Deep Motives

Trump isn’t trying to make our communities safer from migrant crime, which is not a widespread thing. He is trying to divide us, to make us fear and despise other human beings who live in our communities, and to gain power from that division and fear.

- "The Cruelty Is The Point, But What’s The Goal?"
The Big Picture

This week's featured post is "The Greatness Paradox".

This week everybody was talking about the GOP's budget bill

Last week I wrote about what the "Big Beautiful Bill" contains: tax cuts for rich people, cuts to programs like Medicaid and Food Stamps that help the working poor, and a huge deficit.

Trump's supporters will undoubtedly see hypocrisy my complaints about this bill's deficits when I was fine with Biden's deficits. But there's a big difference: Biden was investing in the future, in infrastructure, and in mitigating the damaging effects of climate change. Trump is just transferring wealth from the bottom of society to the top.

The "Freedom" caucus in the House briefly slowed down the bill's passage, but enough of them fell into line to pass the bill by one vote. The holdouts got a variety of concessions, but the big one is a further cut in Medicaid: the "work requirement" (that adds bureaucratic hurdles to the program and will cause millions of qualified working people to lose their medical coverage) starts in 2027 rather than 2029.

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A handful of Republican senators are still pretending to care about the national debt. They will make lots of favorable headlines for themselves and their serious good intentions -- and then quietly cave.

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An obscure point about this bill deserves more attention: PAYGO legislation from years ago forces an across-the-board sequestration if deficits go too high. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office is projecting that the Big Beautiful Bill might cross that limit and lead to $500 billion in Medicare cuts.

and the ongoing wars

The Ukraine War continues, long after Trump's promise to end it "in 24 hours" expired. As Putin responds to Trump's attempts at peace talks with ever-more-deadly attacks, Trump appears to finally be recognizing that Putin is an enemy to peace. But he frames the situation as Putin-has-changed, not Putin-fooled-me.

“I’ve always had a very good relationship with Vladimir Putin of Russia, but something has happened to him. He has gone absolutely CRAZY!” Trump wrote in a social media post, adding, “I’ve always said that he wants ALL of Ukraine, not just a piece of it, and maybe that’s proving to be right, but if he does, it will lead to the downfall of Russia!

”Earlier on Sunday the US president told reporters that was he was “very surprised” that his Russian counterpart had intensified the bombardment of Ukrainian cities despite the US president’s efforts to broker a ceasefire.

Pressed by a reporter to say if he was now seriously considering “putting more sanctions on Russia”, Trump replied: “Absolutely. He’s killing a lot of people. What the hell happened to him?”

The sanctions will never happen, because Putin is the alpha in the Putin-Trump relationship.

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Israel's genocide in Gaza continues and even escalates. I used to hesitate to use that word, but I don't see how else to characterize the situation. This week, Israel's former prime minister Ehud Olmert wrote an op-ed in a leading Israeli newspaper:

“What we are doing in Gaza is a war of extermination: indiscriminate, unrestrained, brutal, and criminal killing of civilians,” he said.

“We are doing this not because of an accidental loss of control in a particular sector, not because of a disproportionate outburst of fighters in some unit — but as a result of a policy dictated by the government, knowingly, intentionally, viciously, maliciously, recklessly,” Olmert’s op-ed continued. “Yes, we are committing war crimes.”

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I continue to denounce any attempt by Americans of any opinion to bring the Gaza War here. The murder of two Israeli embassy staffers in Washington, D.C. Wednesday helps no one. And there is even less justification for harassing American Jews for the actions of the Netanyahu government.

Similarly, demonstrating or writing in favor of Palestine is no reason to deport foreign students.

In America, we can and should argue about issues of all kinds. We have the right to speak out and peacefully demonstrate to make our opinions known. But leave the violence over there. Our goal should be to stop the violence there, not bring it here.

and Joe Biden

Last week we heard that Joe Biden has an advanced form of prostate cancer. I cannot remember bad news about a former president being met with less compassion. Don Jr. tweeted:

What I want to know is how did Dr. Jill Biden miss stage five metastatic cancer or is this yet another cover-up???

When he took flack for that stone-hearted comment, he struck back:

I sometimes forget that part of the mental disorder of leftism is an inability to understand sarcasm.

No, we get the sarcasm. What we can't understand is posting a sarcastic response to another human being's death sentence.

Laura Loomer skipped any attempt at humor and went straight for venom.

To all of you praying for Joe Biden, can you pray for the people he killed with his open border policies instead? “Ohhhh boo hoo he’s such a good guy booo hooo he’s such a fighter.” No he’s not. And no, he’s not. He is going down in history as the worst US President EVER.

No, Laura, I think your guy has that title pretty well wrapped up.

For the mainstream media, this was another opportunity to raise the dementia-cover-up theory. I find it striking how much of this story revolves around Biden's trouble walking, and has nothing to do with an inability to think.

In a statement to Axios, an anonymous Biden aide said: "Yes, there were physical changes as he got older, but evidence of aging is not evidence of mental incapacity."

The spokesperson added: "We are still waiting for someone, anyone, to point out where Joe Biden had to make a presidential decision or make a presidential address where he was unable to do his job because of mental decline.

"In fact, the evidence points to the opposite - he was a very effective president."

I don't know how much he did himself and how much he delegated, but everything that happened during the Biden administration was consistent with the man he has always been. The US was well-governed during his four years, and he did an excellent job of cleaning up the mess Trump left behind after his first term.

And whether you liked his politics or not, his career is done now and he's likely to die soon. It costs you nothing to treat him like a human being.

and you also might be interested in ...

Bruce Springsteen tells it like it is:

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The measles outbreak in Texas seems to be waning, but the disease is still spreading in New Mexico and Kansas. Officials worry about the outbreak spreading further as more people travel in the summer. Already, 2025 has the second-most cases of any year in this century.

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Just in case you thought it couldn't get worse: The EPA wants to completely eliminate greenhouse gas limits on power plants.

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MSNBC host Jen Psaki used to answer questions as Biden's press secretary. One of the more charming features of her current show is to take questions from current White House press conferences and answer them honestly, something current press secretary Karoline Leavitt will never do.

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I always thought Kristi Noem was an opportunist. But now we find out she's also an idiot.

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It's been five years since a Minneapolis policeman murdered George Floyd, igniting protests around the country. NPR's Michel Martin spoke to Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey and civil rights attorney Benjamin Crump. Activists M Adams and Miski Noor argue that the resulting movement to defund the police accomplished more than you might think. On the other hand, the NYT reports that police killings have risen every year since Floyd's murder.

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David Roberts:

If you're talking about jobs that could relatively easily be replaced with AI, I would suggest, at the top of the list: [mainstream media] political reporter. How trivially easy would it be to program an AI to crank out "Dems in disarray" pieces from now to eternity?

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Ruben Bolling does his best Dr. Seuss imitation:

and let's close with something challenging

The Sony World Photography Awards open a new competition on Sunday. Just for reference, here's last year's winner.

Still Sanewashing

It’s hard to avoid the sense that what we’re seeing on tariffs is another version of the sanewashing that Trump has benefited from ever since he entered politics. People just keep wanting to believe that he’s making sense, that he isn’t as ignorant and irresponsible as he seems. But he is.

- Paul Krugman "The Trade War Isn't Over"

This week's featured posts are "What's up with the Supreme Court?" and "The Big Beautiful Bill".

This week everybody was talking about the FY 2026 budget

Trump's "big beautiful bill" squeaked through the House Budget Committee yesterday. Details about what the bill is intended to accomplish are in one featured post.

and Trump's retreat on tariffs

It's been about six weeks since Trump announced "Liberation Day", when drastically increased tariffs freed Americans from the tyranny of full shelves and cheap products made overseas. Stephen Miller called it "the most significant action on global trade policy that has taken place in our lifetimes".

Then it all started to unravel. (Timeline from The Guardian.) The bizarrely determined individual "reciprocal tariffs" imposed on imports from each country came and went in less than a day, even though deals had been announced only with the UK -- and that one was still tentative. A week ago, Trump announced that the 145% tariffs on Chinese goods would go down to 30% for 90 days.

So here we are. The Treasury secretary is still threatening that the "reciprocal" tariff levels will be back if countries don't negotiate "in good faith", as if the US has been acting in good faith. But the markets have returned to their pre-liberation levels, as investors seem to be pretending the last six weeks were just a bad dream. Maybe Trump has learned his lesson now, as Senator Collins claimed after voting to acquit in his first impeachment.

Paul Krugman would like to differ.

If you get your picture of what’s happening from “news analyses” rather than experts who actually do the math, you might well think that the Trump trade war is basically over, that we’re back to more or less normal policy.

The reality is that we’ve gone from a completely insane tariff rate on imports from China to a rate that’s merely crazy. And China accounts for only a fraction of our imports. Tariffs on everyone else are still at 10 percent, a level we haven’t seen in generations. And there are still other shoes to drop: Trump has, for example, been promising tariffs on pharmaceuticals.

The trade war is still very much on. ... In other words, not much has changed since last week. We may not be looking at the complete economic meltdown that seemed quite possible (and is still a possibility), but we’re still looking at much higher inflation and an economic slowdown at best — i.e., stagflation.

and bribery

Other than going to Vatican City to sleep at Pope Francis' funeral, the first overseas trip of Trump's second administration was the tour of the oil-rich kingdoms of the Persian Gulf he completed this week. He took with him friendly tech-company CEOs "including Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Amazon’s Andy Jassy, Palantir’s Alex Karp and two dozen others".

While it's not unusual for presidents to promote US business interests overseas, the trip's biggest headlines concerned the benefits to Trump himself, including Qatar's gift of a $400 million "palace in the sky" intended to replace Air Force One, which Trump has long considered shabby and whose replacement is behind schedule. (Technically, the plane is a gift to the US government, but Trump's plan is for it to go to his presidential library foundation -- which he will control -- after he leaves office.)

A much more direct enrichment of Trump came from an Abu Dhabi firm that invested $2 billion in his crypto-coin scheme. Some of the investments in US corporations involved changes in government policy, like allowing the United Arab Emirates to buy quantities of top Nvidia chips that would have been forbidden under Biden administration policies, trusting the UAE not to pass such advanced tech on to a rival superpower like China.

Richard Painter, previously a government ethics lawyer under George W. Bush, commented:

[T]he impression is given that the position of the United States can be swayed and even bought.

and the Guardian reported:

Past administrations would have run from the perceived conflicts of interest being welcomed by Trump. ... “The status quo has been saying no, because it’s an actual and apparent conflict of interest, and it could jeopardize our domestic and foreign policies,” said [Scott] Amey [of the non-profit Project On Government Oversight]. ”It certainly doesn’t pass the sniff test for a lot of Americans.”

The lavish gifts and other investments come as Trump is reshaping America’s policy in the Middle East, skipping Israel and turning toward the Gulf states in a flurry of deal-making that could benefit both sides handsomely.

and the Palm Springs bombing

An IVF clinic in California was bombed Saturday morning, in an apparent terrorist attack. My first thought was that this was the work of people who believe in ensoulment at conception, upset that IVF clinics destroy fertilized embryos after they are no longer needed.

But no, it looks like the perpetrator, who also appears to have been the sole fatality, is an antinatalist. I had no idea what that was until NPR explained it: An antinatalist believes it is wrong to have children.

and you also might be interested in ...

We can expect a robust tourist trade this summer.

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It's got to be hard for satirical sites like The Onion to compete with real headlines like this one: "Trump's DHS considers reality show where immigrants compete for citizenship, producer says".

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DOGE is still around, and still exceeding any possible authority it might have. It's been trying to take over agencies that serve Congress, like the Library of Congress and the General Accounting Office.

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Oklahoma's new social studies curriculum will encourage students to believe Trump's conspiracy theories about the 2020 election.

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Some good news on climate change from the UK-based Carbon Brief website, which looks like a good source for in-depth information about the climate.

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and let's close with something commercial

I'm not sure how Facebook figured out my sense of humor, but lately I've been deluged with ads for history-related t-shirts.

True Greatness

America is the greatest democracy in the world.

- Rümeysa Öztürk,
arriving back in Massachusetts after her court-ordered release

This week's featured post is "As we approach our crisis of democracy, we’re in better shape than I expected".

This week everybody was talking about the new Pope

Thursday, the College of Cardinals elected the next pope: Leo XIV.

In my previous weekly summary (April 21) I said:

Undoubtedly there will now be a battle for the soul of Catholicism. Will the church continue on the path Francis started down, or will it return to its traditional role as an ally of authoritarians and the privileged classes?

Leo XIV may surprise me, but at first glance it looks like the Francis faction won. The new pope seems more interested in the Sermon on the Mount than in fighting the culture wars.

I think the name he chose is significant: in 1891, Leo XIII wrote the ground-breaking encyclical Rerum Novarum (Of New Things), which has been the foundation of Catholic social justice thinking ever since. The main idea of Rerum Novarum is for the church to take seriously the plight of working people under capitalism. It represented a realization that without a clearly worker-sympathetic position, the church might lose out to some form of Marxism.

By choosing to be another Leo, this pope gestures towards both a sympathy with the lower classes and a willingness to modernize Catholic doctrine.

Much is being made of Leo's American roots He grew up in Chicago, and his time the Catholic Theological Union in Chicago overlapped my years at the University of Chicago a few blocks away. We probably walked past each other on the sidewalk. Chicago is extremely proud to claim Leo, as the following cartoon illustrates.

To me, the greatest significance of an American pope is that he'll be much harder for conservative American Catholics to ignore. (I'm looking at you, J. D. Vance and Sam Alito.)

and Trump's legal losses

Yesterday, a federal judge in Vermont ordered Rümeysa Öztürk released on bail without travel restrictions. She's the Tufts student who was kidnapped off the street in Somerville, Massachusetts by masked DHS agents and taken to a detention center in Louisiana. The administration obeyed the order, and Özturk is back in Massachusetts walking around free.

Chris Geidner of the Law Dork blog:

[Judge William Sessions concluded] that she has raised "a very substantial First Amendment claim" in her underlying habeas challenge, in addition to a “substantial claim” that the Trump administration violated her due process rights regarding her detention as well.

Prior to being arrested, Öztürk had been a Tufts Ph.D. student legally in the country on a student visa. What appears to have drawn the administration's ire was an op-ed Öztürk wrote (with co-authors) in Tufts Daily urging the Tufts administration to "acknowledge the Palestinian genocide". The judge wrote:

"There is absolutely no evidence that she has engaged in violence or advocated violence.” Additionally, he noted, “I do not find that any of the contacts that she has in the community create any danger or risk of flight."

If you read the First Amendment, you will notice that it says nothing about citizenship. Freedom of speech is a human right, not a privilege of citizenship.

In a similar case, a federal appeals court denied the administration's motion to stay the release of Columbia student Mohsen Mahdawi. Mahdawi was a green-card holder who was arrested in Vermont when he appeared for an interview related to his application for citizenship. He similarly has no record of violence or criminality, and has only advocated for Gaza.

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Several federal judges have ruled against the administration on its invocation of the Alien Enemies Act; this is the basis for Trump to send people to prison in El Salvador. (See the same Law Dork link.) The Act allows the president to deport foreign nationals during time of war, predatory incursion, or invasion. Judges in a variety of jurisdictions have been finding that the current situation does not fit into any of those categories. Trump can call mass migration of individuals an "invasion", but that does not match the way such a term was used in 1798 when the AEA was passed.

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Yet another judge issued a restraining order against Trump's mass firings of federal workers. (Same Law Dork link.)

“It is the prerogative of presidents to pursue new policy priorities and to imprint their stamp on the federal government. But to make large-scale overhauls of federal agencies, any president must enlist the help of his co-equal branch and partner, the Congress,” U.S. District Judge Susan Illston wrote in the decision. “Federal courts should not micromanage the vast federal workforce, but courts must sometimes act to preserve the proper checks and balances between the three branches of government.“

... “Plaintiffs are likely to succeed on their claim that the President’s Executive Order 14210 is ultra vires” — or beyond the president’s legal authority, in other words illegal — “as the President has neither constitutional nor, at this time, statutory authority to reorganize the executive branch,” [Judge Susan] Illston wrote.

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One Trump victory: the purge of transfolk from the armed services can continue.

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In general, I think the media is doing a bad job of explaining why the Trump administration is snatching people off the street, deporting American children, and so on: Trump was elected because he sold voters a dark fantasy about Biden's America: The nation had been overrun by millions of immigrant criminals whose gangs had taken over our cities. The local police knew who they were, but couldn't do anything because Biden protected the criminals. But Trump would be able to deport them all quickly. Millions of them.

So now he's elected and has a real world to deal with: There aren't millions of immigrant criminals and there is no migrant crime wave. If he just deports people for legitimate reasons, he can't achieve the numbers his supporters expect.

That's why he has to deport not just the relatively small number of immigrant criminals, but also men with tattoos, students who expressed anti-Israel opinions, and so on. And he's still not making the numbers his followers expect.

and the FY 2026 budget

Nothing sums up the problems Republicans face in putting together a budget than this: Senator Josh Hawley isn't down with cutting Medicaid.

As for Missouri, it is one of 40 Medicaid expansion states — because our voters wanted it that way. In 2020, the same year Mr. Trump carried the Missouri popular vote by a decisive margin, voters mandated that the state expand Medicaid coverage to working-class individuals unable to afford health care elsewhere. Voters went so far as to inscribe that expansion in our state constitution. Now some 21 percent of Missourians benefit from Medicaid or CHIP, the companion insurance program for lower-income children. And many of our rural hospitals and health providers depend on the funding from these programs to keep their doors open.

All of which means this: If Congress cuts funding for Medicaid benefits, Missouri workers and their children will lose their health care. And hospitals will close. It’s that simple. And that pattern will replicate in states across the country.

Meanwhile, the House leadership's budget calls for more than $800 billion in Medicaid cuts.

A preliminary estimate from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said the proposals would reduce the number of people with health care by 8.6 million over the decade.

They're clever about it: They aren't cutting "benefits", they're just slashing the federal reimbursement to states. Then most red states will scrap the Medicaid expansion associated with Obama's Affordable Care Act, providing Congress with deniability: We didn't do it, the states did it.

The end result, though, is exactly what Hawley says: People (particularly people working for barely more than minimum wage) will lose their health insurance, and rural hospitals will close.

Cuts like this (and to food stamps, which also affects the working poor) are necessary so that billionaires can pay lower taxes. And even then, a huge deficit will remain. I don't know how Republicans will be able to sell this to their base. And if they can't, their slim majorities in Congress won't hold together well enough to push it through.

This is another example of the MAGA fantasy world running into reality. In the fantasy world, government is full of waste and fraud that a smart guy like Elon can point out and eliminate. That way, spending can be slashed without affecting ordinary Americans.

but I want to talk about optimism

That's the subject of this week's featured post. My view wouldn't be optimistic in any other context: I still think we're facing a crisis of democracy. But we're facing it in better shape than I thought we'd be in.

and you also might be interested in ...

Brought to you by the party that supports family values:

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Vox' Zack Beauchamp warns:

Israel’s war in Gaza, which has long been a moral atrocity, is on the brink of becoming unimaginably worse.

He quotes Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich;

“Within a few months, we will be able to declare that we have won. Gaza will be totally destroyed,” Smotrich said. “In another six months, Hamas won’t exist as a functioning entity.”

He told the listening audience that the population of Gaza, some 2.3 million Palestinians, would be “concentrated” in a narrow strip of land between the Egyptian border and the so-called Morag Corridor, which runs the width of Gaza between Khan Younis and the border city of Rafah.

“They will be totally despairing, understanding that there is no hope and nothing to look for in Gaza, and will be looking for relocation to begin a new life in other places.”

Beauchamp notes that this is "a textbook example of ethnic cleansing".

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Mass shootings are down. No idea why.

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Trump has stopped just about all refugee resettlement in the US. But he has finally found a group of refugees he likes: White South Africans.

The Trump administration is bringing a small number of white South Africans to the United States as refugees next week in what it says is the start of a larger relocation effort for a minority group who are being persecuted by their Black-led government because of their race.

But are they persecuted? Not in any way that makes them stand out, and maybe not at all. But they're White, so they go to the front of the line.

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This week in corruption:

In what may be the most valuable gift ever extended to the United States from a foreign government, the Trump administration is preparing to accept a super luxury Boeing 747-8 jumbo jet from the royal family of Qatar -- a gift that is to be available for use by President Donald Trump as the new Air Force One until shortly before he leaves office, at which time ownership of the plane will be transferred to the Trump presidential library foundation, sources familiar with the proposed arrangement told ABC News.

Nothing to see here, just a foreign government giving an extremely valuable gift not to the United States, but for the benefit of one person, who happens to make many decisions the government of Qatar might want to influence.

The Guardian reviews the rules on presidential gifts, which are legally regarded as gifts to the American people. Previous presidents have transferred gifts -- none of them nearly this large -- to their presidential libraries for public display. But in Trump's case this appears to be a dodge, as the plane will remain available for Trump's personal use after ownership transfers. Judd Legum:

Can we please stop staying that, after Trump leaves office, the $400 million plane from Qatar will be given to the "Trump Presidential Library" Libraries do not fly on planes. The plane will be given to Trump.

The jet is not the only Qatari bribe. There's also his partnership with Qatar's sovereign wealth fund in developing a new Trump International Golf Club in Qatar.

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The measles outbreak continues to spread, and even though it started before RFK Jr. took over as HHS Secretary, he's coming to own it. The costs of his anti-vaccine crusade are becoming obvious.

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A Republican attempt to steal a state supreme court seat in North Carolina was finally thwarted this week, a mere six months after an election that the Democratic candidate won.

[Incumbent Justice Allison] Riggs won the election in November by just 734 votes, but [Republican challenger Jefferson] Griffin mounted a massive legal challenge to overturn the election results and disenfranchise tens of thousands of voters. At the heart of Griffin’s lawsuit was a challenge to 65,000 lawfully cast ballots that he believed should be tossed out, because of errors made by the North Carolina elections board. The board counted some 60,000 ballots cast by voters with allegedly incomplete registration. ... In fact, the litigation raised no significant evidence whatsoever that any illegitimate votes were cast.

A federal judge ruled in Riggs favor last Monday.

“This case concerns whether the federal constitution permits a state to alter the rules of an election after the fact and apply those changes retroactively to only a select group of voters, and in so doing treat those voters differently than other similarly situated individuals. This case is also about whether a state may redefine its class of eligible voters but offer no process to those who may have been misclassified as ineligible,” Myers wrote in his opinion. “To this court, the answer to each of those questions is ‘no.’”

Griffin decided not to appeal, so the case is finally over.

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The US and China have agreed to reduce the massive tariffs each have imposed on the other, from 145% and 125% to 30% and 10%. The reduction is temporary: 90 days. We'll see if that's enough to cause trade to start flowing again. 30% is still a pretty hefty price increase.

and let's close with something distracting

If you're on BlueSky and looking for something to brighten up your otherwise depressing news feed, I recommend following Daily Bunnies. You'll get a reliable stream of cute rabbit pictures. I guarantee that this sleepy bunny is not worrying about whatever is bothering you.