Roaming Charges: State of the Empire in Extremis

Reality in our century is not something to be faced.

– Graham Greene

+ I’m sorry to report that reality has not become any more faceable in the succeeding century, Graham.

+ Fidel’s five-hour harangues on agricultural production in rural Cuba seemed shorter and livelier than Trump’s bitchy, repetitive, and leaden performance at the State of the Empire. I guess he should be congratulated for not dozing off to the hypnotic scroll of the teleprompter. I did.

+ The relentless exploitation of victims of tragedies and their families to advance his fascist policies is one of the most grotesque set-pieces in Trump’s long-running political schtick. Last night, he once again invoked the story of a young girl (Dahlia Coleman) who was critically injured in a crash with a semi-truck driven by an immigrant from India, who was likely speeding through a construction zone to meet his employer’s quota. It was a car crash, like thousands of others that happen every day. You’re much more likely to be killed or seriously injured by an all-American macho man driver weaving his way home from the bar after getting shitfaced while watching the men’s hockey Olympic game or get beaten to a pulp by your drunken spouse after he lost a prop bet on the Super Bowl.

+ Joseph Heller, Catch-22: “When I look up, I see people cashing in. I don’t see heaven or saints or angels. I see people cashing in on every decent impulse and every human tragedy.”

+ Trump unwittingly provided a visual metaphor for the Gaza genocide that left mass graves of a hundred Palestinian bodies for each Israeli:

Believe it or not, Hamas worked along with Israel and they dug, and they dug, and they dug. It’s a tough thing to do, going through bodies all over. Passing up 100 bodies sometimes for each one then found. Tough job. And uhh. They finally got it back to 27. And then they found all 28.

+ Tom Nichols on Trump’s PT Barnum routine at the SOTU: “The only thing Trump did not do was explain his policies—especially about war and peace—to Congress or the American people.”

+ When Trump said he would not allow Iran to obtain a nuclear weapon (Iran has denied it wants a nuclear weapon), more than two dozen Democrats stood and applauded.

+ Matt Welch writing in Reason: “The electorate, as we have seen, can stomach gratuitous lying, just not so much about the quality and conditions of their own lives.”

+ Speaking of gratuitous lies that are exposed by the unpaid bills stacking up on the kitchen table….

+ Trump: “Incomes are rising fast, the roaring economy is roaring like never before.” In fact, incomes rose just 0.9% in 2025, down from 2.2% in 2024. The fractional increase in the first year of Trump’s second term is the slimmest since 2022.

+ Trump: “More Americans are working today than at any time in the history of our country.” There are more Americans than ever before, period. But the unemployment rate was lower when Biden left office.

+ Trump: “In one year, we have lifted 2.4 million Americans — a record — off of food stamps.” “Lifted” = “kicked off”….

+ Trump: “The cost of chicken, butter, fruit, hotels, automobiles, rent is lower today than when I took office, by a lot. And even beef, which was very high, is starting to come down significantly.” As most shoppers know, food prices are 2.9 percent higher than this time last year.

+ Trump: “Gasoline, which reached a peak of over $6 a gallon in some states under my predecessor and was, quite honestly, a disaster, is now below $2.30 a gallon in most states, and in some places $1.99 a gallon. And when I visited the great state of Iowa just a few weeks ago, I even saw $1.85 a gallon for gasoline, the lowest in four years, and falling fast.” According to AAA, the average price per gallon of regular in the US is $2.975, 6.5 cents a gallon less than last year. (In Oregon, the price is back up to $3.92 per gallon.)

+ David J. Bier: “The state of the union on immigration policy is that immigration policy is destroying our union by violating the Constitution, dividing our country, and making us poorer and less free. Every member of Congress should reject this pointless agenda and demand a better way.”

+ With Liz Cheney apparently unavailable to give the Democratic response to Trump, party leaders turned to the newly elected governor of Virginia, April Spanberger, who introduced herself to the country by saying, “After my career in law enforcement, I continued my service in the CIA…”

+ Vegas loves it when Democratic party gamblers come to town…

+ The ever-elusive “center” the Democrats keep chasing is now well to the right of the first Nixon administration.

+++

+ Iran has not attacked the US. Cuba has not attacked the US. Venezuela did not attack the US. Nigeria did not attack the US. Gaza did not attack the US. Libya did not attack the US. Iraq did not attack the US. Serbia did not attack the US. Haiti did not attack the US. Panama did not attack the US. Nicaragua did not attack the US. Grenada did not attack the US. East Timor did not attack the US. Chile did not attack the US. Cambodia did not attack the US. Laos did not attack the US. Vietnam did not attack the US.

+ Donald Trump, July 19, 2025: “All three nuclear sites in Iran were completely destroyed and/or OBLITERATED. It would take years to bring them back into service.”

+ Steve Witkoff, February 22, 2026: “They’re probably a week away from having industrial-grade bomb-making material.”

+ Both of these statements are false.

+ Aside from Trump being mentioned more than 55,000 times in the Epstein files, a cratering economy, collapsing poll numbers and daily judicial rebukes for trashing the Constitution, have we been told one reason why we’re about to go to war with Iran? We certainly didn’t get any clue from Trump’s SoTU speech…

+ More than two dozen Democrats stood up and applauded every time Trump threatened Iran, roughly the same number that applauded every time he mentioned Israel. The Democrats aren’t against Trump’s pending attack on Iran. They’re against his lack of a “process” for attacking Iran.

+++

+ The diagram for the ICE warehouse turned into a mega-prison in Georgia resembles the diagram of a slave ship…

+ Blueprints of the proposed mega warehouse ICE jail show that the austere building is meant to confine 10,000 people, making it nearly 50% larger than America’s largest jail. ICE plans to pack 100 people into each room, in conditions designed to be so inhumane that the detainees are coerced into giving up their asylum claims.

+ “The court is not aware of another occasion in the history of the United States in which a federal court has had to threaten contempt — again and again and again — to force the United States government to comply with court orders.” So wrote Federal Judge Patrick Schlitz, chief judge in Minnesota, in a ruling on Thursday regarding the repeated violations of judicial orders by ICE in the state. In a review of 143 federal cases, Schlitz found 210 orders that ICE officials had failed to comply with. Schlitz, who was appointed by George W. Bush, vowed that “one way or another, ICE will comply with this court’s orders.”

+ In another case of ICE perfidy (if you believe Columbia’s duplicitous president, Claire Shipman), federal agents entered Columbia University campus under false pretenses and arrested Ellie Aghayeva, a senior majoring in neuroscience and political science, from her apartment on university grounds. The agents apparently told campus security they were searching for a “missing person” (not normally an ICE function) to gain entry into the building. The immigration officers had fake badges and showed security a fake missing persons bulletin for a 5-year-old girl. Aghayeva has an International student visa. All law enforcement agents must show a judicial (not administrative) warrant to access private areas on Columbia’s campus, including housing and classrooms. 

+ Update: Aghayeva was freed from ICE custody late Thursday after Zohran Mamdani met with Trump and complained about the illegal circumstances of her arrest: “Just got off the phone with President Trump,” Mamdani wrote on X.  “In our meeting earlier, I shared my concerns about Columbia student Elaina Aghayeva, who was detained by ICE this morning. He has just informed me that she will be released imminently.”

+ It looks like Zohran has officially replaced Kim as Trump’s favorite communist. 

+ Eduardo Tinajero Rodriguez was pulled over on a traffic stop in West Virginia, supposedly because the license plate on a trailer he was hauling had mud on it and the number was illegible to the cop, a frequent pretext for racial profiling stops. When the cop learned that Rodriguez spoke Spanish, he called ICE. When ICE arrived, they supposedly did a “records” check and arrested Rodriguez on the spot without a warrant. Rodriguez was not a gang member and had no history of violence or criminal activity. The only evidence the Feds presented for detaining and seeking to deport Rodriguez was an arrest for marijuana possession in 2009. But as Federal Judge Irene C. Berger pointed out in her ruling, Rodriguez was only four years old at the time: “The document was supplied by ICE and likely presumed to relate to the Petitioner [ie., Rodriguez] because the individual in those records had the same name, despite the differences in birthplace, birthrate, parents’ names, and immigrations status. This sloppiness further validates the Court’s concerns about the procedures utilized by the Respondents [ie, the Trump administration, depriving people present in the United States of their rights.” Judge Berger ordered Eduardo Rodriguez released from ICE custody and prohibited them from arresting him again.

+ Angel Camacho was hired by Border Patrol as an IT specialist. When he showed up for work, he was immediately detained by ICE, put in handcuffs and sent to Alligator Alcatraz, where he was imprisoned for the next month.

“I say, ‘Good morning. I’m Angel,” Comacho told a Miami news station. “They say, ‘Oh yes, we’re waiting for you.'”

+ Comacho said he was housed with violent criminals for 30 days, even though he is an asylum seeker with legal protected status and a work permit, who entered the US legally with a valid visa. He is married to a US citizen and is the father of American-born children. He has no criminal record. “I just went there to work, and it was too easy for them to catch me and say—’This is an immigrant.’ It’s the worst nightmare I’ve ever been in.”

+ Former ICE agent, Ryan Schwank: “I am duty-bound to report the legally required training program at the ICE Academy as deficient, defective, and broken. On my first day of training new cadets, I received secretive orders to teach them to violate the Constitution by entering homes without a judicial warrant. I watched ICE cut 240 hours of vital classes that teach our legal system, firearms training, the use of force, lawful arrests, proper detention, and the limits of officers’ authority.”

+ Remember Puppy Killer’s Tales from the Crypt scare story about ICE deporting a cannibal who began to eat himself on the deportation flight? You’ll be shocked to learn that this was a complete fabrication.

+ Big Tech works for Them: Internal documents show that ICE tripled its use of Microsoft products in the last six months,  storing a vast load of data on Microsoft’s cloud while using its AI tools to analyze videos and images.

+ Don’t stay in any hotel that rents rooms to ICE. You might get shot…

+ Aliya Rahman on being yanked out of her car and dragged away by ICE in Minneapolis:

I’ve spent the last month learning the names of the tendons in my shoulder, because both of my shoulders are torn — cartilage and tendons. But what I haven’t learned is the names of the people who did this to me.

+ Rahman was invited to the SOTU as a guest of Ilhan Omar, where she was forcibly removed from the gallery by United States Capitol Police after she stood up in a silent protest of Trump’s State of the Union speech. She warned officers of her injured shoulders, but was so aggressively handled that she had to be taken to George Washington University Hospital for treatment. She was later booked at Capitol Police headquarters on charges of “Unlawful Conduct.”

+ Julia Benitez, a 79-year-old Cuban asylum seeker with degenerating dementia who is confined to a wheelchair, has been crammed into a privately-run ICE prison in Eloy, Arizona, for the last nine months, despite her family’s pleas to allow them care for her. Rep. Adelita Grijalva, after visiting Benitez: “She is incredibly confused. It was heartbreaking because, as we were leaving, she thought we were here to pick her up and take her home.”

+ Federal Judge Eric Tostrud found the Trump administration in civil contempt for transferring an ICE detainee to Texas in violation of his order and then releasing him without his belongings in El Paso.  The judge ordered the administration to refund the $568 it cost for the man to get a plane ticket home to Minneapolis. (These judges need to start holding them in criminal contempt or they’ll continue to brazenly flout judicial orders.”)

+ On Thursday, Federal Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly ruled that Trump’s IRS violated federal law “approximately 42,695 times” when it shared private taxpayer data, including addresses, with ICE.

+ Tricia McLaughlin slandered the slain, celebrated their slayers, and told more transparent lies than Trump, which will probably land her a six-figure job doing PR for a strip mining company, private prison or manufacturer of biological weapons….

+ Yes, they’re evil. But they’re also incompetent at how they implement their evilness…

+ According to a court-ordered review conducted by a senior Justice Department official, the Trump administration has violated more than 50 orders from federal judges in the District of New Jersey alone. All of the violations occurred in cases involving immigrants who challenged the legality of their detention.

+ In a blistering ruling, Federal Judge Joseph Goodwin denounced ICE’s tactics of recalling profiling people on West Virginia’s highways, abusive arrests and lying to the court:

An anonymous government is no government at all. It cannot be held accountable. A masked agent freely uses force without justifying his actions, and the public cannot name him to challenge his conduct. A regime of secret policing has no place in our society.

+ On March 25, 2025, Rümeysa Öztürk was arrested on the street by six ICE agents, after the Tufts’ Ph. D. Candidate’s F-1 student visa was personally revoked by Marco Rubio for writing a pro-Palestinian op-ed. Öztürk was quickly sent out of Massachusetts to the ICE prison in southern Louisiana, where she was held for six weeks, until her release on May 9. Her arrest, detention and deportation have been ruled illegal by several courts and the feds have been enjoined against further proceedings against her. Last week, nine months after her release, Öztürk was awarded her doctorate. Öztürk had been targeted by the pro-Israel doxing website Canary Mission, which served as a malicious pipeline to Rubio’s office. 

+ Meanwhile, last week, an immigration judge terminated removal proceedings for Mohsen Mahdawi, a Columbia student, Palestinian activist, and U.S. permanent resident, whom the Trump administration arrested in April 2025  and attempted to deport under the foreign policy provision for protesting against genocide.

+ Another federal judge ruled that Kilmar Abrego Garcia can’t be “re-detained” by ICE. I feel compelled to point out that Abrego Garcia agreed to be deported to Costa Rica. Costa Rica agreed to take him. But the Trump administration refused and, for purely vindictive reason insisted on deporting him to Africa, but couldn’t even bribe a country into taking him…

+ Fewer than 1.5 percent of DHS arrests involve child-trafficking or sex abuse. Meanwhile, about half of the male members (so to speak) of the Trump cabinet are facing credible allegations of sexual assault, headlined by the President, the Secretary of “War” and the Secretary of Health and Human Services…

+ One might think the real child abusers are the people who locked up kids for no valid reason…Maria Antonia Guerra Montoya, a 9-year-old girl from Colombia, with a valid tourist visa and hoping to visit Disney, was detained at Miami International Airport and held at the Dilley immigration detention prison for four months.

+ Given the report in NBC News on the systemic use of tear gas and pepper spray by ICE against American citizens protesting its purge of immigrants, I was reminded of this cop who pepper-sprayed me for no reason other than I had ventured off the sidewalk to take his photo, while I was covering a protest at the notorious Rampart Division of the LAPD in the fall of 2000. My entire head felt like it was on a barbecue spit. The late great Alan Sekula, whose photographs of the WTO protests illustrate our book Five Days that Shook the World, was standing right next to me, photographing a cop beating a black teenager in the head with a “baton” (ie, club). Alan got sprayed with liquid fire, too. As all of this was transpiring, Cockburn was sitting on a bench down the block, scanning a copy of LA Weekly for its review of our biography of Al Gore. But he was soon compelled to evacuate his leisurely post for the sanctuary of his Valiant by the LAPD’s deployment of tear gas, which enveloped the entire block in a faint blue cloud of noxious, eye, nose and throat-burning chemicals. I remember thinking how militarized these cops looked, as I dropped to the pavement, wondering if my burning eyes would ever be able to focus again. But they seem beachwear now, compared to the full-battle gear that enwraps ICE’s shock troops…

+++

+ Trump is the least popular sitting modern president and he still has more than a thousand days left in his regime. According to CNN’s latest poll, Trump’s approval rating of -27 percent is the worst since he left office after the insurrection of January 6, 2021. In the last year, his approval among Hispanics collapsed by 19 percent. His approval among voters under the age of 45 fell by 18 percent. His approval among the manosphere slipped by 14 percent and his approval among independents, who secured both of his victories, slid by 15 percent, down to a record low of -26%. He remains popular only with Republicans, who are paying the price at the polls for their continued loyalty.

+ Trump is such a narcissist that he regularly writes his own fan fiction. To Wit…

It was Denmark that sent the hospital boat to treat a US Navy sailor who fell dangerously ill on a nuclear submarine off the coast of the island. Both of the US hospital boats are moored for repairs in Mobile. They aren’t going anywhere for months. Health care in Greenland, as in all of Denmark, is free. Greenlanders have no need for the predatory services of the US health care industry…Meanwhile, Louisiana, one of the unhealthiest places in the Western Hemisphere, needs more than a “hospital boat,” it needs an entire carrier fleet…

+ Nearly half of all Canadians now view the US as the biggest threat to peace (Israel wasn’t on the ballot):

U.S.: 48%
Russia: 29%
China: 10%
EU: 2%

Politico poll.

+ American Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee told Tucker Carlson: “Israel is a land that God gave, through Abraham, to a people that he chose. It was a people, a place and a purpose.” When he was pressed by Tucker Carlson on whether Israel has a legal right to all of the land (Gaza, the West Bank, Jordan, Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq), Huckabee responded: “It would be fine if they took it all.”

+ Speaking of Abraham and the righteousness of Biblical prophecy, a Pennsylvania man says God told him to stab his infant son with a knife and throw him in the snow. Afterwards, the man looked to the heavens and proclaimed, “I did it, God. I did it.”

And God said to Abraham: “Kill me a son.”
Abe said: “Man, you must be putting me on?”
God said: “No.”
Abe said: “What?”
God said: “You can do what you want to, but the next time you see me, you’d better run.”
Abe said: “Where you want this killing done?”
God said: “Out on Highway 61.”

+ Pete Hegseth invited the self-avowed “paleo-confederate” Christian Nationalist “pastor” Doug Wilson to preach at the Pentagon. Wilson, who has argued that enslavement of Africans was on “firm scriptural grounds,” has called for stripping the right to vote from women, who should submit to the choices of their husbands in all sexual, economic and political matters.

+ Southern Baptist Convention President Clint Pressley explained his support for a bill in the Tennessee legislature that imposes the death penalty on women who get abortions, saying it would “provide preborn children with equal protection of the laws. By protecting the lives of preborn children with the same laws that protect people who are born, we are simply loving our neighbors in the womb as ourselves.” The “right to life” ends once the “pre-born” are born, apparently…

+ How Republicans became the party of the pre-born…

+ According to a new analysis by Forensic Architecture and Earshot: “Israeli soldiers fired nearly a thousand bullets during the massacre of 15 Palestinian aid workers in southern Gaza on March 23, 2025 — with at least eight shots fired at point blank range…”

+ After her primal scream appearance before Congress, Pam Bondi returned to the RFK Justice Department building and ordered that a giant banner of Trump be hung above the entrance.

Over to you, Living Color…

I sell the things you need to be
I’m the smiling face on your TV
Oh, I’m the cult of personality
I exploit you, still you love me
I tell you, one and one makes three
Oh, I’m the cult of personality

+ A group of Vietnam veterans is suing to stop the construction of Donald Trump’s triumphal arch to himself, claiming that the hulking structure will despoil the view of Arlington National Cemetery. Trump’s Arch will be 150 feet taller than the Lincoln Memorial, which it will loom over like John Wilkes Booth entering the presidential box at Ford’s Theater. At 250-feet tall, it will be 82-feet taller than Napoleon’s Arc de Triomphe in Paris and 170-feet taller than Titus’s Arch on the Via Sacra in Rome. The tallest existing arch is in Pyongyang at 200 feet tall. It is built of white granite and dedicated to Korean resistance to Japanese domination. The walls of the arch are inscribed with the lyrics to “The Revolutionary Hymn of General Kim Il-Sung.” Trump’s arch to himself will be 50-feet taller and inscribed with the lyrics to “YMCA.”

+ Classical historian Mary Beard on the triumphal column of Marcus Aurelius: “Some of the modern admirers of the gentle philosopher-emperor Marcus Aurelius would be less admiring if they reflected on the brutality of his suppression of the Germans, proudly illustrated in the scenes of battle that circle their way up his commemorative column that still stands in the centre of Rome; though less famous, it was clearly intended to rival Trajan’s and was carefully built just a little taller.”

+ If you’re thinking there’s nothing uglier and more oppressive than Trump’s proposed Arc de Moi, you haven’t seen the Obamalisk…

+++

+ Kudos to Jeremi Grant, the underrated, smooth shooting forward for the Portland Trailblazers…And, yes, I know Kyrie Irving has been a lone voice in the NBA for Palestinian rights for years. But Kyrie’s hardly ever on the court anymore and he doesn’t share a locker room with an Israeli teammate, Deni Avdija, who is a rising star not only on the Blazers but in the entire league.

+ This week, Cuba conducted its own boat strike against a suspected “foreign terrorist” operation by would-be Bay of Piggers…(Unlike US airstrikes, the Cubans rescued and gave medical treatment to the surviving and injured invaders.)

+ Trump coerced Claudia Scheinbaum into tracking down and taking out El Mencho (Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes), the former cop turned ruthless boss of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, sparking days of violent reprisals from the cartel’s foot soldiers and spoiling the plans of many spring-breakers. Of course, the cartels exist to feed the insatiable demand for cocaine, meth and fentanyl in the US and the guns that fuel the cartels’ violence come pouring across the border from the north. Mexico’s Defense Secretary, General Ricardo Trevilla Trejo, says Mexico has seized more than 23,000 weapons from the cartels, 80% of which are of US origin and the rest are from Israel.

+ As a reward for killing El Mencho, Elon Musk, a confessed drug abuser, accused Scheinbaum of being on the payroll of the cartels, a ludicrous and libelous slur that may prompt a lawsuit from the Mexican president. “We are considering whether to take legal action. The lawyers are reviewing it. But the truth is, what matters to me is what the people say.” Sue Apartheid Boy and ban his companies from doing business in Mexico, Claudia.

+ More journalists and media workers were killed in 2025 than in any other year since the Committee to Protect Journalists began collecting data more than three decades ago. At least 129 journalists and media workers were killed in 2025, two-thirds of them by Israel.

+ Trump feels aggrieved even in victory:

“I got probably 85 million votes. They say 78 million, 79 million. They cheated in this election, too. It was just too big to rig. They cheated like hell … a Democrat will get 3, 4, 5, 6, and even 7 ballots, and then we’re supposed to win. They’re professional cheaters.”

Reality: Trump received 77,302,580 votes in 2024. (How would Democrats getting 7 ballots each–as a Green, I only got 5–suppress Trump’s vote total by 8 million votes?)

+++

+ Atmospheric C02 levels at the Mauna Loa Observatory have breached 430 ppm several times in February, each an ominous new record.

+ Stuart Varney: “We were always told that coal is the dirtiest fuel, that there are more CO2 emissions from coal than from natural gas. Is that no longer true?”

+ Doug Burgum, Secretary of the Interior: “It’s true, but then the question goes back to the reversal of the endangerment finding, which is, is CO2 a pollutant or is it something that helps plants grow? We know it does the latter for sure.”

+ They’re doing it for the veggies!

+ The state of Colorado estimates that deepening drought and extreme heat caused by climate change could cost the state to $37 billon.

+ Even after offshoring its industrial sector, much of it to China, the US still emits nearly twice as much CO2 per capita as China.

+ New research shows that climate change is leading to a steady reduction in fish biomass across the planet, “falling by 7.2% from as little as 0.1 °C of warming per decade.” Marine ecologist Dr Shahar Chaikin, lead author of the study, told the Guardian: “Our research proves exactly what that biological cost [of warming] looks like underwater.”

+ Thermal imaging from drone footage shot by Floodlight shows Elon Musk’s AI data center power plant in Mississippi violating clean air rules….

+ Doug Burgum: “Nobody’s electric bill has gone up because of a data center.”

+ A study in Nature Geoscience finds that two large lakes in the peatlands region of the Congo Basin are releasing carbon that is “thousands of years old.”

+ Global warming is turning the rivers of the Arctic a garish rusty-orange color from minerals being released by thawing permafrost.

+ If you want to reduce the risk of killer avalanches, the latest research shows that you need to stop clearcutting montane forests.

+ RFK, Jr is a total fraud, turning his (increasingly bare) back on everything he once professed to believe in:

Glyphosate is the active ingredient in Roundup, which has been the target of tens of thousands of lawsuits that claim it causes non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. In 2018, as a plaintiff’s lawyer, Mr. Kennedy helped win a landmark $289 million jury verdict against Monsanto, the maker of Roundup, in a case contending the company knew the weedkiller caused cancer. But in a statement issued through a spokesman Wednesday night, the health secretary said he supported the president.

+ A Bloomberg analysis found that out of Louisiana’s 64 counties, 62 received federal climate disaster aid exceeding 40% of the local GDP.

+ Four weeks: the amount of time the CDC has had a full-time director under Trump. This week, Ralph Abraham, the number two official at CDC, resigned abruptly.

+++

+ Ludwig Van: “I cannot bring myself to write for the flute.” I feel the same way about tariffs, Maestro. I just can’t do it. But do it, I must…

+ The Supremes may have just saved the economy for (and from) Trump…

+ A poll taken shortly before the Supreme Court ruling striking down Trump’s tariffs show 64% of Americans oppose the tariffs, with the disapproval expressed by men, women, all racial and ethnic groups and across all educational backgrounds.

+ The Yale Budget Lab calculated the impact of tariffs on consumers if those authorized under emergency powers were included and if they weren’t. It concluded: “Without IEEPA tariffs, consumers will face an overall average effective tariff rate of 9.1 percent, which remains the highest since 1946, excluding 2025. (If IEEPA tariffs had been allowed to stay in effect, this figure would have been 16.9 percent.)”

+ Trump last month on Truth Social: “If the Supreme Court rules against the United States of America on this National Security bonanza, WE’RE SCREWED!”

+ I guess he’ll have to bomb Iran now, since he can’t bomb John Roberts’s house (though he may send ICE after his maids and lawn crew.)

+ A study by JPMorgan/Chase found that the amount of tariffs paid by midsize US companies more than tripled last year: “The additional taxes have meant that companies that employ a combined 48 million people in the U.S. — the kinds of businesses that Trump had promised to revive — have had to find ways to absorb the new expense, by passing it along to customers in the form of higher prices, employing fewer workers or accepting lower profits.”

+ Trump economic adviser Kevin Hassett:

The basic theory of President Trump’s tariffs is, sure, we’re importing stuff from China, but we’ve got producers in the US who make stuff, maybe at a slightly higher cost. If we bring the stuff home, create the demand at home, then that will hurt China and drive up wages in the US and American consumers will be better off … consumers were made better off by the tariffs.

The thing about theories is they have to have a “proof” and this one has failed that test, time and again…

+ US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer found a strange way to finally concede that tariffs are a sales tax: “It’s not regressive. Most consumption in America is done by the wealthiest people. So the idea it’s somehow regressive is just wrong.” (Like all sales taxes, tariffs hit the poor the hardest.)

+ The concentration of wealth took off under Clinton, fell under Bush, resumed speed under Obama and, except for the pandemic, hasn’t slowed since…

+ $620 billion: additional amount US corporations would be paying in taxes per year if taxed at 1960s levels.

+ Living proof we’re not sending our best to the Congress…

Sen. Markwayne Mullin: When you talk about the economy, we cut inflation in half

Joe Kernan, CNBC: But when Trump came into office, it was about where it is right now.

Mullin: But we stabilized it.

Not really.

+ GOP Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith’s advice to her constituents in Mississippi (the nation’s poorest state with a poverty rate of 19%) struggling with the still rising cost of beef? Eat something else: “You have so many proteins to choose from.” Will Trump’s ag and economic policies turn America vegan? (Of course, many vegan products are now more expensive than meat.)

+ Steven Errede: “Let them eat snake!”

+++

+ For whatever reasons, Americans have never seemed interested in class warfare, but maybe Epstein Class Warfare will ignite their righteous ire…(What PR Firm did Dershowitz hire push down his numbers so low?)

+ Within 24 hours last week, the US lost both Jesse Jackson and Avel Gordly, the first black woman state senator in a state (Oregon) whose constitution, which declared itself a “white utopia,” prohibited blacks from living inside its boundaries, owning property or making contracts.

+ I can’t repress my schadenfreude at seeing Bob Kerrey ensnared in the Epstein fallout. Kerrey, one of the most self-righteous politicians of the unlamented 90s, a self-styled New Democrat, who portrayed himself as a more macho version of Bill Clinton. His main gig was the pursuit of austerity economics and he led the neoliberal drive to privatize Social Security. I never understood what the effervescent Debra Winger, a signatory of Film Workers for Palestine, saw in the man.

+ The US is the only major tourist destination in the world to see a decline in international travelers in 2025. And the shortfall in 2026 looks to be even worse, causing foreign airlines to slash the number of US-bound flights. Disney issued a warning about “international visitation headwinds.”

+ A new report by former Washington Post investigative reporter Carol Leonnig and  Ken Dilanian disclosed that the FBI was delayed in reaching the scene of a mass shooting in December because there was no FBI plane available to take them:

The whistleblower says in Dec. 2025, when there was a mass shooting at Brown University, Kash Patel was on his FBI director jet in Florida and that there was only one other available jet, but Patel had ordered it to be put on standby for another team. That meant that an evidence review team had to drive through the night …

+ Speaking of planes, here’s a look at the bedroom on the $70 million private jet Puppy Killer demanded, where she can no doubt engage in deep strategizing with Cory on the separation of children (not their own)…

+ The new University of New Hampshire’s Pine Tree Poll is not good news for Chuck Schumer, Janet Mills, Susan Collins or Donald Trump…

Democratic Primary

Platner: 64%
Mills: 26% 

General Election

Platner: 49%
Collins: 38% 

Mills: 41%
Collins: 40%

+ More than 60% of Americans describe Trump as becoming more and more “erratic” with age, including 89% of Democrats, 64% of independents and 30 percent of Republicans. I guess “erratic” is one word for it. But not a very good word…

+ There’s rarely a sane sentence (fragment or run-on) that escapes his mouth anymore. It’s all nuts…

DOOCY: On Prince Andrew, do you think American associates of Jeffrey Epstein will wind up in handcuffs, too?

TRUMP: I’m the expert in a way because I’ve been totally exonerated. That’s very nice. I can actually speak about it very nicely. I think it’s a shame. I did nothing.

+ Trump also wandered off into a really weird tangent at the White House ceremony for “victims of foreign criminal organizations”…

 You can help, and—hello, darling, how are you? Right behind you, look! My friend, right? Are you okay? Are you okay? Good. Are your eyes okay? I gave her money to get her eyes fixed, a lot of money to get her eyes fixed. The doctor ripped me off, but that’s okay.

+ Wayne Dingus, the Republican Mayor of Butler, Ohio, was charged with voyeurism after he was nabbed sniffing the underwear of an underage girl. The aptly named Dingus later resigned.

+ You don’t need to consult Sigmund Freud on projektion (See his letters to Wilhelm Fliess in 1895, if you do) to understand that the MAGA/QANON obsession with pedophilia represented not a revulsion at others having sex with children but a revulsion at their own forbidden desire to have sex with children…

+ Belén Fernández: “Houston airport. They asked me where are you coming from. I said Colombia. They said how long were you there. I said 5 weeks. They said did you buy your ticket a few days before going to Colombia or in advance. I said why does it matter. They said are you bringing any food items in. I said some boiled potatoes that I was planning to eat. They laughed and sent me for secondary inspection, which required me to have a numbered collar attached to my neck (number 2). I told them I don’t even know why I come to this country. They said oh. And eventually let me keep my potatoes.”

+++

+ If only the Brits had listened to Dennis the Peasant and adopted Anarcho-Syndicalism as their form of government, they could have spared themselves the humiliating spectacle of Andrew Albert Christian Edward Mountbatten-Windsor and much else besides…

Dennis the Peasant: Listen. Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government. Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.

Arthur: Be quiet!

Dennis: You can’t expect to wield supreme power just ’cause some watery tart threw a sword at you!

+ Last Sunday, Trump called FBI director Kash Patel (who’d taken an FBI jet at public expense to Milan on a private trip to party at the Olympics) in the locker room of the US men’s hockey team, where he invited the team to the State of the Union speech and the White House and said, ““I must tell you, we’re going to have to bring the women’s team. You do know that. I do believe I probably would be impeached [if the women’s team wasn’t invited].” The players laughed. The video of the call went viral. The women’s team responded by refusing an invite to the State of the Union and team captain Hillary Knight was forced to respond to the spectacle, which diverted attention away from their gold medal and back to Trump. “I thought it was sort of a distasteful joke and unfortunately, that is overshadowing a lot of the success, the success of just women at the Olympics carrying for Team USA and having amazing gold medal feats. We’re just focusing on celebrating the women in our room, the extraordinary efforts, and continue to celebrate three gold medals in program history as well as the double gold for both men’s and women’s at the same time. And really not detract from that with a distasteful joke.” Knight, one of the most decorated Olympians in US history, is a class act and someone who won’t be intimidated or patronized, even by the Misogynist in Chief. The men’s team, who snickered at Trump’s sexist joke, later defended him, allowed themselves to be used as political props at his SOTU and were force-fed McDonald’s (MAHA!) at the White House with Trump the next day, not so much…

+ Toni Morrison: “I find myself being more and more difficult. It’s something I really relish.” Words to live by.

+ I doubt that Tourette’s Syndrome turns you into a racist. Rather, it likely drops the filters on the racist within…

+ In 1977, more than 72% of American men and 64% of American women agreed with the view that “a preschool child is likely to suffer if his or her mother works.” By 2024, those numbers had fallen to 32% of men and 24% of women. So much for the Trad Wive movement.

+ Trump on Obama’s comment about aliens among us:

Where he gave classified information? He’s not supposed to be doing that… I don’t know if they’re real or not. I can tell you. He gave classified information. He’s not supposed to be doing that… He made a big mistake. He took it out of classified information.

+ For years, Trump contended that Obama was an alien. Has he given that up now?

+ While “Sympathy for the Devil” is the most famous song inspired by Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, Patti Smith’s “Banga” (after Pontius Pilate’s dog in the novel) is truer to the driving spirit and wild antics of Bulgakov’s serio-comic phantasmagoria of Stalinist Russia’s pact with the Devil…(It also references Bulgakov’s Heart of a Dog)…”Night is a mongrel. Believe or Explode!”

+ The estimated ratio of words written by Bulgakov’s idol, Franz Kafka, to the words written about words written by Kafka: 1:10,000,000.

+ The Oprah Winfrey Show served as the Cape Canaveral for most of these New Age snake-oil grifters, like Deepak Chopra, launching them into their larcenous orbits…

+ Herman Melville’s The Confidence Man had nothing on the imperial grifter, Donald J. Trump: “Hello, everyone. It’s President Donald J. Trump and it’s Trump time. Check out this red beauty. It’s one of my new watches. Wear it proudly on your wrist, and everyone will know exactly what it’s for, who it’s for, who it represents. It’s really gonna be something special. It’s for your favorite president. Get your watch today at GetTrumpWatches.com. These make a great gift. It’s Trump time.”

+ From Deborah Friedell’s incisive piece on the political agency of Melania Trump in the LRB …

[Melania] doesn’t say whether it bothered her that [Donald] called in to the Howard Stern radio show to brag about her body parts; he told its listeners that he often felt her up in public, that she was ‘actually naked’ while they were on the air. Donald put her on the line:

Stern: You are so hot. I see pictures of you, I can’t believe it, you’re a dream.

Melania: Oh, thank you …

Stern: I want you to put on your hottest outfit … What are you wearing right now?

Melania: Not much.

Stern: Are you nude?

Melania: Almost.

Stern: Ahh. I have my pants off already.

When Stern asked Trump if he’d stay with her if she were disfigured in a car accident, Trump asked: ‘How do the breasts look?’

Come and Join the Choir, When ICE Opens Fire….

Booked Up
What I’m reading this week

The Crown’s Silence: The British Monarchy and Slavery in the Americas
Brooke N. Newman
(Mariner)

Bad Influence: How the Internet Hijacked Our Health
Deborah Cohen
(Oneworld)

The Story of Capital
David Harvey
(Verso)

Sound Grammar
What I’m listening to this week…

Known Associates
The Paranoid Style
(Bar/None)

Mariachi El Bronx IV
Mariachi El Bronx
(AtO)

Momoko
Momoko Gill
(Strut)

More Like a Plant Than a Jewel

“To be a good human is to have a kind of openness to the world, an ability to trust uncertain things beyond your own control, that can lead you to be shattered in very extreme circumstances for which you were not to blame. That says something very important about the ethical life: that it is based on a trust in the uncertainty, and on a willingness to be exposed. It’s based on being more like a plant than a jewel: something rather fragile, but whose very particular beauty is inseparable from that fragility.”

– Martha Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy

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