"Many Of His Actions Are Legal"

Still laughing at this. Does it beat this one?

Mister Deals

Very smart, Mr. President.

PRES. DONALD TRUMP:

I can't tell you that. I can tell you that we're making a lot of money. We're doing great. Again, we were losing more than $5 billion a day. $5 billion a day. You don't talk about that. And right now, we're going to be at a point very soon where we're making money every day. Look –

KRISTEN WELKER:

How soon?

PRES. DONALD TRUMP:

– we were losing hundreds of billions of dollars with China. Now we're essentially not doing business with China. Therefore, we're saving hundreds of billions of dollars. Very simple.

Hopefully this new economics is taught at all the finest schools.

Lord Sidcup

Glorious future for all.

Some white collar workers may be on the brink of layoffs thanks to AI, but the Secretary of Commerce says they will always have a place in America’s factories. As the U.S. puts up high tariffs and curbs immigration, the administration hopes to fuel an intergenerational manufacturing boom.

“It’s time to train people not to do the jobs of the past, but to do the great jobs of the future,” Howard Lutnick told CNBC this week.

“This is the new model, where you work in these plants for the rest of your life, and your kids work here, and your grandkids work here.”

DEI

It is a hard belief of members of the elite commenter group chat that DEI is hideously unpopular and that the restoring segregation is one of Trump's popular moves. This is an example of elite commenters projecting their own bigotries onto the population and pretending that they, Ivy graduates, are merely acknowledging the will of the people and not promoting that agenda themselves.

Bouie:

To read some prominent commentators is to get the impression that of all the things the administration is doing, the public is most receptive to its attacks on D.E.I. But there’s no real evidence to say this is the case. In fact, D.E.I. holds majority support among American adults, and when asked whether they approve or disapprove of the president’s attacks on diversity programs, 53 percent say they disapprove.

This might be because most Americans perceive something that these prominent commentators do not, which is that the administration’s attack on D.E.I. is less about fairness than it is recreating systems of domination and subordination. Consider this line of thought from Richard Kahlenberg of the Progressive Policy Institute, a curiously named group founded as the primary think tank of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council in 1989. According to Kahlenberg, observations that the Trump administration is not interested in fairness as such are “over the top.” To him, the president simply wants the government to “treat different racial groups the same.”

This is hard to take seriously. So far, in this apparent effort to spread racial equality, the White House has removed, without apparent cause or real justification, a number of Black Americans from senior positions in the military, removed the work of Black, women and Jewish authors from the Naval Academy (while leaving books such as “Mein Kampf”), criticized the Smithsonian, particularly its Museum of African American History, for spreading supposedly “improper ideology,” pushed the National Park Service to rewrite its history of the Underground Railroad, gutted the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department, rescinded executive orders mandating desegregation in federal contracting, revoked a decades-old school desegregation order, and fired dozens of women and minorities from the boards that review science and research at the National Institutes of Health.

Morning

Sunday funday.

Saturday Night

Rock on.

Afternoon

Maybe if Big Balls yells at air trafic controllers then things will get better.

Critical Workers

I'm sure Grok can take over.

The FAA has not commented officially on the nature of the staffing problems, though staffing has been listed by the FAA as the cause of delays since Monday equipment outages led to United Airlines canceling more than 100 flights and diverting 37 others.

United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby put out a statement Friday about the delays, saying the airport’s issues seem to be a combination of technology failures and “over 20% of the FAA controllers for EWR (Newark Liberty International Airport) walked off the job.”

I haven't seen the precise reason they walked off the job, yet.

And Who Was In It

One would think the self-preservation instinct of members of Congress - who use this airport occasionally - would kick in eventually.

An Army helicopter flying in the D.C. airspace Thursday forced two commercial passenger jets inbound to Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport to perform go-around maneuvers — roughly three months after the airport was the site of the nation’s worst aviation fatality in more than two decades.

Sure Why Not

Morning

Slacker Saturday

Friday Night

It's alright.

Happy Hour

Get happy

But Why

I know we have all been over this many times, but are the tariffs there to raise money and/or onshore manufacturing? In which case they'll stay, and there is no reason for "deals." Are they there to use as a stick to make deals? In which case they'll be gone - because President Deals always makes great deals - and there will be no pain!

Lunch

eat

America's Second Worst University

Harvard University.

Floating On Fart Fumes

Yes, Yes, John Maynard, markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent,* but eventually everyone betting that everybody else is an idiot comes to an end.

Don't take financial advice from me.

*apocryphal, as Moe reminded me.

Copium

I don't claim to be fluent in Chinese Diplomacy, but I don't think you have to be to know that they aren't saying what The Markets want to believe they are saying. Does this:

China said it is assessing the possibility of trade talks with the US, the first sign since Donald Trump hiked tariffs last month that negotiations could begin between the two sides.

really follow from this:

China’s Commerce Ministry said in a Friday statement that it had noted senior US officials repeatedly expressing their willingness to talk to Beijing about tariffs, and urged officials in Washington to show “sincerity” toward China.

“The US has recently sent messages to China through relevant parties, hoping to start talks with China,” the ministry added. “China is currently evaluating this.”

I think the message is, "beg harder."

Morning

Funky Friday.

Happy Hour

get happy