During his failed vice-presidentail bid, Tim Walz faced charges of stolen valor in about the same way as Brave Sir Robin from Monty Python and the Holy Grail faced his travails – had SIr Robin had the benefit of a compliant media that did its best to keep the issue quiet. And Walz is famous...
A few days ago, there was a bit of a tempest in a teapot when our representative to the NATO military committee, a female US Navy admiral named Shoshana Chatfield, was ‘forced out,’ as the media decided to put it. Now, the pretty sympathetic coverage the story got was overshadowed by the noise of the tariff...
Confused about the meaning of the unanimous Supreme Court order issued late yesterday? I certainly wonder what an order to “facilitate” an action without “effectuating” it means. John Sexton seemed similarly nonplussed about it last night. So it comes with some sense of relief to discover that the demand to facilitate the return of a...
I am going to leave aside any question about whether the World Health Organization is telling the truth because I have no way of knowing. There may have been a time when, in ignorance, I would have assumed that they were, but that time is long past. The WHO is run by a man who...
Closing the tabs … The United States is considering offers from 15 countries on tariff agreements and is close to deals with some of them, White House economic adviser Kevin Hassett said on Thursday after President Donald Trump lowered some of the duties in a stunning reversal. “USTR has informed us that there are maybe...
Christopher Eisgruber is the President of Princeton and seems to be the Ivy League leader who is stepping up to resist moves made by the Trump administration at other leading colleges and universities. He wrote a piece about it for the Atlantic and recently gave an interview about it to the NY Times. I want...
Well, the grace period for New York City denizens is over. The one they’d had since October, where they were supposed to learn how to properly separate their food scraps in order to obey the city’s new picky, picky, picky composting law. Organic matter from the leaves in your yard to the potato peels on...
The Supreme Court today issued a brief order today which partly sides with a lower court’s order that the Trump administration must “facilitate” the return of an illegal immigrant living in Maryland who was deported to a prison in El Salvador last month. However there are some quibbles about the wording of the lower court’s...
The world is healing, one MAGA snub at a time. During the first Trump administration, the White House was often stymied by trying to follow rules and norms that were designed with the purpose of buttressing the power of an establishment with which it was at war. The second Trump administration has put its focus...
I’ve heard of clueless briar-patch strategies, but this one really takes the cake. Or a Golden Raspberry, perhaps. Rumors have swirled the last few days that China’s Xi Jinping had compiled a precise set of retaliatory actions against the US in the trade war touched off by Donald Trump’s tariffs. Today’s report from Bloomberg doesn’t...
If Columbia University thought it could agree to Trump administration demands and then quietly tell its own insiders that it had no intention of following through on any of them, they are probably going to be mistaken. The end of this may not be some handshake deal in which Columbia promises to be better and...
With all that’s been going on in the world as far as trade wars, tariffs, and China, China, China, there hasn’t been much in the news about Panama. That doesn’t mean nothing’s been happening, though. In fact, Panama is turning into one more giant burr under Xi’s Mongolian camel blanket and Trump has to be...
The United States has been tracking serious cyberattacks on US infrastructure for years. Those attacks are hardly minor–the intrusions threaten all our computer-linked infrastructure, which in the great Venn Diagram of life means basically all our electrical generation, water distribution, pipelines, power plants, communications, and even medical systems. Computers and software make life more efficient...
Among the most frequently asked questions over the last few weeks concern the abuse of injunction power by federal judges in district courts. The top question: How can one judge in a defined district issue orders that bind the executive branch across the country? That’s closely followed by: Is this happening to Trump more than...
China’s kind of in a pissy mood about the trap Trump sprung on them and spent a little time mocking his motivations for doing so the other day. The CCP put out a nifty little AI piece illustrating what their vision of the industries China now dominates would look like if returned to the United...