Lone Candle
Champion of Truth
“it would appear this would be another “emergency” that the president will declare to force through policy changes that in nonemergency times would require going through the federal rule-making process or even, gasp, Congress.”
https://reason.com/2025/09/02/the-trump-administrations-fake-housing-emergency/
Trump’s tariffs are likely to produce a record trade surplus for China as imports from China are frontloaded.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ze8fbNgsZ0s
“Denver’s high minimum wage, especially its low tip credit, has unintentionally undermined the financial viability of full-service, labor-intensive restaurants. As costs outpace revenue and margins evaporate, once-thriving independent establishments are closing in droves, eroding the city’s cultural fabric and economic diversity.
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Restaurant operators and advocacy groups agree that Covid sparked the decline, but rising costs since have continued to cripple the industry. Property taxes, utilities, insurance, food and drink prices, rent, and one of the highest minimum wages in the country — higher than in Los Angeles or New York — are straining already razor-thin margins.
The city’s low tip credit, which results in a high minimum wage for tipped workers, is a particular pain point.
Denver City Council unanimously passed a minimum wage increase in November 2019 — just four months before the pandemic hit — and it was fully implemented citywide by 2022. Today, the base minimum wage is $18.81 an hour and the tipped wage is $15.79 — increases of about 70 percent and 95 percent, respectively.
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Per 2019 legislation, wage increases are uncapped and rise annually with the Consumer Price Index. In 2026, the base wage will be $19.29. For operators like Ms. Tronco and Mr. Seidel, who said that labor now consumes more than half his revenue, the math no longer works.
“When you force an operator to give raises every January 1 to the group of people who’s already making the most money, it chokes our ability to give a salaried person or an hourly cook a raise,”
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To keep her business alive, Ms. Tronco has cut the hosts and bussers she hired when opening and reduced weeknight server shifts. She raises her menu prices every six months to keep up with costs. Her numbers have taken a hit: Sales are down an average of 10 percent this year.
“It just feels like whack-a-mole,” Ms. Tronco said. “Inflation has affected everyone … Now we’ve got a tariff situation and all my wine importers are telling me that everything is going to go up $3, $4 a bottle.”
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Mr. Padró said the small tip credit is the industry’s biggest burden. He supports a higher base wage, even up to $25, because most of his employees already earn above that. He said that his servers and bartenders average $38 and $44, respectively. Expanding the tip credit would alleviate some of the burden faced by operators.
“I have 17-year-old kids pouring coffee for their teachers, making more than them,” he said.”
https://www.slowboring.com/p/denver-piece
Israeli strike took out several high ranking Houthi officials.
Israel releases more footage of brutal Hamas terrorist attack that started this war.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TFV_1H6y2r8
Belarus is partially controlled by Russia, and could be fully controlled soon. Putin has said that he sees Belarusians, Russians, and Ukrainians as one people.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4hM-OhDBHsc
A key part of keeping Peru’s currency stable are reforms that made their central bank independent from politicians. Trump is currently weakening this separation in the United States.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vDayhEHc5OE
Hiring is so low, it’s almost like we have a hiring freeze across the country.
The U.S. is on the edge of recession directly because of Trump policies–tariffs, immigration crackdown, DOGE cuts.
Hyperinflation around the world regularly happens after an executive takes control of a central bank and makes it cut interest rates.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D5F8o9z1-Nc
“A conservative election researcher whose faulty findings on voter data were cited by President Donald Trump as he tried to overturn his 2020 election loss has been appointed to an election integrity role at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
Pennsylvania activist Heather Honey is now serving as the deputy assistant secretary for election integrity in the department’s Office of Strategy, Policy and Plans
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The political appointment, first reported by Democracy Docket, shows how self-styled election investigators who have thrown themselves into election conspiracy theories since 2020 are now being celebrated by a presidential administration that indulges their false claims.
Her new role, which didn’t exist under President Joe Biden, also comes as Trump has used election integrity concerns as a pretext to try to give his administration power over how elections are run in the U.S.
The president has ordered sweeping changes to election processes and vowed to do away with mail ballots and voting machines to promote “honesty” in the 2026 midterms, despite a lack of constitutional authority to do so. Trump’s Department of Justice also has demanded complete state voter lists, raising concerns about voter privacy and questions about how the federal government plans to use the sensitive data.
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Since 2020, she also has led a variety of election research groups whose flawed analyses of election data have fueled right-wing attacks on voting procedures, including in battleground states Pennsylvania and Arizona.
In 2020, her election research misrepresented incomplete state voter data to falsely claim that Pennsylvania had more votes reported than voters. Trump echoed the falsehood during his speech to supporters on Jan. 6, 2021, saying Pennsylvania “had 205,000 more votes than you had voters.” Shortly after, his supporters violently attacked the U.S. Capitol in an effort to prevent Biden from becoming president.
In 2021, Honey was involved in the Arizona Senate’s partisan audit of election results in Maricopa County, she confirmed in a podcast interview with a GOP lawyer. That review in the state’s most populous county, which spent six months searching for evidence of fraud, was described by experts as riddled with errors, bias and flawed methodology. Still, it came up with a vote tally that would not have altered the outcome, finding that Biden actually won by more votes than the official results certified in 2020.
In 2022, Honey’s organization Verity Vote issued a report claiming that Pennsylvania had sent some 250,000 “unverified” mail ballots to voters who provided invalid identification or no identification at all.
Officials in Pennsylvania said the claim flagrantly misrepresented the way the state classified applications for mail-in and absentee ballots. The “not verified” designation did not mean the voter didn’t provide accurate identification information, nor did it mean their ID wasn’t later verified.
Former Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer said he received dozens of public records requests related to elections from Honey during his time in office, which took up “scores of hours of staff time.” He said he was surprised to hear she had been elevated to a position of such “authority and responsibility.”
From what he saw, Richer said, she’s “not a serious auditor.”
Honey’s hiring at the Department of Homeland Security comes amid reports that Trump’s administration has met with several other election conspiracy theorists in recent months.”
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/08/26/dhs-election-security-2020-election-conspiracy-00527453
“Independence has underpinned financial markets’ trust in central banks for half a century and has provided much of the basis for the U.S.-led international economic order.
Across the Atlantic, Cook’s counterparts at the European Central Bank are alarmed that Trump’s moves could not only set a dangerous precedent — but also have a tangible impact on their own policymaking, which is inexorably influenced by the course charted by the Fed.
“Attacking the independence of the Fed, the Trump administration inflicts a serious damage to the American economy,” said Bank of Greece Governor Yannis Stournaras in emailed comments to POLITICO. “The implications will come sooner rather than later.”
When independence is threatened, monetary policy “becomes dysfunctional, it starts doing things that it shouldn’t do,” European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde told Fox News in an interview Sunday before Trump’s move to oust Cook, but after he had already signaled he wanted her out.
“The next step is disruption. It is instability, if not worse. So I think that this should not be debated,” Lagarde added.
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Others expressed a similar wariness, with one Governing Council member, granted anonymity to candidly discuss the sensitive subject, fretting that a breach of the Fed’s independence could have “enormous repercussions on the financial world,” while also stressing the basic principle of due legal process that’s not been afforded to Cook.”
https://www.politico.eu/article/donald-trump-attack-federal-reserve-lisa-cook-alarm-europe-economic-stability/
““Deals with the Trump administration simply do not create the kind of lasting certainty everyone is desperate for, because certainty, predictability and strict fidelity to treaties are not White House objectives,” said Dmitry Grozoubinski, a former trade diplomat and author of the book “Why Politicians Lie About Trade.””
https://www.politico.eu/article/eu-faces-first-reality-check-fragile-trade-truce-donald-trump/