If it's Thursday, this must be Asmara.
Only 1,388 days to go...
“Civilization begins with order, grows with liberty and dies with chaos.” ~Will Durant
April 5, 2025. Hands Off 2025 Spread the word…
Living through these times…
Several friends have been sending me information about Penzeys Spice Company. I think it’s a company based in Wisconsin. From their website:
What if your business, just by being its best self, could make a whole lot of the problems the world faces a chunk easier to solve? Given that possibly wouldn’t you owe it to everyone to try your best to do that?
“Penzeys makes everything better.” We noticed that ourselves pretty early on, and at first didn’t quite know what to make of it. But for some time now, without coming right out and saying it, we’ve been running our business as best we can to encourage the kindness and compassion that’s needed to take on the world’s problems and the resolve needed to overcome the obstacles in the way to solving them.
I ordered some of their spices for someone and am now on their mailing list. Just reading their emails makes me smile. Sign up if you want to get good vibes!
Finding the humor…
President Trump’s childhood home in NYC sells at steep discount — after being overrun by feral cats
Trump’s New Canada Tariff Threatens Toilet Paper Supply
“Ludicrous” Situation: Jeffrey Epstein Case Redaction Takes Over FBI’s New York Office
The New York field office is an epicenter for FBI counterintelligence, counterterrorism, public corruption, international drug trafficking, and financial crime investigations. The redeployment of agents to comb over the file of the notorious sex trafficker Epstein, who died nearly six years ago, is an indication of the Justice Department’s priorities in this second Trump administration. One FBI veteran calls it a “ludicrous” situation.
Thought for the day on his birthday…
“The appearance of the law must be upheld - especially when it's being broken.”
~ Boss Tweed
Must Read Article:
The Greater Scandal of Signalgate
In the initial months of Donald Trump’s second Administration, the qualities of malevolence, retribution, and bewildering velocity have obscured somewhat the ineptitude of its principals. This came into sharper view with recent reports in The Atlantic, in which the magazine’s editor, Jeffrey Goldberg, tells how he was somehow added to a communal chat on the commercially available messaging system Signal, labelled “Houthi PC small group.” Sitting in his car, in a Safeway parking lot, Goldberg watched incredulously on his phone as the leaders of the national-security establishment discussed the details of bombing Houthi strongholds in Yemen.
…the discovery that the Vice-President and the heads of the leading defense and intelligence bureaucracies deploy emojis with the same frequency as middle schoolers. More seriously, but not astonishingly, when prominent members of the Administration were confronted with their potentially lethal carelessness, they did as their President would have them do: they attacked the character and the integrity of the reporter (who proved far more concerned about national security than the national-security adviser), and then refused to give straight answers to Congress about their cock-up and the sensitivity of the communications. Everyone from Cabinet members to the President’s press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, followed principles inherited by the President from the late Roy Cohn: Never apologize. And be certain to slander the messenger…
This is an Administration that does not have to slip on a Signal banana peel to reveal its deepest-held prejudices and its painful incapacities. You get the sense that we would learn little if we were privy to a twenty-four-hour-a-day live stream of its every private utterance….
It would be unwise to dismiss the importance of secrets in this or any other Administration, but the point is that Trump and his ideological and political planners have made no secret of their intentions… Trump gives voice to his id almost daily at the microphone or on social media: the autocratic actions intended to undermine the law, academia, and the media; the disregard for democratic partners and the affection for all manner of authoritarians; the hostile designs on Greenland, Canada, Panama, Mexico, and Europe; the ongoing attempt to purge the Republican Party of any remaining dissenters; and the constant effort to intimidate his critics and perceived enemies.
The threat of autocracy advances each day under Donald Trump, and it is a process that hides in plain sight.
Quote of the day:
“The strong economy the Biden administration created is tumbling, and Trump administration officials seem to have no plan to stop it except to ‘Trust in Trump.’ The officers in charge of keeping the nation safe have instead broken the law in an epic fail demonstrating that they have no foreign policy plan except military strikes highlighted with emojis.”
~ Heather Cox Richardson
What I’m reading today…
‘It’s a Disaster’: Global Markets Slide After Trump Unveils Tariffs
Markets around the world shuddered on Thursday after President Trump announced across-the-board 10 percent tariffs on all U.S. trading partners except Canada and Mexico, as well as even higher tariffs on dozens of America’s other main trading partners.
Futures on the S&P 500, which allow investors to trade the index outside normal trading hours, slumped over 3 percent. Asian markets fell sharply, with benchmark indexes dropping more than 3 percent in Japan, and nearly 2 percent in Hong Kong and South Korea.
I Just Saw the Future. It Was Not in America.
President Trump is focused on what teams American transgender athletes can race on, and China is focused on transforming its factories with A.I. so it can outrace all our factories. Trump’s “Liberation Day” strategy is to double down on tariffs while gutting our national scientific institutions and work force that spur U.S. innovation. China’s liberation strategy is to open more research campuses and double down on A.I.-driven innovation to be permanently liberated from Trump’s tariffs.
Beijing’s message to America: We’re not afraid of you. You aren’t who you think you are — and we aren’t who you think we are.
The Top Goal of Project 2025 Is Still to Come
Project 2025 has proved to be a good road map for understanding the first months of Donald Trump’s second term, but most of the focus has been on efforts to dismantle the federal government as we know it. The effort to restore traditional families has been less prominent so far, but it could reshape the everyday lives of all Americans in fundamental ways. Its place atop the list of priorities is no accident—it reflects the most deeply held views of many of the contributors—though the destruction of the administrative state might end up imperiling the Trump team’s ability to actually carry out the changes the authors want.
The DOGE Plan That Endangers U.S. Revenue
The stated purpose of these firings, and of DOGE’s other cuts across federal agencies, is to save money. But the cuts may actually translate to a meaningful dip in taxpayer revenue. The IRS is effectively the government’s accounts-receivable department. Staffing cuts set up the IRS to lose money in two ways, Natasha Sarin, a Yale law professor and former Treasury counselor, told me: A reduced IRS has less capacity to collect and enforce taxation, and taxpayers who think they won’t be audited may be more inclined to start cheating. Sarin expects that the agency’s losses will far outweigh the $140 billion DOGE says it has saved (DOGE’s self-reported data is opaque and has been full of errors). She and her colleagues at the Budget Lab at Yale forecast that the plan to cut half of the agency’s workforce alone would conservatively translate to $395 billion in lost revenue in the next decade, and possibly up to $2 trillion.
Stocks Mark Worst Month in Years
Markets around the world have wavered as fear and uncertainty over tariffs and trade wars rattle investors. The S&P 500 just recorded its worst month since 2022, shedding 5.8 percent in March.
Trump Is Going After the Independence of the Entire Legal Profession, Not Just Big Law
A new presidential memorandum outlines the White House’s expansion to a more general scheme of penalties against law firms that take legal positions that it regards as baseless, vexatious, or unreasonable across the range of courtroom disputes in which the federal government is a party. Unless stopped—whether by the courts or some other form of pushback coming from civil society—these policies will endanger the health of, and may even constitute an existential threat to, an independent legal profession or bar willing to vigorously stand up to the federal government. Why Trump opponents can’t find a lawyer… yeah Chicago law firm Jenner & Block: Jenner Stands Firm
The latest episode of Mad King Trump
I do not believe that Donald Trump is secretly a Russian plant, hired by the Kremlin to destroy America’s economy and global influence. But frustratingly, Trump’s actions are often indistinguishable from what he might do if he were a foreign agent bent on destruction.
Trump is stronger on immigration and weaker on trade, an AP-NORC poll finds
Views of Trump’s job performance overall are more negative than positive, the survey found. About 4 in 10 U.S. adults approve of the way Trump is handling his job as president, and more than half disapprove. Negative opinions are also stronger than positive opinions — about 4 in 10 U.S. adults strongly disapprove of Trump’s job performance, while about 2 in 10 strongly approve.
The s-word rippling through Wall Street and Main Street
Economic growth has flatlined so far this year. Inflation has picked up. And consumers expect both to get worse in the months ahead. For the moment, it adds up to Wall Street's least-favorite "s-word," stagflation — stagnant growth mixed with elevated inflation. That pattern, most vividly seen in the 1970s, is particularly painful because it means people experience pain from both lack of job opportunities and higher prices. It also leaves the Fed and other economic policymakers with less ability to cushion the blow because a move that might address one side of the problem could worsen the other.
White House Communications Director Steven Cheung is on X, trolling his boss’s enemies…Observers have noted that, standing next to Donald Trump, Cheung (who is ethnically Chinese) looks a bit like Oddjob, the archvillain’s silent but menacing sidekick in the 1964 James Bond film, Goldfinger. Cheung happily made the comparison himself last week, when he reposted a photo of himself wearing a black bowler hat—Oddjob’s signature concealed weapon.
Cheung worked in communications for the Ultimate Fighting Championship before joining the 2016 Trump campaign—and he brought along an apparently boundless appetite for combat…And under his leadership, the comms team is engaged in a campaign of relentless—often performative—hostility.
Does DOGE Pose a National Security Risk?
Musk’s activities present a national security nightmare. Consider what the intelligence agencies of U.S. allies and adversaries see when the American president grants sweeping access to the basic systems that make the U.S. government run to a team of young people who have no government experience, who may not have been put through standard personnel vetting processes, and who work for an unelected figure with extensive personal financial interests in national security spending.
American adversaries surely see an espionage and blackmail bonanza. Less obviously but just as crucially, U.S. allies, accustomed to doing business and sharing information with the United States on a day-to-day basis, are likely to take a hard look at their typical routines. Will they be willing to continue operating as usual? Even if Musk has not yet reached into the major national security agencies’ systems, there is now a very real possibility that he might do so, and foreign governments, friends and foes alike, are surely paying close attention.
MAGA conservatives love Viktor Orbán. But he’s left his country corrupt, stagnant, and impoverished. Once widely perceived to be the wealthiest country in Central Europe, and later the Central European country that foreign investors liked most, Hungary is now one of the poorest countries, and possibly the poorest, in the European Union. Industrial production is falling year-over-year. Productivity is close to the lowest in the region. Unemployment is creeping upward. Despite the ruling party’s loud talk about traditional values, the population is shrinking. Perhaps that’s because young people don’t want to have children in a place where two-thirds of the citizens describe the national education system as “bad,” and where hospital departments are closing because so many doctors have moved abroad. Maybe talented people don’t want to stay in a country perceived as the most corrupt in the EU for three years in a row. Even the Index of Economic Freedom—which is published by the Heritage Foundation —puts Hungary at the bottom of the EU in its rankings of government integrity…
What is this Hungarian model they so admire? Mostly, it has nothing to do with modern statecraft. Instead it’s a very old, very familiar blueprint for autocratic takeover…. After being elected to a second term in 2010, Orbán slowly replaced civil servants with loyalists; used economic pressure and regulation to destroy the free press; robbed universities of their independence, and shut one of them down; politicized the court system; and repeatedly changed the constitution to give himself electoral advantages... He has aligned himself openly with Russia and China, serving as a mouthpiece for Russian foreign policy at EU meetings and allowing opaque Chinese investments in his country.
The Tariff Man Is Coming for America’s Entrepreneurs
It sounds great. But it is not happening. Many entrepreneurs, such as the Rosens, have no practical way to onshore their supply chain. If they managed to do so, their jewelry would cost more than imported jewelry, making their business uncompetitive. If the tens of thousands of American firms relying on imported goods did the same, the country’s rate of productivity growth and consumers’ purchasing power would go down. “If we try to make every damn thing here, it’s a road to poverty,” Kimberley Clausing, an economist at UCLA, told me. “The idea that there’s going to be some sort of long-term benefit is hogwash.”
How the Social Security Administration and DOGE are gaslighting Americans
Here are the facts: DOGE and the SSA moved forward with plans to close multiple field offices. Then, without public notice or explanation, they reversed their plans. Now they are trying to pretend like they were never planning to close field offices, and people are confused due to misinformation from the media or Democratic politicians.
In Campbellsville, Kentucky, for example, the owner of a 12,750-square-foot office building leased to the SSA for a field office was informed by the General Services Administration (GSA) that the entire lease was being terminated. The SSA lease was also listed as terminated on the DOGE website… News of the closure generated protests from residents and local politicians. A couple of weeks later, the owner of the building in Campbellsville received another letter from the GSA saying it was reversing its decision to terminate the lease for the entire building…
It appears that, for now, the SSA is largely maintaining its network of field offices. But it is also slashing 12% of its staff — more than 7,000 people. It is also implementing two major changes that could flood its offices with millions of additional people annually. Even before these new policies, it could take a month or longer to schedule an appointment at a field office.
We Are Sleepwalking Into Autocracy
Donald Trump and the MAGA movement are threatening myriad institutions and making them bow to executive power but that the midterm elections of 2026 might be rendered undemocratic through the erosion of the infrastructure necessary for opposition to exist. And Trump, or a member of his family, may well be in position to take the White House two years later. Long ago, the Republican Party decided that they cared more about power than they did democracy.
Under Trump, Social Security Resumes “Clawback Cruelty”
Trump deputy Elon Musk has boasted of taking a chainsaw to the federal government and has called Social Security a Ponzi scheme. In a signed declaration filed in federal court last week, a recently retired SSA official, Tiffany Flick, said she “witnessed a disregard for critical processes” as members of DOGE — the Department of Government Efficiency, which Trump established by executive order — demanded access to sensitive Social Security systems, including files that contain beneficiaries’ banking information. New management at the SSA called its workforce “bloated.” But, under the previous administration, the agency was telling a starkly different story. A year ago, O’Malley told lawmakers that, as the number of people receiving benefits increased, “historic underfunding and understaffing” at the agency had created a “service delivery crisis.”
Late last year, the agency provided data to KFF Health News showing that in September its workforce was near a 50-year low. As of last month, applicants for disability benefits were waiting an average of more than seven months for a decision, according to the SSA website.
The E.P.A. vs. the Environment
With the help of the E.P.A., the Trump Administration is doing everything it can to make emissions grow again. It is bestowing favors on the fossil-fuel industry, by, for example, opening up more land in Alaska for oil drilling. It is also kneecapping the industry’s competitors: the President, in an executive order issued on his first day in office, announced that he would halt leases for offshore wind development. The other day, on social media, he said that he wanted the country to burn more coal, the most carbon-intensive fuel.
Trump wants to dismantle FEMA—at the same time that experts are predicting a brutal hurricane season
As climate change and record-warm ocean temperatures usher the U.S. into yet another intense storm season, the Trump administration has signaled that it may be working to dismantle the Federal Emergency Management Agency. As more information about the upcoming hurricane season comes to light, it appears that the Trump administration may be gearing up to shutter the government’s largest disaster aid group.
Kristi Noem, secretary of Homeland Security, reportedly said that her department planned to “eliminate” FEMA. CNN reported that top officials from FEMA and the Department of Homeland Security met to discuss FEMA’s future and options for shutting it down. According to CNN, the agency is currently in a state of disarray as more than $100 billion in disaster assistance and grant money is frozen and hiring is largely stalled.
These Countries Have Issued Travel Advisories for the United States
Canada and several European countries have issued travel advisories for the US. While most of the government warnings don’t specify why they were added, the timing points to the the Trump administration's executive orders regarding immigration and the tightening of border policies.
Kristi Noem refused to say who financed some of her travel. It was taxpayers who were on the hook
As then-Gov. Kristi Noem crisscrossed the country — stumping for President Donald Trump and boosting her political profile beyond her home state — she refused to reveal what her extensive travel was costing taxpayers…. South Dakota repeatedly picked up the tab for expenses related to her jet-setting campaigning.
An Associated Press analysis of recently released travel records found more than $150,000 in expenses tied to Noem’s political and personal activity and not South Dakota business. That included numerous trips to Palm Beach, Florida, where Trump resided before retaking office.
The Trump Administration’s First 100 Days
Executive Order on Elections: Nearly every arm of the Democratic Party united in filing a lawsuit against the Trump administration, arguing that a recent executive order seeking to require documentary proof of citizenship and other voting reforms is unconstitutional.
Fitness Standards for Combat Roles: Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary, mandated that physical fitness requirements for combat jobs be “sex-neutral,” a move that is likely to significantly reduce the number of women who qualify.
‘Move It Back to the States’: President Trump justifies his plan to shutter the Education Department by saying that states should control schools. He’s using the mantra for other policies, too.
Immigration Law and Congressional Limits: A crackdown targeting foreign students protesting Israel’s treatment of Palestinians conflicts with free-speech protections that lawmakers added in 1990.
Trump’s Next Law Firm Target: The law firm that employs Doug Emhoff, former Vice President Kamala Harris’s husband, has learned that it is among the next firms that Trump plans to use his power to punish, according to four people briefed on the matter.
Targeting Federal Agencies: The so-called Department of Government Efficiency, led by billionaire Elon Musk, has appeared at agency after agency to slash spending and cut the federal work force. Here’s how DOGE employees do it.
U.S.A.I.D.: The Trump administration detailed its plans to put the government’s main agency for distributing foreign aid fully under the State Department and reduce its staff to some 15 legally required positions. The agency employed about 10,000 people before President Trump entered office.
Smithsonian Institution: Trump intensified his push to impose a more positive view of American history by moving to curb the independence of the institution, which has 21 museums, libraries, research centers and the National Zoo. Here’s what to know.
What I am watching…
Meet the women who were the “secret weapon” that won the war and changed the world in the process. How to Watch The Women of World War II - The Untold Stories It is available to stream on pbs.org and the free PBS App, available on iPhone, Apple TV, Android TV, Android smartphones, Amazon Fire TV, Amazon Fire Tablet, Roku, Samsung Smart TV, and Vizio
