates, lower car payments and grocery prices, protect our seniors and put more money in the pockets of American families.
It seems pretty clear that Trump plans to destroy Social Security and leave millions of Americans to starve in the streets. Americans need to fight back, and force Democrats to wake up and actually see what is happening.
Rick Wilson posted a scathing review of the speech on his substack, “Rick Wilson’s Intel and Observations”: 100 Minutes Of Lies. Dear God, That Was Worse Than Even I Expected.
Well, that’s 100 minutes of our lives we’ll never get back.
Trump’s big Joint Address to Congress read as if the White House staff told ChatGPT, “Give me a State of the Union speech that’s Castro in length, Von Munchausen in facts, and Culture War Carnival Barker in style. Oh, and make it tendentious, boring, and ugly.”
What else did one expect?
Trump’s speech last night was dull yet terrifying. It was self-referential and self-aggrandizing yet vaguely desperate. It was Trump at his worst, but it also showed America that all he’s got is his base and his same tired bit, his greatest hits played over and over, louder and louder, to an audience getting older, poorer, and more vicious in its demands that their umber demigod give them that old-time religion.
It was divisive, terrible, and badly written, a speech so clunky and organizationally and rhetorically grotesque that even if Ted Sorenson, Ray Price, and William Safire rose from the grave and sat down with Peggy Noonan and Aaron Sorkin for a fortnight, they couldn’t find enough creative mayonnaise to turn that chickenshit into chicken salad. Almost every State of the Union speech ends up with a kind of freight-train problem; too many constituent groups inside the Administration need their paragraph, their nod to their importance.
This graceless bucket of rhetorical fish guts was a catalog of “Now That’s What I Call Culture War! Volume 27” tropes, riffs, and attacks on the usual Catalog of Imaginary Demons that informs MAGA belief and behavior. None of it was new or more shocking than the first 1,000 times.
But it was the stunning disregard for truth that set this speech apart.
Trump opened his lie hole and sluiced a torrent of outright lies into the willing maw of his dull-eyed, bovine audience watching at home hooked to their Fox feed of amygdala-stoking fear porn. The absurdity of his lies was rivaled only by their scope.
The rest is behind a paywall, but here are reports on the lies. (I can’t post excepts–there are just too many lies):
CNN Staff: Fact-checking Trump’s address to Congress.
Glenn Kessler at The Washington Post: Fact-checking 26 suspect claims in Trump’s address to Congress.
Here is video from CNN of fact checking by Daniel Dale:
NBC News: Democratic Rep. Al Green removed after disrupting Trump’s speech.
Rep. Al Green, D-Texas, was removed from the House chamber Tuesday night after he disrupted President Donald Trump’s joint address to Congress.
Green, who has long pushed to impeach Trump dating to his previous term in office, stood and shook his cane toward the president in the opening minutes of his speech.
Other lawmakers cheered and booed Green, causing further chaos on the House floor as Trump paused. The uproar prompted House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., to read aloud from House rules.
“Members are directed to uphold and maintain decorum in the House and to cease any further disruptions,” Johnson said, an admonishment aimed at Green.
After Green refused to sit and allow Trump to continue, Johnson called for the House sergeant at arms to remove him from the chamber.
“Nah nah nah nah, goodbye,” Republicans chanted as Green was escorted from the room.
Outside the chamber, Green told NBC News that as “a person of conscience,” he believes Trump “has done things that I think we cannot allow to continue.”
What Green yelled at Trump was “You have no mandate to cut Medicaid!”
Trump reiterated his desire to take over Greenland. Politico: ‘Greenland is ours’: Greenland prime minister rebukes Trump pledge to acquire the territory.
Greenland’s Prime Minister Múte Bourup Egede proclaimed that “Greenland is ours” in response to President Donald Trump’s joint address to Congress Tuesday night, where he said the U.S. will get Greenland “one way or another.”
“Americans and their leader must understand that,” Egede wrote on Facebook Wednesday, using the Greenlandic name for the island. “We are not for sale and cannot simply be taken. Our future will be decided by us in Greenland.”
Egede’s remarks follow Trump’s pledge to acquire the territory — despite emphasizing Greenland’s self-determination — during his Tuesday speech.
“We strongly support your right to determine your own future, and if you choose, we welcome you into the United States of America,” Trump said, stressing that acquiring the territory would improve U.S. national and international security.
“I think we’re going to get it. One way or the other, we’re going to get it,” Trump added.
David Kurz at Talking Points Memo: Donald Trump Personally Thanks John Roberts For Keeping Him Out Of Jail: ‘I Won’t Forget It.’
It wasn’t Rep. Al Green (D-TX) being escorted out of the House chamber after his disruptive protest, and it wasn’t the long list of Trump absurdities cobbled together into an endless speech. Nope, it was Trump rubbing Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts’ face in their mutual corruption:
“Thank you again. Thank you again. Won’t forget it,” Trump says while shaking the hand of Supreme Court Justice John Roberts after the State of the Union.
— Anna Bower (@annabower.bsky.social) 2025-03-05T05:18:11.964Z
Let’s stipulate that we’re reasonable people who can see this for what it is: a reference to the Supreme Court’s disastrous ahistoric discovery of vast presidential immunity from criminal prosecution that saved Trump from going to jail.
Trump’s mob boss mentality has led to other moments like this, where he extravagantly highlights the moral and ethical compromises that a sycophant has made on his behalf as a way of demonstrating that they really are no better than he is and of lashing them even more firmly to his side. If they resist, he calls them out for being hypocrites, pointing to their compromised behavior and mocking their previous pretensions to ethical behavior.
But this time Trump did it to the sitting Supreme Court chief justice in public on the floor of the House. Whatever high regard John Roberts still held himself in has been directly challenged in the most excruciating and a dignity-robbing way. Trump has a way of doing that to everyone who comes in contact with him. Roberts had it coming. No pity for him.
Jamelle Bouie at The New York Times: Trump’s Revenge Tour Finds Its True Target.
Donald Trump rambled, ranted and raved his way through the 2024 presidential campaign, but he was clear on one point. When he was elected, he would get revenge.
“I am your retribution,” Trump said to crowds of his supporters throughout the campaign.
This was not an abstraction. He had a few targets in mind.
“I will appoint a real special prosecutor to go after the most corrupt president in the history of the United States of America, Joe Biden, and the entire Biden crime family,” he said in 2023.
There were also the judges, prosecutors and politicians who tried to hold Trump accountable for his crimes, both the ones for which he was indicted and the ones for which he was convicted. He refused to rule out an effort to prosecute Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney who prosecuted the Stormy Daniels hush-money case against him, and attacked Justice Juan Merchan, who presided over the trial, as “crooked.” Trump shared an image that called for the former Republican representative and Jan. 6 committee member Liz Cheney to be prosecuted in “televised military tribunals,” and he accused Gen. Mark Milley, a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, of treason, calling his actions “so egregious that, in times gone by, the punishment would have been DEATH!”To get his revenge, Trump would turn the I.R.S., the F.B.I. and other powerful parts of the federal government against his political enemies. He would hound and harass them in retaliation for their opposition to his law stretching and lawbreaking.For once in his public career, Trump wasn’t lying. As president, he has made it a priority to go after his political enemies.
You all know the things Trump has done to get revenge in his brief time in office so far. But Bouie argues that Trump’s real revenge target is the American people.
Altogether, Trump has done more to actualize his desire for retribution than he has to fulfill his campaign promise to lower the price of groceries or reduce the cost of housing. A telling sign, perhaps, of his real priorities in office.This fact of Trump’s indifference to most Americans — if not his outright hostility toward them, considering his assault on virtually every government function that helps ordinary people — suggests another dimension to his revenge tour. It is almost as if he wants to inflict pain not just on a specific set of individuals but on the entire nation.
Read the whole thing at this gift link. It’s very good.
By Mark Bryan
Joyce Vance at Civil Discourse: Let’s Be Honest About The State Of The Union.
It wasn’t necessary to watch all of Trump’s speech last night to understand where we are as a country. The state of our union, as I noted Sunday night, is compromised. And that comes as no surprise to any of us. But two moments from last night are worth noting, as markers of where we are.
The Stupid: “I have created the brand new Department of Government Efficiency, DOGE. Perhaps you’ve heard of it. Perhaps. Which is headed by Elon Musk, who is in the gallery tonight,” Trump said during his speech.
Only one problem. That’s not what the Justice Department has been telling judges in litigation involving the Musk-led effort to privatize government. They’ve been doing everything they can to claim Musk is not in charge of DOGE, including telling the judge that a woman named Amy Gleason, who was on vacation in Mexico when they made the representation to the court, is the Acting Administrator. It didn’t take lawyers long to point that out. Trump was barely finished when Kel McClanahan filed a “Notice of New Evidence” in Lentini v. DOGE, one of three cases that have been consolidated to hear claims about DOGE’s legality in the District of Maryland.
McClanahan argued that Trump’s statement about Musk “conclusively demonstrates that expedited discovery is urgently needed to ascertain the nature of the Department of Government Efficiency and its relationship to the United States DOGE Service.” The best outcome for Trump, following his epic foot in mouth, is that Judge Jia Cobb grants the motion to expedite which would make this the first case where pro-democracy lawyers would gain access to information about the inner workings of DOGE, likely a treasure trove that would further underscore the lawless manner in which Trump is acting.
The worst case is that someone gets held in contempt, either civil or criminal. That would open an entire can of worms about how the courts enforce their orders against a Trump administration that has at least suggested it might not comply with ones it doesn’t like. But that fight is, inevitably, coming, and judges don’t like it when parties lie to them, especially when it’s so explicit and when it’s the government doing it, here, rather uniquely, with the president’s involvement.
Hahaha!
Vance also comments on Trump’s behavior toward the SCOTUS justices:
The Corrupt: After his speech, Trump shook hands with people in the room, including the four active Supreme Court Justices who were present in their long black robes. Their tradition of dress is meant to ensure that no one mistakes who they are. It separates them from the political fray, even as they attend. That message, however, was lost on Trump.
The moment was captured on CSPAN. Trump thanks the Justices. He doesn’t say what for, but of course, we all know.
“Thank you very much, appreciate it,” he says to Elena Kagan, whose face is a mask in the moment. Then, he moves on to the Chief Justice. “Thank you again. Thank you again,” he says to John Roberts. Then he awkwardly slaps him on the shoulder and says, “Won’t forget it.” The moment has an almost classic mob boss feel to it in context.
Roberts, followed by Kagan, peels off and leaves without comment and immediately.
Wired: Some DOGE Staffers Are Drawing Six-Figure Government Salaries.
Some staffers at Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency are drawing robust taxpayer-funded salaries from the federal agencies they are slashing and burning, WIRED has learned.
Jeremy Lewin, one of the DOGE employees tasked with dismantling USAID, who has also played a role in DOGE’s incursions into the National Institutes of Health and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, is listed as making just over $167,000 annually, WIRED has confirmed. Lewin is assigned to the Office of the Administrator within the General Services Administration.
By Mark Bryan
Kyle Schutt, a software engineer at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, is listed as drawing a salary of $195,200 through GSA, where he is assigned to the Office of the Deputy Administrator. That is the maximum amount that any “General Schedule” federal employee can make annually, including bonuses. “You cannot be offered more under any circumstances,” the GSA compensation and benefits website reads.
Nate Cavanaugh, a 28-year-old tech entrepreneur who has taken a visible internal role interviewing GSA employees as part of DOGE’s work at the agency, is listed as being paid just over $120,500 per year. According to DOGE’s official website, the average GSA employee makes $128,565 and has worked at the agency for 13 years.
When Elon Musk started recruiting for DOGE in November, he described the work as “tedious” and noted that “compensation is zero.” WIRED previously reported that the DOGE recruitment effort relied in part on a team of engineers associated with Peter Thiel and was carried out on platforms like Discord.
Since Trump took office in January, DOGE has overseen aggressive layoffs within the GSA, including the recent elimination of 18F, the agency’s unit dedicated to technology efficiency. It also developed a plan to sell off more than 500 government buildings.
Although Musk has described DOGE as “maximum transparent,” it has not made its spending or salary ranges publicly available. Funding for DOGE had grown to around $40 million as of February 20, according to a recent ProPublica report. The White House did not respond to questions about the salary ranges for DOGE
Reuters: Exclusive: Judges face rise in threats as Musk blasts them over rulings.
U.S. Marshals have warned federal judges of unusually high threat levels as tech billionaire Elon Musk and other Trump administration allies ramp up efforts to discredit judges who stand in the way of White House efforts to slash federal jobs and programs, said several judges with knowledge of the warnings.
In recent weeks, Musk, congressional Republicans and other top allies of U.S. President Donald Trump have called for the impeachment of some federal judges or attacked their integrity in response to court rulings that have slowed the Trump administration’s moves to dismantle entire government agencies and fire tens of thousands of workers.
Musk, the world’s richest person, has lambasted judges in more than 30 posts since the end of January on his social media site X, calling them “corrupt,” “radical,” “evil” and deriding the “TYRANNY of the JUDICIARY” after judges blocked parts of the federal downsizing that he’s led. The Tesla CEO has also reposted nearly two dozen tweets by others attacking judges.
Reuters interviews with 11 federal judges in multiple districts revealed mounting alarm over their physical security and, in some cases, a rise in violent threats in recent weeks. Most spoke on condition of anonymity and said they did not want to further inflame the situation or make comments that could be interpreted as conflicting with their duties of impartiality. The Marshals Service declined to comment on security matters.
As Reuters documented in a series of stories last year, political pressure on federal judges and violent threats against them have been rising since the 2020 presidential election, when federal courts heard a series of highly politicized cases, including failed lawsuits filed by Trump and his backers seeking to overturn his loss. Recent rhetorical attacks on judges and the rise in threats jeopardize the judicial independence that underpins America’s democratic constitutional order, say legal experts.
This one is for Dakinikat. The Wall Street Journal: The Two-Headed Monster Stalking the Economy Has a Name: Stagflation.
Stagflation has entered the chat.
President Trump’s decision to dramatically raise tariffs on imports threatens the U.S. with an uncomfortable combination of weaker or even stagnant growth and higher prices—sometimes called “stagflation.”
The U.S. has imposed 25% tariffs on Mexico and Canada, and another 10% hike on China following last month’s 10% increase. They “will be wildly disruptive to business investment plans,” said Ray Farris, chief economist at Prudential PLC. “They will be inflationary, so they will be a shock to real household income just as household income growth is slowing because of slower employment and wage gains,” he said.
It is still unclear how long Trump intends to keep the tariffs in place. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick suggested Tuesday afternoon on Fox Business that a rollback could be in the works.
Sentiment indicators and business commentary in recent weeks point to slumping confidence over the threat of higher prices.
By Mark Bryan
China and Mexico are the top two sources of consumer electronics sold at the retailer Best Buy, Chief Executive Corie Barry told analysts Tuesday. “We expect our vendors across our entire assortment will pass along some level of tariff costs to retailers, making price increases for American consumers highly likely,” Barry said. The company’s shares plummeted 13% in the midst of a general stock-market retreat.
Brothers International Food Holdings, based in Rochester, N.Y., imports mangoes and avocados from Mexico and sells fruit juices, purées and frozen-food concentrates to food and beverage manufacturers. New tariffs are forcing the 95-person company to pass on price increases to its customers or accept lower profit margins….
Trump and his advisers have said some short-term pain might be warranted to achieve the administration’s long-term ambitions of remaking the U.S. economy. They have also said their steps to boost energy production could offset higher goods prices.
Nonetheless, tariffs are a particularly difficult economic threat for the Federal Reserve to address. Its mandate is to keep inflation low and stable while maintaining a healthy labor market. Tariffs represent a “supply shock” that both raises inflation, which calls for higher interest rates, and hurts employment, which calls for lower rates. The Fed would have to choose which threat to emphasize.
NBC News: Supreme Court rejects Trump administration’s bid to avoid paying USAID contractors.
The Supreme Court on Wednesday backed a federal judge’s power to order the Trump administration to pay $2 billion to U.S. Agency for International Development contractors but did not require immediate payment.
In doing so, the court on a 5-4 vote rejected an emergency application filed by the Justice Department after U.S. District Judge Amir Ali issued a series of rulings demanding the government unfreeze funds that President Donald Trump put on hold with an executive order.
The court delayed acting on the case for a week. In the meantime, the contractors have not been paid.
In an unsigned order, the court said that Ali’s deadline for the immediate payment had now passed and the case is already proceeding in the district court, with more rulings to come. A hearing is scheduled for Thursday.
As such, Ali “should clarify what obligations the government must fulfill” in order to comply with a temporary retraining order issued Feb. 13, the court said. Ali should consider “the feasibility of any compliance deadlines,” the court added.
Four conservative justices dissented from the denial of the application, with Justice Samuel Alito writing that Ali did not have “unchecked power to compel the government to pay out … 2 billion taxpayer dollars.”
“I am stunned,” Alito added.
The other dissenters were Justices Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh.
One more on the tariffs before I wrap this up. Eric Levitz at Vox: Trump doesn’t seem to know why he launched a giant trade war.
Donald Trump just imposed a 25 percent tariff on virtually all goods produced by America’s two largest trading partners — Canada and Mexico. He simultaneously established a 20 percent across-the-board tariff on Chinese goods.
As a result, America’s average tariff level is now higher than at any time since the 1940s.
Meanwhile, China and Canada immediately retaliated against Trump’s duties, with the former imposing a 15 percent tariff on American agricultural products and the latter putting a 25 percent tariff on $30 billion of US goods. Mexico has vowed to mount retaliatory tariffs of its own.
This trade war could have far-reaching consequences. Trump’s tariffs have already triggered a stock market sell-off and cooling of manufacturing activity. And economists have estimated that the trade policy will cost the typical US household more than $1,200 a year, as the prices of myriad goods rise.
All this raises the question: Why has the US president chosen to upend trade relations on the North American continent? The stakes of this question are high, since it could determine how long Trump’s massive tariffs remain in effect. Unfortunately, the president himself does not seem to know the answer.
In recent weeks, Trump has provided five different — and contradictory — justifications for his tariffs on Mexico and Canada, none of which make much sense.
Read all about it at Vox.
That’s all I have for you today. Please take care of yourselves in this terrible time for our country.
“Those damn “entitlement” programs like Medicaid and Social Security must go.” John Buss, repeat1968
As the unfocused butchering of the federal workforce and agencies continues, we see more and more essential services and research getting turned into contracts for Elonia’s Empire and billionaire tax cuts. It’s only a matter of months now before the economy begins to collapse from the weight of higher prices and the return of high unemployment. Stagflation is inevitable. Economists, including me, see it as inevitable at this point. The financial markets are sending up red flares. The UK’s Economics Times has this banner headline. “Brace for impact: Stagflation fears could wipe 10% off stocks, says Wall Street’s Doom Prophet Barry Bannister.” I’ve been saying this all month.
Wall Street is worried about the possibility of a “worst-case scenario” in the US economy, one that would send stock prices plummeting by as much as 10%, as per a report.
Stifel managing director and chief equity strategist Barry Bannister has been among the few bears in an optimistic market. He is predicting the S&P 500 would end 2025 in the mid-5000s, reported Business Insider. His call for a potential stagflation scenario may serve as a wakeup call to investors.
According to Business Insider, while most investors expect another strong year of growth and inflation to continue cooling in 2025. According to Bannister, there are early signs that stagflation is beginning.
As per the report, inflation has already increased over the past few months, with consumer prices increasing by 3% from the year earlier in January and more than economists expected and above the 2.9% pace in the previous month. Bannister highlighted that the Trump-era tariffs might be driving up costs for consumers, reported Business Insider.
Bannister said, “I think it’s foolish that people assume that inflation’s going back down to 2%. It’s not going back down to 2%, not without a recession,” as quoted by Business Insider. He also claimed, “Tariffs undo a lot of the disinflation.”
Those of you my age will remember this from the 1970s. It is positively the worst economic scenario imaginable. I already am swamped by electric bills that are unimaginable for my little house. The unusual weather and snow basically doubled it last month. And just in time for Hurricane and Fire Seasons, we see the Triumvariate try to kill us all so billionaires and Multinational Mega Corporations can steal the coins from our eyes. Additionally, we are providing momentum to the spread of infectious diseases globally and locally. What a clusterfuck our country has become in such a short time! By mid-2026, we will officially be known as a shithole country. Let’s break this all down. You can see from the sources that I am becoming less trustful of the American Fourth Estate.
The Trump administration has fired hundreds of workers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa), the US’s pre-eminent climate research agency housed within the Department of Commerce, the Guardian has learned.
On Thursday afternoon, the commerce department sent emails to employees saying their jobs would be cut off at the end of the day. Other government agencies have also seen huge staffing cuts in recent days.
The firings specifically affected probationary employees, a categorization that applies to new hires or those moved or promoted into new positions, and which makes up roughly 10% of the agency’s workforce.
“The majority of probationary employees in my office have been with the agency for 10+ years and just got new positions,” said one worker who still had their job, and who spoke to the Guardian under the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal. “If we lose them, we’re losing not just the world-class work they do day to day but also decades of expertise and institutional knowledge.”
Another anonymous staffer called the laid-off workers “dedicated, hard-working civil servants who came to Noaa to help protect lives and keep our blue planet healthy”.
“These indiscriminate cuts are cruel and thoughtless,” the second worker said.
It is not only laid-off employees who will be harmed by the cuts, the second worker said. Ordinary Americans who rely on Noaa’s extreme weather forecasts, climate data and sustainably monitored fisheries will also suffer.
“Words can’t describe the impact this will have, both on us at Noaa and on the country,” the employee said. “It’s just wrong all around.”
Andrew Rosenberg, former deputy director of Noaa’s National Marine Fisheries Service, said Thursday was a “sad day”.
“There is no plan or thought into how to continue to deliver science or service on weather, severe storms and events, conservation and management of our coasts and ocean life and much more,” he said. “Let’s not pretend this is about efficiency, quality of work or cost savings because none of those false justifications are remotely true.”
Okay, this one is from the New York Times. I hope they can hold off the Techbro Overlords long enough to uncover some truth. “U.S. Terminates Funding for Polio, H.I.V., Malaria and Nutrition Programs Around the World Here are some of the 5,800 contracts the Trump administration formally canceled this week in a wave of terse emails.” This is reported by Stephanie Nolen.
Starting Wednesday afternoon, a wave of emails went out from the State Department in Washington around the world, landing in inboxes for refugee camps, tuberculosis clinics, polio vaccination projects and thousands of other organizations that received crucial funding from the United States for lifesaving work.
“This award is being terminated for convenience and the interest of the U.S. government,” they began.
The terse notes ended funding for some 5,800 projects that had been financed by the United States Agency for International Development, indicating that a tumultuous period when the Trump administration said it was freezing projects for ostensible review was over, and that any faint hope American assistance might continue had ended.
Many were projects that had received a waiver from the freeze because the State Department previously identified its work as essential and lifesaving.
“People will die,” said Dr. Catherine Kyobutungi, executive director of the African Population and Health Research Center, “but we will never know, because even the programs to count the dead are cut.”
The projects terminated include H.I.V. treatment programs that had served millions of people, the main malaria control programs in the worst-affected African countries and global efforts to wipe out polio.
What follows is an incredibly long list of programs that have saved all kinds of people from death and massive illness. A lot has to do with prenatal care. Certainly, we can be better human beings than this. I am ashamed of my country. Pamela Herd and Don Monyhan ask the big question on their substack: “Can we still govern?.” As a young adult, I used to joke that I would pay so much for so long–starting at 15–for Social Security that I doubt I’d ever see all of it. That was a bit of a joke back then, but it seems dead serious now. Sit down, swallow, then put the cup down. “Trump’s Assault on Social Security. The plan to cut America’s most successful safety net program in half.”
Social Security is our biggest and most successful safety net program. The annual $1.6 trillion in benefits constitutes 21% of federal spending and 40% of older adults’ income. It lifts more people out of poverty than any other government program. We all know some of the 69 million Americans depending on those benefits. If you are not currently a recipient, you will be at some point. We all have a stake in ensuring that Social Security works.
And so, we all have a reason to fear the Trump administration’s call to cut 50% of Social Security Administration employees. It’s current staff of about 57,000 employees would drop to 23,000. SSA, quite simply, will not be able to function if this happens.
President Trump promised that “Social Security will not be touched.” Then he claimed he would act only eliminate SSA fraud based on false claims by Elon Musk. Gutting agency capacity is not about fraud, and is very much going to affect people’s experience of Social Security. The benefits that so many Americans depend on will not administer themselves.
This long but useful read will tell you how effective and economical the plan is. I wrote a research paper for my doctoral class in Financial institutions right after Katrina and was amazed by its efficiency. An outline of studies and data follows the paragraphs above. I will cut to the chase and pass that for brevity.
While we don’t know precisely how the agency will implement the staffing cuts, it will almost certainly entail closing many of the 1,233 SSA field offices around the country. About 120,000 people visit those offices each day. Those that remain open will have fewer staff to serve more people.
We talked with Kathleen Romig, the Director of Social Security and Disability Policy at the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities. She has also previously worked with Social Security, as well as the Social Security Advisory Board. She said:
There’s no way SSA can sustain the thousands of staff losses that result from the massive reductions to come without hurting beneficiaries. Over two-thirds of the agency’s staff serve the public directly, and the rest support their work—hearing appeals, keeping SSA’s systems running and secure, maintaining a high level of transparency and accuracy, and more. It’s going to get a lot harder for people to get help and take a lot longer to get access to their earned Social Security benefits.
DOGE has already announced the closure of 45 field offices, though it’s unclear if the offices are actually closed. The process is so chaotic that members of Congress are not being told when field offices are being closed in their district.
If the proposed cuts in staff move forward the scale of field office closures will be much greater. Field offices serve many functions. Its where you get a new Social Security card if you lost yours or need it changed due to a name change. The card, of course, is critical for everything from getting a drivers’ license to opening a bank account. It is the closest thing the US has to a national identity system. Field office staff also help people decide when they should enroll in the program, as well as provide in-person assistance when the agency makes mistakes with payments or paperwork.
We already know the effects of field office closures on a smaller scale. A study in the American Economic Journal: Economic Policy found that field office closures led to a 16 percent decline in disability recipients in the surrounding communities due to excess demand in the remaining offices. The people hit hardest were those with moderately severe disabilities, lower education and lower income.
These actions are enough to make you want to take to Pennslyvania Avenue with pitchforks, torches, and guillotines. It’s a full-out assault on the least among us. He’s also going to puke out another Presidential order to establish English as the official language of the USA. We’ve been doing fine with pluralism for 250 years. Besides, if we’re going to be language NAZIs, let’s start with FARTUS and Elonia. Most of the time, they speak unintelligibly. This is from CNBC. “Trump to sign order making English the official U.S. language.” Why is this even necessary? What is this going to cost?
President Donald Trump plans to sign an executive order making English the official language of the United States, three White House officials told CNBC on Friday.
The order would establish a national language for the first time in U.S. history.
Trump’s order would also rescind former President Bill Clinton’s August 2000 directive requiring agencies and other recipients of federal funds to provide services for those with limited English proficiency, according to a fact sheet shared with CNBC.
Trump’s designation will allow federal agencies to maintain their current policies and continue to provide documents and services in other languages. But it “encourages new Americans to adopt a national language that opens doors to greater opportunities,” according to the fact sheet.
The Wall Street Journal first reported the order earlier Friday morning.
Trump’s schedule for Friday does not currently include any time for signing executive orders. A White House source did not immediately tell CNBC when Trump was expected to sign the order.
So, with this and the destruction of the Education Department, will we stop seeing ESL classes in schools? I can only see this as the ultimate golden ticket for bullying.
The Department of Ed has a form to snitch on DEI policies in schools.I’d be a shame if we broke it with thousands of responses… enddei.ed.gov
— Jess Piper (@piperformissouri.bsky.social) 2025-02-27T21:52:28.162Z
One last economic thing. I’ve never been a deficit hawk. It’s established theory that the size of the tax base and economy plus market factors like acceptance of the money play a much bigger role in how big it can be rather than how big it is. However, this worries me. This is from Alexander Solender, who is writing for AXIOS. “Republicans fear their big budget win is a 2026 time bomb.”
House Republicans notched a major legislative victory this week when they passed their budget resolution. Now comes the hard part: Crafting a fiscal package that doesn’t doom them in the 2026 election.
Why it matters: Some Republicans already see signs that the backlash to the Trump administration’s “efficiency” efforts is spilling over into opposition to their legislative plans.
- One Republican moderate, speaking on the condition of anonymity to give candid thoughts about political concerns surrounding their party’s marquee legislation, told Axios: “It could be trouble.”
- “We saw what happened in 2018,” the lawmaker said, referring to the midterm year in which voter anger over the GOP’s legislative efforts helped Democrats flip more than 40 House seats.
Driving the news: The House voted Tuesday to adopt House Republicans’ budget resolution, with all but one House Republican voting in favor of the measure and every Democrat opposing it.
- The resolution — a first step toward the hulking budget reconciliation bill Republicans hope to pass — allows $4.5 trillion in tax cuts, offset by $2 trillion in spending cuts.
- The vote came after a tortured process in which House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) strained to bring together right-wing hardliners who want greater spending cuts and centrists fearful of cuts to programs like Medicaid.
State of play: After the vote, some vulnerable Republicans were quick to distance themselves from the notion that the budget measure does anything more than provide a conceptual framework for the final bill.
- “Last night’s vote was just a procedural step to start federal budget negotiations and does NOT change any current laws,” Rep. Rob Bresnahan (R-Pa.) said in a strident statement Wednesday morning.
- Rep. Ryan Zinke (R-Mont.), in a CNN interview, insisted there is “zero mention of cutting Medicaid” in the budget resolution — even as it calls for the Energy and Commerce Committee to seek $880 billion in cuts, some of which will likely have to come from Medicaid.
Between the lines: Republicans have been barraged the last week and a half by angry constituents at town halls and protests outside their district offices complaining about DOGE’s layoffs and cuts to federal programs.
- While DOGE has been the primary target of that voter blowback, House Republicans say they have also faced plenty of flack over the prospective benefit cuts in the GOP’s fiscal package.
- “Most of the concern now is over … DOGE,” said a second House Republican who spoke anonymously, “but there’s also, maybe not too far behind that, the message that they are trying to get across on reconciliation.”
Zoom in: Despite voting for the budget measure, moderate and swing-district House Republicans told Axios they are drawing clear red lines on what they will support in a final package.
- “If that doesn’t match with what our constituents and our district is looking for, then we won’t be voting for that product,” said a third House Republican.
- A fourth told Axios: “I have told my leadership … there are scores of Republicans who don’t want to go further [on Medicaid] than requiring work for able-bodied adults, getting the illegals off and rooting out waste, fraud and abuse.”
- “If it goes further than that,” they said, “the bill is probably dead.”
Yes, but: Conservatives are equally emphatic the bill must include substantial enough cuts to Medicaid to offset the increases in spending — creating a seemingly unworkable dilemma for Johnson.
- Insufficiently deep Medicaid cuts are “probably a nonstarter,” said Rep. Eric Burlison (R-Mo.).
- Burlison went as far as to say Republicans “should cut more” than the budget provides for, telling Axios: “I just had people in my office say, ‘You didn’t cut enough.'”
What to watch: Democrats are eager to exploit Republicans’ struggles as the process of crafting the final package begins.
- “Health care’s gone for everyone … we just won back the House,” exulted Rep. Haley Stevens (D-Mich.) coming out of the budget vote on Tuesday.
- Democrats’ House Majority PAC is circulating a memo on the vote, first shared with Axios, titled: “House Republicans Ignore Constituents, Vote For Trump-Musk Agenda.”
Well, I’m off to see if I can pay the electric and cable bill and get groceries today. It’s a big question.
Take care and be kind to yourselves!
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