The Supreme Court strikes down Trump’s capricious tariffs, so he announces a 10% across-the-board tariff. No, wait. Make that 15%. What will it be tomorrow?
The King of Chaos, who declared business bankruptcy six times, is seething over being “debanked” after January 6, 2021. He should take his case to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Oh, right. He destroyed the CFPB.
Paul Krugman has started a YouTube channel. He seems uncertain about keeping it going, but what he says here about the Trump administration’s response to a report from the New York Federal Reserve is worthy of a debut video.
Based on LG’s pre-tariff sale price for my new washer and dryer, I estimate I paid at least $50 more per unit than I would have a year ago. Something else that’s happening at the Fed is, in contrast, undoubtedly welcomed by Trump’s people. The easing of mortgage regulations.
The decline in banks issuing mortgages was a reason why I moved most of my retirement money out of the bank where it had been. As a savings bank, it was dropped by the Depositor’s Insurance Fund, which guarantees accounts above the FDIC limit of $250,000. The bank wasn’t in any sort of legal trouble, it had simply grown too big to remain within the DIF’s “too small to fail” limit.
Home mortgages and small business loans are the life blood of that bank. I became concerned that the economic changes resulting from the Financial Crisis of 2008 — conditions that should have favored small community banks — and later the Covid pandemic, could reverse that bank’s growth. If it were ever to run into financial trouble, my retirement money would be at risk. So, being cautious (my definition of conservative) with my money, I moved more of it to another Massachusetts chartered savings bank that is still a DIF member.
I wasn’t kidding about taking some days off. I just didn’t say whether or not they’d all be consecutive. 😉
The first time I posted something about Stephen Colbert was two weeks after starting this weblog,* during the second term of George W. Bush’s presidency. What an aggravating, time consuming struggle it was back then, capturing video and getting it to play online!
How long ago was that? For a reference, three weeks later, Google announced its intention to buy YouTube. Steve Jobs was four months away from introducing the iPhone.
Here we are today, twenty years later, and Colbert is in the crosshairs of the petty, childish, vindictive, and incompetent yet dangerous, President of the United States. Bush was only one of those pejoratives. Stephen is righteously pissed off, and he has every reason to be.
Here is the interview Colbert wasn’t allowed to air on broadcast television.
Everyone, myself included, underestimated Trump’s ability to succeed as a con man. Obama most of all, as Peter Baker writes about in one of his typically compelling and readable reports.
* dograt.com had been live since 2002, with a set of static web pages. They were written with Microsoft Front Page, along with some HTML manual editing.
Tonight’s PBS News Hour ended with this segment about Boston’s singular significance in the Revolutionary War. Then it “goes woke” with a discussion of another revolt; the desegregation busing crisis of fifty years ago.
I have a niece who is a practicing physician at a Minneapolis hospital.
He’s been sundowning then staying up late into the night, posting unhinged screeds and sharing offensive fake videos. In the Oval Office he’s always sitting at his desk. His speech patterns have become so odd. Something is very wrong, even by his bizarre standard.
From the bruising on his hands it’s obvious he’s on a blood thinner, and it isn’t just aspirin. A mini-stroke must have been suspected, so he had an MRI. The CT scan was a cover-up story, or perhaps he was given one of those too.
