“First, Trump fires the holdover director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a radically anti-business agency. He appoints the new treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, as acting director. Bessent orders the agency to stop everything – ‘rulemaking, communications, litigation,’ Bloomberg Law reported. ‘A source inside the bureau who asked to remain anonymous said the order appeared to shut down the CFPB altogether, for the time being.’ So far, so good.” (03/03/25)
“In an interview with podcaster Joe Rogan, the world’s richest person Elon Musk late last week called Social Security ‘the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time’ It was yet another ‘pot calling the kettle black’ moment in the run-on sentence called Trumpism. I say run-on sentence because it is important to highlight Trumpism as featuring a nefarious discourse self-consciously deployed by Donald Trump and his acolytes to normalize their extremism. Trumpism as a discourse obfuscates so as to legitimate what has become its extremist threat to the existing political system, the rule of law and U.S. Constitution. It is a distinctive way of speaking that facilitates highly questionable action. We see this repeatedly in the Trump era. Trumpism as a discourse most prominently features three verbal maneuvers: gaslighting, coopting, and boomeranging.” [editor’s note: Well, at least this pundit considers the label correct, even though for the wrong reasons – SAT] (03/03/25)
“Whoever controls a chokepoint has the obvious advantage of keeping it open to merchant transit, ideally under ‘freedom of navigation’ rules and norms, such as are enumerated in the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) – which the US has not ratified. On the other side of the coin, the very definition of chokepoints implies that they can be closed off and blockaded by force – presumably given some alleged military necessity, legal or otherwise.” (03/03/25)
“Donald Trump is a vehicle for Musk and Thiel to implement their radical ideas of replacing accountable governance with an unaccountable techno-monarchy.” (03/02/25)
“Even the basic concept of free speech has become another truncheon in the nation’s ongoing battle between tribes. Each side claims to be its champion, but neither consistently supports such principles. Conservatives were rightly aghast when the Biden administration tried to muscle social-media companies into quashing alternative views about pandemic-related policies. That wasn’t a violation of the First Amendmen — a point with which the U.S. Supreme Court agreed given that social-media platforms are private entities. But it was tawdry, nonetheless. Shortly after his second inauguration, President Donald Trump signed an executive order that claimed to restore our free-speech protections. Nice, but Trump continues his attacks on free speech through a variety of disreputable strategies.” (03/02/25)
“Everything about President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance kicking Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s sorry, begging, petulant, pompous, entitled ass out of the White House last Friday is the perfect encapsulation of America First foreign policy in practice, not just in theory. This is exactly what I voted for, and I couldn’t be more proud of our leaders for practicing what they preach, consequences and optics be damned. From start to finish, that White House press conference was a diplomatic masterclass in not just pragmatism and defending American interests, but also what to do when confronted with lies, veiled insults, weirdly deceptive threats … and all around boorish behavior from someone who is clearly used to being worshipped and catered to by world leaders everywhere.” [editor’s note: A little balance for all the “progressive” victimization of the failed comedian wanna be dictator – SAT] (03/03/25)
“Angela McArdle has resigned, but her replacement doesn’t seem to have a plan to get the Libertarian Party back on a track for growth. What must be done?” (03/02/25)
“Since the publication of her novel, Atlas Shrugged, in 1957 and her subsequent nonfiction writing in her newsletters, Ayn Rand has been regarded by many as the doyenne of reason, and its leading advocate. In more recent times, a challenger to that title has arisen. Steven Pinker, the Harvard polymath and professor of psychology, who published Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress in 2018 and Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters in 2021 has argued passionately for reason. But his understanding of reason differs from Rand’s. The question arises, who is the real champion of reason?” (03/02/25)
“The originalist case for a unitary executive falls apart in an era when many of the powers wielded by the executive branch were not originally supposed to be federal powers in the first place.” (03/02/25)
“By every economic metric, three signature achievements of the Biden presidency were a resounding success. Its infrastructure bill has led to long-overdue repairs and new construction of the nation’s roads, bridges, and digital interconnectors as well. Its CHIPS Act kick-started semiconductor production, a critically important field for the nation’s technological performance and security, which had been ceded to other countries. And the misnamed Inflation Reduction Act yielded a boom in new factory construction, in which America had lagged for decades as Wall Street and major corporations had preferred to offshore production to anyplace where labor was cheaper. By every political metric, however, American voters appeared largely indifferent to these achievements when they went to the polls.” (03/03/25)
