Breathing a little easier

Even two decades ago, the gray haze over Kathmandu obscured the magnificent views of the surrounding mountain ranges. The valley is prone to temperature inversions, meaning warmer air at higher altitudes traps airborne pollution. It was hard to breath while trudging about and dodging exhaust-belching mini-buses and trucks even in 2006 when I took this picture out a hotel window.

According to Bill McKibben via The Guardian, Nepal is doing as well as anywhere replacing its fossil fuel fog with less polluting electric vehicles. 

A heartening report from Kathmandu, one of the world’s smokiest cities, shows that the Nepali capital is rapidly cleaning its air as electric minibuses and cars start to dominate the local scence

More than 70% of four-wheeled passenger vehicles – largely cars and minibuses – imported into Nepal last year were electric, one of the highest rates in the world. The figure reflects a remarkable growth in the use of electric vehicles (EVs), which saw the country import more than 13,000 between July 2023 and 2024, up from about 250 in 2020-21.

Nepal’s government has set ambitious targets for wider take-up of EVs, with the aim that 90% of all private-vehicle sales and 60% of all four-wheeled public passenger vehicle sales will be electric by 2030.

Makes sense. Nepal produces abundant, clean, hydroelectric power as water runs off the Himalayas. 

Chinese made BYD vehicles are available to Nepalese buyers. Great to see.

A rising wave

Margaret Sullivan, former in-house critic for the New York Times and the Washington Post back when these media outlets dared to focus resources on improving journalism, wrote yesterday: 

Big protests — but not big news -- Throngs of anti-Trump and anti-Musk protesters gathered in every state. Why was some media coverage so quiet — or almost non-existent?

Apparently much of the remaining print news media pretty much ignored some million(s?) of people in venues across the country speaking up and writing inventive protest signs. Sullivan has some guesses as to why this reporting omission; I have mine. These pubs are timid when bullied, economically precarious, and adrift in the threatening news environment created by the Trump regime's radical drive for dictatorial powers. 

But I'm not at all sure that this partial erasure of millions mattered. 

These days, we don't get our impressions of widespread action by citizens from newspapers or even TV.  We get it from millions of impressions on various social media. Sure, our experiences there are siloed, limited by the platforms to "friends," but that may even enhance the impact of seeing Susie in Peoria out there with her sign. If we turn to "mainstream" sources for information at all on a thing like this, it's for overview. We've already seen the content.

Having lived through a previous period in which "mainstream" media was hesitant to acknowledge a rising tide of citizen protest anger, I'm having deja vu. Been here, lived that. 

When I was an uppity college student in the early 1960s, there was a media pattern. In those days, newspapers had night and morning editions. (How quaint.) The junior reporter tasked to quickly describe some student protest would file from the field and the night edition would seem to us relatively accurate and even sympathetic to the participants. We'd gather around a copy and applaud. Then we'd see the morning edition and our story would have been rewritten to minimize and obscure our message. Happened every time -- early, direct coverage was not terrible; later interpretation comforted the powerful (that would have been Governor Reagan who was no saint to us.) 

This worked to minimize the rising tide of outrage about civil rights, Vietnam, and more -- until it didn't and our demand for change engulfed a decade and beyond. 

Our current rulers want to turn back the clock. 

Public protest witnesses to a rising wave that will have none of it. We won't go back. This is a movement building popular pressure that is still looking to find its footing and its opportunities. (Do note the Tesla takedown.) Most Americans don't want to live in conformity, ignorance and fear. We will be heard. We will find a way or make one.

What might the Hands Off! protests mean?

 

G. Elliot Morris decodes statistical information. After working as a data journalist for The Economist from 2018 to 2023, he took over the election information site FiveThirtyEight during the moment when it was an appendage of ABC News. Perhaps as part of ABC paying off Trump for protection, the network dumped his site. He now writes a Substack called Strength in Numbers.

 

Today Morris unpacked what he learned from the breadth and passion of the nation-spanning Hands Off! demonstrations on Saturday. His observations are thoughtful:

It’s this intersection between political discontent and the physical world that may matter most for modern politics. In an era where much of politics is mediated through screens, the mass mobilization of people serves as a kind of anchoring point: proof that opposition isn’t just statistical, but structural, social, and spatial. Protests against the unpopular policies of an imperial presidency underscore the validity of polling data that can be used to reign leaders in.

 

As the 2026 midterm campaign cycle kicks off over the next six months, and begins in earnest with elections for governor in New Jersey and Virginia this November, it’s the mental image of protests around the country that will transform abstract dissatisfaction into something more concrete — especially for voters who may not follow politics closely but are swayed by momentum, emotion, and community. It is one thing for the Democrats to be campaigning with public opinion on their side. It’s another for them to be doing it with the public literally and visibly on their side, too.

And time may yet exacerbate the incumbent party’s troubles, not soften them. If Trump continues to pursue a punishing and nonsensical trade policy, consequences from a further sinking stock market to economic recession are possible, perhaps even probable. And with a battle over the federal budget on the horizon, concerns about cutting funding for health care and Social Security as well as Elon Musk’s controversial role in “efficiency” would likely become more salient, not less.

Hands Off! put the wind at the back of our opposition to the Trump-Musk-Vaught destruction of the American project. Let's keep it up -- on screens, but also in person wherever possible.

The lunacy of King Donald

I like charts. I learn well from informative visualizations of data. And therefore, I appreciate the work of Washington Post journalist Philip Bump.

Bump knows what he thinks about Donald Trump's tariffs:

This will almost certainly prove to be bad for the economy, but it has been pretty good for data visualization. For example:

We've gone back to the late 1800s.

 

 

Add a tariff on washing machines, raise the price. Remove the tax and price falls.

 ... tariffs will instead mean surges in the prices Americans pay.

 

How uncertain is the country’s economic future? As the Financial Times’ John Burn-Murdoch put it, it is “equivalent to a global pandemic” uncertain.

At least we get some nice charts out of the deal.

Unfortunately the Canadian cartoon with which I led this post gives an incomplete picture. Presumably King Donald intends to get plenty out of his tariffs, knowing he can shakedown particular businesses and whole favored sectors of the economy for a personal payoff after which he'll make an exemption from his taxes.

If we want this set of impositions to blow back on King Donald, we the people will have to make it so. Along with Canadians, we're the fan.

HANDS OFF! – Vineyard Haven, Mass.

 

It was good to be part of an enthusiast crowd today at Five Corners.

 

Despite threatening skies and cold temps, the veterans came.

Not all were ready to retire.

 

The friends I was with nominated this for the best sign. 

They thought perhaps 500 people -- a lot for a seasonal population of 20,000 on the Island. I noted the wide age distribution. A good day and the rain held off until the very end.

Friday cat blogging

I wonder if this Greenland cat scared off JD Vance? Don't think I'd want to invade its space.

Dumb and dumber

I remember kind of enjoying the 1994 movie. Those dumb boys were sort of funny, in a stupid way.

Donald Trump's dopey tariffs aren't so funny. Even though he revealed himself to be trying to tariff penguins. Any number of economists -- left, right, and center -- agree he's thrown us into a trade war in which ordinary Americans only lose. Their estimates vary between $3000 and $5000 per household in increased costs as a consequence of Trump's trade idiocy.

So why this madness? There seem to be two elements that Trump thinks serve his interests:

1) The tariffs give Trump the legal ability to exempt particular sectors and countries. How many millions or even billions will he be demanding from companies to enjoy these exemptions? We've never seen such straightforward opportunities for presidential corruption. And the moral rot of such a system spreads. Will every individual who holds a tiny smidgen of power over others expect to be personally paid off in the Trumpy future US economy? That's how it works in much of the world.

2) Domestic importers will pay the tariffs if they continue to engage in trade in our deeply interlinked world. They'll try, and mostly succeed, in defending their bottom line by passing their increased costs on the US consumers. Trump will claim he's found a magic source of cash that will replace any need to try to tax our oligarchs. After all, there's all this cash coming in from the tariffs. Let's cut taxes some more for millionaires and billionaires! 

It's all sick and sad.

Let's fight back, starting with the Hands Off rallies tomorrow. Find an event near you here.

A Canadian envisions world domination

The morning after our idiot President did his best to murder the international and domestic economy, it would be easy to rave. But I think sometimes it is better to laugh.

When not trying, in a very different world, to ape late 19th century economic foolishness, Trump also claims to want to repeat President William McKinley's experiment in American imperialism (think the Philippines, Cuba) by demanding that Canada be made the 51st state. Canadians aren't having it.

John Manley was Deputy Canadian Prime Minister and Minister of Finance in Prime Minister Jean Chrétien’s Liberal government in 2002-3. He's written a letter to Donald Trump which I reproduce here in full:

• • •

Dear Donald Trump,

My mentor and former boss, prime minister Jean Chrétien, has dismissed your suggestion that Canada and the U.S. merge.

Do not despair. My point of view differs somewhat from his (sorry, Boss). I think we may be able to make this work if Canadians fully understand your proposal. 

Imagine what the “United States of Canada” could be. We would marry American ingenuity and entrepreneurship to Canada’s natural resources, underdog toughness and culture of self-effacing politeness to create a powerful, world-dominating country.

Pointers for starters...

☆ We would be the largest land mass in the world.
☆ We would be self-reliant in every respect (food, energy, minerals, water).
☆ We would attract the world’s most talented people.
☆ We would truly be “the best country in the world,” to use Mr. Chrétien’s words.
☆ We would dominate international hockey competitions.

Your idea is truly brilliant.

As you know from your corporate experience, for any successful merger, the devil is in the details, but I have some suggestions.

(1). Canada could never simply be the 51st state. You see Canada consists of 10 states (we call them “provinces”) and three territories.

Each of our provinces exists for historical reasons and citizens feel a deep loyalty to their province. So we would need to be the 51st to 60th states. With two senators for each state, of course. 

Therefore, our 20 senators will no doubt bring fresh ideas to the institution that will help make the United States of Canada truly great!

(2). Some issues that cause division and frustration in your country are considered settled by political parties of all stripes in Canada, so I suggest adopting Canadian consensus in the interest of making this deal work.

☆ For example, there is no argument in Canada over women’s reproductive rights. There! That hot-button issue is resolved for you! (You can thank me later.)

☆ All Canadian politicians support our single-payer health care system because no one is refused treatment for their inability to pay and no one goes broke because they suffer a catastrophic illness. In effect, all of our citizens have lifetime critical illness insurance provided by the government. And while it’s expensive, our system costs considerably less than yours, with 100 per cent of the population covered! Your citizens will love it, I promise.

☆ I would also observe that Canadians have long preferred to live with many fewer firearms than are tolerated in the United States. The result is a drastically lower rate of deaths and injuries caused by gun violence in Canada. Our gun laws would make the country safer than it is, and safer is definitely greater!

☆ We have some other innovations that you may wish to consider. Our Canada Pension Plan, equivalent to your Social Security, is fully funded and actuarially sound. This requires higher contributions but it pays off with solvency. I believe your Social Security runs out of money in the near future. (That’s not great, is it?)

☆ Lower personal income taxes paid in the U.S. are a great attraction.

☆ But our programs to support both seniors and young families to reduce the worst cases of poverty among them help make society more cohesive and fair. That’s one of the reasons our taxes have been higher.

☆ Oh, and we must consider how we fund government expenses. We’re struggling to bring our deficit back down, but it wasn’t that long ago (2015) that our budget was effectively balanced. In fact, for more than a decade prior to the global financial crisis, Canada ran surplus budgets. In addition to spending discipline, our national value-added tax, the GST, was key. You definitely want to adopt that! In fact, you will love it! (Canadians don’t love it, but their governments do. And it beats borrowing money from the Chinese.) There are many smaller details that I am sure we can work out.

☆ You will enjoy the simplicity of the metric system for weights and measures, for example. Oh, but we’re not crazy, you can keep yards for football! And you will love that sport even more when you play it on a bigger field with only three downs.

I am so excited about this, Mr. Trump. You are truly a visionary leader to have come up with this idea.

I can already see the 60 little maple leaves on the flag with 13 stripes!

I am ready to throw myself into this great project of making the United States of Canada great again! (Oh, that’s too long. Let’s just call our new country “Canada.”)

Respectfully, as I dislodge my tongue from my cheek,

John Manley

Once again, what's wrong with these people?

This morning we begin to get reports of the shitshow MAGA and RFK Jr are making of the American health complex. It's bad. It will be a few days before the newsmedia suss out the full catastrophe.

But this morning we get The Bulwark's new healthcare writer Jonathan Cohn taking up what those of us who live in the reality-based universe frequently find ourselves reverting to these day: why are these lunatics tearing down the country we have known? What motivates them? I found this summary helpful:

THE WRECKAGE FROM TUESDAY’S CUTS ONCE MORE raised the question of why, instead of undertaking a more carefully calibrated set of staff reductions, the Trump administration cut so crudely and destructively.

Most likely, multiple motives are at work, coming from different parts of the Trump coalition. For ideologues like Russ Vought, the Project 2025 participant who now leads the Office of Management and Budget, this is a chance to cut the federal government down to their preferred size—and to wipe out all the supposedly left-wing activists they believe have burrowed into the bureaucracy.

For Elon Musk and the DOGE team, quite possibly, there’s an element of techno-arrogance at work. And for Trump himself, the cuts would seem to fit in neatly with his agenda of attacking the “deep state” he believes thwarted him during his first term.

That leaves Kennedy, the secretary, who if so inclined could have pushed back on these reductions or at least demanded they proceed in a more deliberate way. There are no signs that happened. Instead, the one hallmark of Kennedy’s tenure so far has been a disregard—some would say disdain—for the department’s veterans and the way they do things.

You can see it in the expertise that the Trump administration cavalierly dispatched on Tuesday. You can see it, also, in how RFK Jr. is dealing with real-world challenges the department currently faces.

Right now the United States is confronting two serious threats that fall under HHS jurisdiction: the measles outbreak that started in Texas and has now spread to three other states, and the strands of avian flu decimating poultry flocks. ...

Photo from 2009. Will these Unitarian Universalists have to come back to the fray?

Jonathan Cohn is long time student of our health care morass who was one of my go-tos during the Obamacare passage wars.  Definitely someone worth following as MAGA tries to unravel decades of health accomplishments.

No capitulation to MAGA here

So I'm stuck in the Harvey Milk Terminal of the San Francisco airport for a long day (boring story of weather near destination colliding with airline schedules) so I got a chance to try to get in my walking miles in the corridors. You'll be glad to know that SFO is paying no attention to Trump's commands to erase women, POC Americans, queers and history. 

 

Northern California was a center of WWII war production, so there is a lot to display.

 

Women had a job to do to defeat fascism. War mobilization broke a lot of barriers. Even knowing what we know now of the underbelly of US empire, it's possible to admire their spunk.

 

 

They weren't all eager pink-cheeked white girls either. 

The Harvey Milk terminal at SFO is a monument to all MAGA hates. Nice place to involuntarily spend a day.

Trans Day of Visibility 2025

As I walked up to the Teslatakedown protest on Saturday, I was greeted by this guy.

The Trans Day of Visibility weekend had begun. 

This is not an observance I know much about, so I looked up what the media advocacy outfit GLADD had to share about it.

International TDOV was created in 2010 by trans advocate Rachel Crandall. Crandall, the head of Transgender Michigan, created TDOV in response to the overwhelming majority of media stories about transgender people being focused on violence. She hoped to create a day where people could celebrate the lives of transgender people, while simultaneously acknowledging that due to discrimination, not every trans person can or wants to be visible.

Given that only a minority of Americans say they personally know someone who’s transgender, the vast majority of the public learns about trans people from the media, including TV, film, and news. This is a problem because, as shown in the Netflix documentary Disclosure, the media has misrepresented, mischaracterized, and stereotyped trans people since the invention of film. These false depictions have indisputably shaped the cultural understanding of who trans people are and have modeled, often for the worse, how the average person should react to and treat trans people in their own lives.

Evident in 2025 is intensifying vitriol and attacks against trans people led by a vocal but loud minority. ... That’s why it’s still necessary for trans people to be seen through authentic, diverse, and accurate stories which reflect the actual lived experiences of trans people; both for themselves and for the people who believe they’ve never met a trans person.

Trans people care about the coup against our country as much as anyone. Maybe more, in fact, being involuntary targets on the front lines...

• • •

For the Trans Day of Visibility, Aaron Scott, Episcopal Church Staff Officer for Gender Justice, preached a sermon at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City. I'm including short excerpts here which I hope retain its power for a broad audience; there's much more. Read it in full here.

... We are, in the end, a small community, very much under the boot of repression. And yet we continue to lead.

We speak for ourselves.

We set forth our own vision for what justice means for our people—trans and nonbinary people. 

... It’s a beautiful day to be alive.

It’s a beautiful day to exist, in flagrant defiance of executive orders. January 20th came and went and I still haven’t been whisked away to Oz—like the rapture, but for trans people only. I briefly wondered, “Am I not transgendering hard enough, if two whole months have gone by and I’m still stuck here in America?!”

And then I remembered myself, and I remembered: this is a sham. Because we have always been here and we are not going anywhere, ever.

We determine what justice means for us in our bodies, in our families, in our neighborhoods, in our churches, in our workplaces, in our country. And while we need everyone here to join with us in that struggle, we are the ones responsible for setting the vision. We are the experts on when we are free. Only we get to say when we are truly safe, truly honored, truly afforded our God-given dignity and rights. So thank you to every trans and nonbinary person here for the visions you put forward into the world. Thank you for standing in your power and your leadership.

... We will only get what we are organized to take. No powers and principalities are going to hand trans people our joy and our thriving ... out of their benevolence. That’s not how change happens. Change comes because we demand it, and we labor for it. So today we celebrate our joy—and tomorrow we get back to work organizing to defend our joy. Organizing to defend our young people. Organizing to defend our dignity. Organizing to draw in more and more people to stand with us, move with us.

And we can’t do all that on an empty tank, so today: We sing. We shout. We strut. We swagger. We rejoice in our trans-ness so that the memory of this joy can continue to carry us forward even in the hard times.

... Trans joy is not about marketing a false, palatable version of ourselves. It is about enjoying being alive and not dead.

... We do not exist to be respectable. We exist to be respected.

... The more that trans people stand in our joy and our full messy humanity without apology, the more powerful we become. That is why this day is important. The less afraid we are to live—even when there is so much to fear—the stronger we get.

#Teslatakedown – San Francisco – Saturday, March 29

The crowd outside the dealership on Van Ness Avenue just gets larger each week.

Perhaps 500 people yesterday? Each Saturday there are more protesting Elon's car company while he works to destroy American democracy. Next week this crew will take a week off to join the Hands Off protest at Civic Center -- but the following week (April 12) they'll be back.

That seems a good idea.

 

A simple and patriotic message here.

This does seem on the right track for a nice spring day.

 

 In our various ways, The Defiance needs to show staying power.

See no evil: the toll of the Trump team's Signal chat lapse(s?)

Wouldn't they have loved to get the intel on D-Day?

The people whose lives might be at risk as a result of the Trump team's frat boy approach to national security are not amused.

Signal Chat Leak Angers U.S. Military Pilots
Men and women who have taken to the air on behalf of the United States expressed bewilderment after the leak of attack plans. “You’re going to kill somebody,” one pilot said.

Illinois Senator Tammy Duckworth, who lost both legs and use of her right arm when the combat helicopter she piloted in the Iraq war was shot down, had a very direct response

Duckworth: ‘Pete Hegseth is a ‘f‑‑‑ing liar’ “...This is so clearly classified info he recklessly leaked that could’ve gotten our pilots killed. He needs to resign in disgrace immediately,” Duckworth said in a statement. 

The Washington Post's judicious columnist Philip Bump unpacks what accountability for the security breach might look like and why we won't get it from the Trump clown show.

The point of accountability is to reinforce that bad things are bad. ...

... Trump — and by extension his party — have proved increasingly likely to rise to the defense of anyone seen as under fire from any perceived opponent. (“Deny, deny, deny,” Trump once reportedly advised an ally.) In any previous administration, Hegseth wouldn’t be the secretary of defense in the first place. Deeply unqualified (beyond his closeness to Trump) and mired in multiple scandals, he was nonetheless confirmed by a Republican-led Senate unwilling to face the ire of Trump. Since the Signal scandal broke, Hill Republicans — a group ostensibly empowered to enforce accountability from the executive branch — have not indicated any newfound appetite for challenging the White House. No one thinks the Justice Department, helmed by some of the more energetic Trump sycophants in America, will launch any serious investigation.

Without accountability, the damage here would not simply be that the U.S. government will continue to be led by people who don’t know or don’t care why communications about military operations occur over secure channels. It is also that there will be no public signal that the actions of these officials were bad. No signal to others in government. No signal to Trump’s base of support. No signal to America’s overseas allies that this government holds such mistakes to account.

This is precisely what (the deeply insecure) Trump wants to avoid, of course. He will happily malign people who used to serve under his direction — but always as he introduces some imaginary distance from them. It would be very hard for him to do so with Hegseth in particular: He picked and advocated Hegseth despite concerns about his readiness; if the criticisms of Hegseth were accurate, then so were the criticisms of Trump.

What results is a weird (and for the right, ironic) moral relativism, one centered on the whims and actions of Donald Trump. We know that religious conservatives revamped their moral boundaries once Trump became the Republican presidential nominee in 2016. What we’ve seen since is an entire party willing to shift black-and-white moral and ethical issues into a muddy, gray area in which Trump alone remains untainted.

Republican politicians have replaced both common sense and elementary ethical calculation with "Anything for Mr Trump." They've become servile as well as ignorant.

Friday cat blogging

Two cats, one bed. Despite the size discrepancy, Janeway holds her own when Mio approaches. They work it out, often by both abandoning the choice window spot.

An abomination, not a mere embarrassment

Last night, I had terrible dreams of encroaching deaths and horrors. I am not the only one living with bad dreams

This morning I opened Facebook to this, from the Rev. Br. Richard Edward Helmer, Rector of the Episcopal Church of Our Savior in Mill Valley, California.

Beyond American Vulgarity
It is arguably very late to say something, but the glorified visage of the Secretary of Homeland Security standing in front of half-naked, deported, incarcerated prisoners who had no recourse to due process — incarcerated, I should add, in an overseas prison with no access to legal representation and completely voided of their rights — a prison bought and paid for with U.S. tax dollars…

…crossed the line for me from the all-too-familiar vulgarity of this administration into outright obscenity.

No cynical veneer of deterring illegal immigration or criminality holds when those in power glorify the treatment of basic human life and freedoms with no greater notice than did the “owners” of those caught in chattel slavery or, for that matter, the overseers of concentration camps.

This is a criminal administration for its utter contempt for human dignity and rights, for its corrupt anti-constitutional assumption and conflation of the roles of prosecutor, judge, and jury, and for its sheer bloody-mindedness when confronted with simple appeals for the truth. We are witnessing an abomination, not a mere embarrassment. All the more so because so many in this cabal lay claim to Christian faith as justification for their actions. There is nothing Christian about this. To say otherwise is blasphemy.

The bone-chilling truth is that this line, departing from all valued constitutional process that this government was sworn to uphold, puts all of us — citizen and immigrant alike — in danger. From abroad, reprisal and encouragement to every enemy of human dignity and freedom. And from within: If the rights of immigrants and asylum-seekers may be treated with such open and gleeful contempt by this presidency, so may the rights of our citizens. Some would say that may in fact may be the point. In which case I say we are already tumbling over the precipice.

Our work ahead could not be clearer. Wherever we are, whoever we are, we must be doubly-prepared to stand up, speak up, and take action to preserve dignity, rights, and freedoms while we still can. If we do, our children will thank us.

If we do not, they will never forgive us.

The crime is in plain sight

Somebody on social media created this all-too-appropriate image.

 

Our rulers are running national security like a marginally competent, clubby family business. They don't trust the apparatus of government, so they have been going "off the books" to try to do their stuff. Since they are mostly ignorant light-weights, they are making a dangerous mess.

People keep suggesting that the Trumpies are so much more competent this time around. Not so. They've just found new, less orderly, and more vicious ways to impose themselves on the American state and people.

Paul Waldman explains how it is all about grievance.

No Republican alive has felt the kind of intoxicating surge of power they are experiencing right now, not because of the size of their 2024 electoral victory but because they have collectively decided that with sufficient aggression and creativity, they can go after just about every individual or institution that ever pissed them off. Even as they set about destroying the federal government, they are expanding its power to harass and intimidate their enemies wherever they may be found.

Incompetently of course, but no less malicious for that. 

Trump amplifies the stupid

Maybe this wasn't the smartest move?

Most people watching around the world recognizes foolish pride mixed with incompetence when they see it. 

And any woman who has competed with a particular sort of oblivious man for a job knows the special stupidity unqualified guys bring to tasks in which they are pretending to expertise they don't possess. (Few women get to try that dodge.) Here's journalist Jill Filipovic:

I cannot emphasize enough that these people do not know what they are doing. They were hired not in spite of that fact, but because of it. Hegseth, Gabbard, and the rest of mostly-men who make up the Trump administration clown show would simply never have otherwise ascended to the positions in which they currently find themselves. No other president would have appointed them, because other presidents at least try to appoint for competence. 

Trump knows that people who have no career prospects without him will do whatever they need to do to stay in his good graces. And that matters more to him than actually getting anything done, or keeping America safe and prosperous.

When your only route to power runs through one man, you are loyal to that one man.

This group chat debacle is not an aberration; it is a predictable result of what happens when you put a bunch of people in power who don’t know what they’re doing, and when you fire everyone who does know something. 

Trump’s paranoia about the Deep State being out to get him is amplified in his second term; he feels that last time around, his ambitions were thwarted by career civil servants and those who had careers before him and ambitions after him. So this time, the confidence man has gotten rid of the competent men.

... Incompetent people behave incompetently. That’s all part of the plan.

What more are these fools broadcasting to a listening world?

Oh Canada! as so often, DJT is shaming us

What if they don't want to get married? 

Historian Marc-William Palen knows a lot more about Canada, and also about the real world consequences of tariffs, than Donald Trump. Trump's attempt to make Canada the 51st state by economic coercion is a re-run of a plan tried by the late 19th century McKinley administration, also to reverse effect.

While Trump’s protectionism and imperial designs are a sharp break with the recent past, they aren’t new. In fact, they’re part of a very old GOP playbook that dates to a period Trump regularly lionizes: the late 19th century. He sees it as a golden era in American history. Yet, the history of the 1890s actually exposes the dangers of the U.S. trying to force Canada into American hands.

Like Trump, Republicans in the late 19th century wanted to annex Canada—which was then still a British colony. The push to make Canada part of the U.S. reached a fever pitch following passage of the highly protectionist McKinley Tariff in 1890, which raised average tariff rates to around 50%.

To pressure Canada into joining the U.S., the McKinley tariff explicitly declined to make an exception for Canadian products. Republicans hoped that Canadians, who were becoming ever more reliant on the U.S. market, would be eager to become the 45th state to avoid the punishing tariffs. 

Secretary of State James G. Blaine saw annexation as a way to eliminate continued and contentious competition over fish and timber. Blaine, who co-authored the McKinley Tariff, publicly stated that he hoped for “a grander and nobler brotherly love, that may unite in the end” the United States and Canada “in one perfect union.” Blaine declared himself “teetotally opposed to giving the Canadians the sentimental satisfaction of waving the British Flag. . . and enjoying the actual remuneration of American markets.” Privately, he admitted to President Benjamin Harrison that by denying reciprocity, Canada would “ultimately, I believe, seek admission to the Union.”

Things didn't work out that way. The McKinley tariff inspired Canadian resistance. 

Canada’s Conservative Prime Minister John Macdonald wanted to react forcefully to send a message to the U.S. He proposed retaliating with high tariffs on American goods, as well as increased trade with Britain. He also recognized a political weapon when he was handed one. He adroitly turned the 1891 Canadian elections into a broader referendum concerning Canadian-American relations. He portrayed the Liberal opposition as being in bed with the Republican annexationists. According to him, they were involved in “a deliberate conspiracy, by force, by fraud, or by both, to force Canada into the American union.”

It looks as if Canada's current prime minister Mark Carney is going to pull out an unexpected victory for the country's updated ruling Liberal Party thanks to the unpopularity of today's Conservative leader Pierre Polievre apeing Trump.

by way of Paul Krugman

Thanks Donald!

Wedding graphic by way of Adam Tooze.

 • • •

I grew up much more aware of and fond of Canada than most residents of the USofA. Canada was just across the Niagara River, shores to sail my little Sailfish to if I was being adventurous. Nobody worried much about the border when I was a kid. Canadians didn't mind US visitors to their side of Niagara Falls and we didn't mind Canadians coming to shop in Buffalo malls when for a moment the value of the currency made this a good deal. My father added a booster antenna to our house so we could watch hockey and other interesting broadcasts on Canadian TV. 

Interestingly, the US Secretary of State James G. Blaine mentioned here also figured in my early life because I went to high school with a descendant of that Republican luminary. Like me, she was interested in what we called "current events." 

Trump's assault on Canada makes me feel ill.

To "improve the world"

Did you know that Washington, DC -- the 68 square mile federal district and city -- is not truly self-governing? Because the city government exists on the sufferance of the national Congress, when Republicans control both Houses -- and DC's budget! -- they can dictate to the city.

And so the GOP Congress demanded that the Black Lives Matter Plaza be erased -- and it was. The mayor needed her budget approved. Talk about "no taxation without representation!" in the slogan of the American Revolution.

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar often strikes me as the last judicious rationalist standing, determined to be a thoughtful reasonable man, come what may. And not only that, he seeks to find something affirmative in the worst of times. It can be a very difficult posture to maintain. But this piece of racist Republican vandalism in DC got to him. In every edition of his substack, he reflects on something that grabbed his attention. He wrote:

QUOTE OF THE DAY

How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world. -- Anne Frank (1929-1945), died at 16 in a Nazi concentration camp

Through her diaries written while hiding from Nazis for two years, Anne Frank has become an international symbol of hope and optimism, despite her tragic death at sixteen in a Nazi concentration camp. Her quote here is an inspirational call to action that most people can embrace.

However, what does it mean to “improve the world”? That question is where sunny optimistic slogans meet the harsh reality of the real world. The Nazis thought they were improving the world: They were ridding the world of inferior people. Lynch mobs thought the same thing: They were imposing social justice on uppity Blacks, thereby restoring natural order. Billionaire industrialists convince themselves, and others, that because they employ many people, whatever they do improves the world. Politicians, judges, and others in power justify their corrupt behaviors with the soothing mantra that they, too, are improving the world.

Musk and his cohorts refer to anyone who disagrees with them as NPCs, a gaming acronym for non-player character. They convince themselves that they are improving the world because those whose lives they are destroying aren’t real people, just stick figures to be manipulated. Their self-delusion is so complete that they are beyond reason.

It’s a game of fake virtue that anyone can play.

The dismantling of the Black Lives Matter Plaza in Washington, D.C. hit me hard. Republicans threatened to withhold crucial funds for the city in order to bully the mayor into ripping up the pavement that featured the words Black Lives Matter. Why spend the money to do that except to insult, not just Black people, but the up to 26 million Americans who marched in support of BLM in 2020? This is a gauntlet thrown to the ground by Trump’s GOP that dissent will not be tolerated. How did this action improve the world? (FYI: It cost $610,000 to destroy.)

It would be easy to say that it’s all just a matter of point of view: One person’s ceiling is another person’s floor. It’s all just a friendly disagreement between two equally valid sides. But it rarely is. Evidence and logic usually favor one side more than the other. Yet so many people ditch evidence and logic in favor of a knee-jerk reaction that favors their biases. Examining evidence and employing logic requires rigorous research and thought. The process makes one feel overwhelmed and anxious, while just shouting a thoughtless opinion feels smart and virtuous, even though it is the opposite. But, as the saying goes, it is better to feel good than be good. Of course, we should strive to feel good by doing good.

There are so many ways—large and small—to improve the world. I often ask myself, “What can I do today to make someone’s day better?” Chat with a neighbor. Sign an autograph. Lend a beloved book to a friend. Those are the small ways.

But I don’t think doing those small actions alleviates my responsibility to do the larger things that improve the world. To do whatever it takes to promote the American ideal that all people are created equal and deserving of equal opportunities. And fighting those who are marginalizing people and punishing dissenters, while enriching themselves at the cost of the U.S. Constitution.

I don’t need to wait a single moment to do that.

Kareem's musing are available here.

Trump/Musk is coming for your mail service

The National Association of Letter Carriers (NALC) -- that's the postal workers union -- held rallies all over the country today against the Trump/Musk threat to privatize the post office. They were out in force on San Francisco's Embarcadero today.

Trump and Musk probably don't know this, but the US Constitution explicitly empowers Congress "To establish Post Offices and post Roads." The USPS is one of the original functions of the federal government, right in there alongside raising an army for defense.

NALC sure doesn't trust Trump's Postmaster General Louis DeJoy and DOGE to identify inefficiencies in the complex nationwide mail system.

The union issued a letter:

As DOGE attempts to tackle [financial and pension issues] at the Postal Service, it is important that they know what our members do and who they are. Letter carriers are lifelines to American communities who uphold our Constitutionally mandated service obligation by delivering to 169 million delivery points, including 51.5 million rural households and businesses, six and sometimes seven days a week.

Five years ago, during a global pandemic when most businesses shut down, letter carriers did not take one day off. We did not work from home. Instead, we delivered every single day, just as we have for 250 years.

... Common sense solutions are what the Postal Service needs, not privatization efforts that will threaten 640,000 postal employees’ jobs, 7.9 million jobs tied to our work, and the universal service every American relies on daily.

As is true in so many arenas, the people most likely to be hurt by diminished postal service are poor and rural folks -- so many of whom were Trump voters. Let's all of us stand up for a strong national postal service. It's part of what brings us together as one country.

All out against Trump/Musk ...

Resistance looks different in Trump 2.0. But that doesn't mean there isn't any. In fact, say scholars of protest Erica Chenoweth, Jeremy Pressman, and Soha Hammam, "Resistance is alive and well in the United States."

Doubt this? They've collected the evidence. 

... since Jan. 22, we’ve seen more than twice as many street protests than took place during the same period eight years ago. ... In February 2025 alone, we have already tallied over 2,085 protests, which included major protests in support of federal workers, LGBTQ rights, immigrant rights, Palestinian self-determination, Ukraine, and demonstrations against Tesla and Trump’s agenda more generally. This is compared with 937 protests in the United States in February 2017, which included major protests against the so-called Muslim ban along with other pro-immigrant and pro-choice protests. 

Their study of popular movements gives them a framework within which to describe what resistance works in the face of broad challenges to rule of law and democracy.

Historically, street protest and legal challenges are common avenues for popular opposition to governments, but economic noncooperation — such as strikes, boycotts and buycotts — is what often gets the goods. Individual participation is deliberately obscure, and targeted companies may have little interest in releasing internal data. Only the aggregate impacts are measurable — and in the case of Tesla, Target and other companies, the impacts so far have been measurable indeed.

Consider the protests against Tesla [join by way of Tesla TakeDown] in response to Elon Musk firing federal workers and blocking federal funding. The multifaceted campaign has a quite specific goal: punish Tesla, Musk’s signature company. ...

... The MAGA faction controls the GOP and enforces strict discipline among its members through fear and the threat of a well-funded Republican primary opponent in the next election. The Supreme Court majority is solidly on the right. Elected GOP officials are abandoning town halls and discouraging constituents from calling their offices. Street protests endure but are increasingly surveilled and high-risk, as the detention of Mahmoud Khalil suggests. Uncertainty about whether the Trump administration will ignore the First Amendment and weaponize the government to persecute political oppositionists looms large.

In the face of such changes, the public’s most powerful options are often withholding labor power and purchasing power. ...The prominence of billionaires in the administration and populist anger toward them make this type of approach even more viable in today’s climate. 

The world stage offers inspiring examples.

... Indeed, the diversification of resistance methods puts the United States on a similar trajectory to many democracy movements of the past. ...in Czechoslovakia, six days after the Soviet invasion in 1968, the newspaper Vecerni Prah published “10 commandments,” writing: “When a Soviet soldier comes to you, YOU: 1. Don’t know 2. Don’t care 3. Don’t tell 4. Don’t have 5. Don’t know how to 6. Don’t give 7. Can’t do 8. Don’t sell 9. Don’t show 10. Do nothing.”

Read the scholars' Waging Nonviolence article about today's resistance here.

This pairs well with an eariler, time-honored response all of us need to know to any interaction for police or immigration cops. 

And be heartened that Bernie and AOC drew 30,000 people to a Denver rally against the regime yesterday. We are indeed everywhere.

Elon Musk is trying to buy a Wisconsin judge

This Schimel guy is really a piece of work; take a look.

Wisconsin elects its Supreme Court judges. Right now, the court leans toward Dems -- that is, in support of abortion rights for women and against a Republican plan to disenfranchise half of Wisconsin voters by corrupt gerrymandering. Electing Susan Crawford holds the line.

The Wisconsin Democratic Party is probably the most effective state party apparatus in the country. If any Dems can go up against Elon, it's WisDems. Our small donations can still help get out the vote in this April 1 election. Voting has already begun. 

I've contributed; if you can, you should too.

Stupid, destructive, and utterly unrealistic: that's our Prez say the economists!

Why are Trump, along with Musk and his Muskrats, breaking government and the institutions that make this country a somewhat livable place? Seems crazy.

A couple of our most significant economic thinkers took up the puzzle in the last few days. Short answer: yes, the Trump regime is crazy -- and vile too.

Adam Tooze is the preeminent English language economic historian of the 20th and 21st century world capitalist system. (I have written about his highly accessible books here, here, here and here.) He does the work to engage what passes for economic theory claimed by Trump's intellectual apologists and wrecking appointees. 

I began to wonder whether this search for a rational wing in Trump’s economic policy is not, in fact, a step towards sane-washing and whether this sane-washing is not driven by some engrained mainstream framings of America’s problems that react in sympathy with the Trump administration’s rhetoric of crisis and victimization even if they are out of sympathy with the Trump administration in general.

Is there a real and important continuity of problems in America’s political economy that at least parts of the new Trump administration are trying to address, thus forming a continuity with the Biden team and Trump 1.0?

Or is the shellshocked commentariat of 2025 in the grip of a kind of Stockholm Syndrome in which our own inner fears lead us to engage with our captors in a way which denies the actual reality of being hurled into a mad house? Call it Mar-a-Lago (Accord) Syndrome.

... we are all struggling to find some kind of rational purchase on the unhinged situation created by the Trump administration.

Turns out, after serious engagement with some Trump apologists, that he finds "no there there" in Gertrude Stein's memorable formulation. 

The Stockholm syndrome element kicks in when we come to the original framing of the problem: The belief that something must be done. Once you are convinced that “something must be done”, you become vulnerable to someone hawking a big plan to “do things”.

Why do sane people in contemporary America believe that “something must be done”? Ignoring the reflexive element of crisis by which Trump himself is the main reason something must be done, which renders one susceptible to any big idea that might fix Trump (even if elements of that “fix” are shared with analysis offered by the Trump camp itself) etc etc, there are two main schools of thought:

• 1. American deindustrialization and class balance. ...

• 2. American debt....

Both arguments 1. and 2. are well known. Both are also contentious. No reader of Chartbook will be surprised to hear that I find both 1. and 2. unconvincing. But that is not my point here. My point is that if you do believe either 1. or 2. you need to be on your guard against Mar-A-Lago syndrome.

Even if you disapprove of the Trumpites style and lawlessness, you may be tempted to take at their word the more reasonable members of the highjack team who insist that they offer a dramatic and comprehensive plan to address the crisis you also believe in, leading you to lose track of the fact that … they are highjackers and they are holding you hostage!

By buying into the reality of underlying problem that Mar-A-Lago claims to be addressing you run the risk of overemphasizing the rational element in Trump 2.0.

Tooze simply finds no rational element.

None of us really knows where this clown car is headed and what drives it on its crazy course. It seems like a mystery even to many on board. Quite reasonably we look for elements of rationality. We ask: who inside MAGA 2.0 is thinking and what are their thoughts? We then relate that to our own efforts to diagnose America’s history and the history of the world economy. ...

... To historically minded people it is appealing for obvious reasons. But it puts us at risk of is underestimating the radicalism of the break marked by the Trump administration. In search of historical context we miss what is most historically significant. We avoid facing the conclusion that the vision of a Mar-a-Lago Accord may have more in common with grift, a protection racket or a facelift pandering to the ignorant vanity of an old man than with economic policy as we have hitherto known it.

Faced with Trump, the risk is that conventional realism is a form of escapism.

You can read the entire Tooze argument here. 

Paul Krugman, former NY Times columnist and Nobel Prize for economics recipient, comes to similar conclusions, even more pithily expressed. In trying to understand the Trump/Musk vandalism in government, he sees no plan -- just the wounded egos of ignorant men.

My guess, instead, is that it’s an ego thing, that Social Security has become to Musk what Canada has become to Donald Trump. Both men at one point said something stupid, something that would have turned them into laughingstocks if there weren’t so much fear in the air. But both men have been unable to let go, doubling down in what amounts to an attempt to redeem their initial foolishness.

In case you’ve forgotten, back in December, when Justin Trudeau visited Mar-a-Lago, Trump taunted him by suggesting that Canada become a U.S. state, calling him “Governor Trudeau.” Some people suggested that it was meant as a joke, but it would be more accurate to call it a dominance display.

Trump's chief of staff listens to him threaten to annex Canada

But once Trump realized how ridiculous the performance made him look, he refused to let go. Instead, annexing Canada seems to have become a fundamental plank of Trump’s foreign policy, with his demands getting ever more insistent the more obvious it becomes that Canadians loathe the idea.

Since then, Musk has replicated his insecure co-president and put Social Security under the gun:

Musk’s big blooper was his claim that millions of dead people are receiving Social Security checks. This claim probably reflected the failure of young Musk staffers — what Dudek called the “DOGE kids” — to understand how the SSA’s databases work, combined with a complete lack of common sense. I mean, if there really were huge numbers of dead people receiving Social Security payments, don’t you think someone else would have noticed?

In a normal political environment, getting something that big that wrong would have destroyed Musk’s credibility and led to his permanent exile from any role in setting policy. But this is America in 2025, so Trump amplified the already-refuted claim when addressing Congress, and Musk seems more powerful than ever.

Furthermore, Musk refuses to give up his Social Security smears, making the completely implausible claim that fraudulent use of Social Security numbers accounts for 10 percent of federal spending. And I’d argue that that the plan to effectively cut off many disabled Americans is best seen as part of a desperate effort to find or pretend to find Social Security fraud, retroactively justifying Musk’s big mistake.

Still, does the plan have to be this cruel to the most vulnerable Americans? As I see it, the cruelty is a feature, not a bug.

... It's hard to escape the sense that DOGE staffers are actually enjoying this. And why not? We’re mostly talking about poorly socialized young men suddenly given the power to ruin other people’s lives, taking their cues from a leader who has declared that “the fundamental weakness of Western society is empathy.” So why should we be surprised that the DOGE kids’ rampage through the government looks more and more like a remake of Lord of the Flies?

Krugman read Tooze's screed and agrees. 

Look, I understand that it’s more fun to write an article about the supposed emergence of a new economic philosophy than to write yet another article about how ignorant men are, once again, saying stupid things. And I guess some journalists are uncomfortable at the thought that people with great power to shape policy have no idea (or rather nothing but false ideas) what they’re doing. 

But trying to put an intellectual gloss on Trumpist international economic policy is sanewashing that misinforms readers rather than helping their understanding.

... My point is that Trump believes many blatantly false things that suit his prejudices. Why imagine that he and his courtiers have sophisticated ideas and a deep strategy when it comes to international economics?

On the surface, Trump’s trade policy looks stupid and destructive. Dig deeper, and you discover that this first impression was completely valid. Trying to pretend otherwise is just misinforming readers.

We don't have to be overawed because these guys are considered some of the best academia has to offer in their field. They care about being understood and they have given us the goods: Trump's economic antics are stupid and cruel, without any rationality beyond grift and grievance.