January
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1 min read
The Front Row Is Empty Now
Read more . . . →Mississippi is sending Scott Colom to the Senate. First Black man to hold the seat since Reconstruction. One hundred and fifty years. That’s how long it took, in a state where the seat was kept warm by a woman who thought “public hanging” was a punchline. Cindy Hyde-Smith survived that comment in 2018 because the alternative was losing the seat. The party swallowed it and the voters shrugged, so she kept her job for eight more years. Now she’s out, replaced by a district attorney from Columbus who won by about three thousand votes while the president’s DOJ was busy...
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1 min read
Private Entrance
Read more . . . →They waited three hours. He brought his own room. Everyone in line is wearing real clothes. Jeans, hoodies, sneakers that have seen a commute. They’re waiting on the sidewalk outside a government building for something that requires them to stand on concrete for three hours. Meanwhile a curtained booth is being hand-carried up the red carpet by men in white gloves. Velvet rope, brass stanchions, zero wait. The people carrying the booth are dressed better than the people waiting. The American flag hanging from the building is really earning its placement in this composition. Two tracks, one system, and the...
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1 min read
A Full Tank and an Empty Plan
Read more . . . →Pierre Poilievre’s “Full Plan for a Full Tank” is the kind of slogan you come up with when your entire platform fits on a bumper sticker. Scrap the carbon tax. Kill the Clean Fuel Standard. Axe the GST on fuel. Hand the fossil fuel industry everything it wants and call it populism because truckers pay for diesel. His motion got voted down in October. He repackaged the same demands as budget conditions in November. Carney’s government said no twice. Poilievre’s response was to reject the entire budget, one that actually invests in Canadian economic sovereignty, in favor of cheaper gas....
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1 min read
Four Point Eight Trillion and a Thank You Card
Read more . . . →The 2017 Trump tax cuts were supposed to create jobs. That was the pitch. Cut the corporate rate and companies will invest, hire, build. Nine years later the receipts are in: $4.8 trillion in stock buybacks. Workers got a newsletter about “company values.” Shareholders got a second yacht. S&P 500 companies hit a record $1 trillion in buybacks last year alone, nearly double what they spent when Trump took office. Schumer, Wyden, and Warren are trying to raise the buyback tax from 1% to 4%, and it’s rotting in committee like every other bill that inconveniences a CEO. The proposed...
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1 min read
Victory Day and a Pink Slip
Read more . . . →Today is Veterans Day. Or “Victory Day for World War I,” if you’re following Trump’s rebrand. The man who wanted to rename the holiday also fired 62,000 veterans from federal jobs this year. Rename the day, gut the people. Classic. That’s the whole trick, every time. The troops get a parade and a social media post. Defense contractors get a $1.5 trillion budget line. The people who actually served get a wait list and a layoff notice, and if they’re among the 1.2 million veterans currently on food stamps, a grocery bill that keeps climbing. Support the troops is a...
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1 min read
Half Your Paycheck and a Picket Line
Read more . . . →Tomorrow Spain shuts down. Every sector, every city. The first joint general strike in 14 years, and the demand is the most basic thing in the world: people who work full time should be able to afford a roof. Spaniards now spend half their gross salary on rent. In Barcelona it’s 76%. An 87-year-old woman named Maricarmen got evicted, sparked the biggest housing protests in a generation, and then died. The government looked at all of that and called a snap election instead of capping rents or building anything. Which is the perfect summary of every housing crisis everywhere: workers...
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1 min read
Two More Months and a Prayer
Read more . . . →China just extended its tariff truce with the US for another two months. That makes this the, what, fourth extension? Fifth? Nobody’s counting anymore because counting implies it might stop, and it won’t. The 24% tariff stays suspended until January, the 10% stays in place, and both sides get to pretend this rolling game of keep-away is a negotiation. It’s not. It’s two governments too proud to admit they broke international trade and too scared to finish breaking it. Meanwhile the people who actually buy things just keep paying more. The Section 301 exclusions expire today too, which means thousands...
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1 min read
Twenty Letters and a Grudge
Read more . . . →The Justice Department sent target letters to twenty Democrats on Election Day. The actual day people were voting. The alleged crime: recruiting a Senate candidate in Alaska whose name happened to resemble the Republican incumbent’s. Election lawyers, DSCC staff, phone records, a hundred subpoenas. All for a tactic that’s been standard political playbook for decades. A federal judge already threw out the DOJ’s lawsuit to block Alaska’s certification. They appealed anyway. Pam Bondi’s office is also still running investigations into Letitia James and Adam Schiff, both of whom committed the unforgivable sin of doing their jobs while a president was...
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1 min read
Open Drawer Policy
Read more . . . →The meeting went great. The paperwork is already being processed. Black and white. Pinstripe suit. The smile of a man who built the chute himself and put a nice desk over it. The visitor sees a polished office, a firm handshake, maybe a little charm. He does not see the furnace underneath. That is the design. The drawer is open because the drawer is always open. The complaint goes in, the fire does its work, and the man behind the desk asks if there’s anything else he can help with. The best part is the chair he gave the visitor....
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1 min read
The Pivot Lasted Nine Hours
Read more . . . →Stephen Miller is the new White House Chief of Staff. That’s the takeaway from losing both chambers of Congress in the biggest midterm rebuke in decades. Voters said “absolutely not” and Trump’s first move was to fire the one staffer even his critics admitted was competent. Susie Wiles ran the 2024 campaign that actually won. She kept the building from collapsing for two years. Her reward for being the only adult in the room is getting replaced by the architect of family separation, the Muslim ban, and a losing streak of court battles that made first-year law students look good....
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