Cryptocurrency, Investing, Money, Economy, Business, and Debt:
Crypto market’s biggest risks in 2025: US recession, circular crypto economy
Strategy Unveils $500M Stock Raise to Buy More Bitcoin
Coronavirus and Public Health:
A Full-Blown Constitutional Crisis:
Judge Lashes Out at Trump Administration
A federal judge lashed out at the Trump administration Monday for not turning around planes as Venezuelan migrants sued over a plan to deport them under the Alien Enemies Act, and refusing to answer questions about the flights.
It was a remarkable hearing in which a Justice Department attorney repeatedly declined to provide details about the flights that landed in El Salvador Saturday evening, saying he was ‘not authorized’ to do so, a rare instance of an attorney rebuffing a judge’s questions.
Justice Dept. Stonewalls Judge on Deportation Fights
Trump’s Open Defiance Of Federal Courts Is Now At Hand
Trump Border Czar Doesn’t Care What Judges Think
Border czar Tom Homan said he doesn’t care what the judges think about the deportation flights of Venezuelan gang members as the administration faces a legal battle over the flight.
Said Homan: “I’m proud to be a part of this administration. We’re not stopping. I don’t care what the judges think. I don’t care.”
Trump’s Cronies Line Up To Help Him Defy The Judiciary
Donald Trump’s administration has openly crossed a big red line — one we’ve been tracking for some time now, as Trump and his allies openly question the judiciary’s authority to block Trump’s various lawless executive actions. The Trump administration had already slipped out of compliance with some court orders blocking executive actions, but up until this weekend, much of that was chalked up to the chaos of the DOGE rampage through much of the federal government, and of the Trump administration more generally. It was unclear how much was pointed defiance, and how much incompetence.
Then Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act over the weekend and gleefully defied a federal court order blocking any deportations under the act…
Trump’s push for deportations without due process is meant to cause a constitutional crisis
Trump’s invocation of the 1798 Aliens Enemies Act, explained
Other Politics:
GOP Lawmaker Moves to Impeach Judge
Rep. Brandon Gill (R-TX) said he would be pushing to impeach the federal judge who ordered the Trump administration to halt deportations of Venezuelan gang members over the weekend.
If it wasn’t a shameful act of a sycophant, it would be laughable. There’s no way that two-thirds of the Senate are going to convict a judge for doing his job.
Russians Celebrate Trump’s Closure of Voice of America
Russian propagandists Margarita Simonyan and Vladimir Solovyov enthusiastically praised the US decision to halt funding for Radio Liberty and Voice of America during a broadcast on Russian television.
Trump Weighs Recognizing Crimea as Russian Territory
The Trump administration is considering recognizing Ukraine’s Crimea region as Russian territory as part of any future agreement to end Moscow’s war on Kyiv.
Administration officials have also discussed the possibility of having the US urge the United Nations to do the same… Such a request would align the Trump administration with the position of Russian President Vladimir Putin…
I really don’t understand why Ukraine hasn’t already taken out the Kerch bridge. They’ve taken a few pot shots at it previously, what plausible reason would the Ukrainians have for not delivering the coup de grâce, especially if Trump stabs them in the back and twists the knife?
Musk’s Team Evicts Officials at the U.S. Institute of Peace
A simmering dispute between the Department of Government Efficiency and an independent agency dedicated to promoting peace broke into an open standoff involving the police on Monday, as Elon Musk’s government cutters marched into the agency’s headquarters and evicted its officials.
The dramatic scene played out in Washington on Monday afternoon as Mr. Musk’s team was rebuffed from the U.S. Institute of Peace, an agency that President Trump has ordered dismantled, then entered it with law enforcement officers. Agency officials say that because the institute is a congressionally chartered nonprofit that is not part of the executive branch, Mr. Trump and Mr. Musk do not have the authority to gut its operations.
How Republicans Learned to Love High Prices
Donald Trump’s allies have pivoted from denying that his tariffs will hurt consumers to insisting that consumers should welcome the pain.
After spending most of the 2024 campaign blaming Democrats for inflation and insisting that tariffs don’t increase prices, Donald Trump and his allies have a new economic message: High prices are good.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, for example, recently admitted to the Economic Club of New York that inflation-weary Americans could see a ‘one-time price adjustment’ from Trump’s tariffs, but he quickly added that ‘access to cheap goods is not the essence of the American dream.’ Representative Mark Alford of Missouri told CNN, ‘We all have a role to play in this to rightsize our government, and if I have to pay a little bit more for something, I’m all for it to get America right again.’ And Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick put his own spin on the argument, telling NBC News that, yes, prices on imports will rise, but American-made goods will get cheaper, and that’s what matters. (In fact, tariffs generally lead to price increases for imported and domestic goods, because the latter face less foreign-price competition.)
It’s true that affordable goods and services are not, on their own, the definition of the American dream. But they’re a necessary component of it, and trade is one of the most important drivers of that affordability. Until recently, Republicans understood this quite well.
Right now, the federal government is engaged in a dramatic purging of visual representations of American history and its current workforce. Some of this is a Stalinist removal of former officials. The official portraits of Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley, and Trump Secretary of Defense Mark Esper are gone. An NIH mural featuring Anthony Fauci was removed.
More systematically, it also the removal of women, persons of color, and trans people, following executive orders around DEI and gender. Here, the removals signal the end one form of representation that valued inclusiveness and a broader understanding and acknowledgment of people whose stories were not always told…
The Trump presidency is, as much as anything, a project of purging and erasing large parts of America, of people, ideas, capacities, and knowledge.
They’re Starting to Figure Out He Had No Plan
While much of MAGA is motivated by hatred of an open society — by racism, misogyny and the desire to end all things woke — the swing voters who put Donald Trump over the top thought they were supporting a great manager who would fix the economy, reducing grocery prices and restoring good jobs. It was inevitable that they would eventually feel buyers’ remorse, because Trump never had plans to deliver on his economic promises; on the contrary, almost everything he’s trying to do will make the economy worse.
Even so, it’s stunning just how quickly consumer confidence has fallen off a cliff…
What’s truly remarkable from my perspective, however, is that Trump’s economic team seems to be even more despairing than the general public.
Serendipity:
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