“the Department of Justice moved to fire several senior FBI executives — including the head of the Washington field office. Additionally, DOJ is demanding a list of FBI personnel who investigated the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.”
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“I asked two scholars of FBI history if there was any precedent for this. Both said no. Agents can be fired for corruption or incompetence after a review, but a mass firing for participating in an investigation is unheard of, they said.”
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“The firing of top officials could make the FBI less effective in critical areas such as counterterrorism. And mass firings of FBI staff involved in the January 6 investigation would serve as a warning to bureau employees about what happens if they investigate Trump’s political allies, corroding the independence the agency depends on to enforce federal law.”
“In exchange for the delay of these tariffs, the Mexican government agreed to send 10,000 national guard troops to its northern border while Trump vowed to stem the flow of American firearms into Mexico. Canada, meanwhile, pledged to implement its 1.3 billion border security plan (which it had already enacted in December). Trump posted on his Truth Social platform that he was “very pleased with this initial outcome, and the Tariffs announced on Saturday will be paused for a 30 day period to see whether or not a final Economic deal with Canada can be structured.””
So far, the concessions from Mexico and Canada are: things they were going to do anyways, things you didn’t need a big tariff threat to get, and two-way deals where the U.S. made its own promises. So, rather than successful threats getting important concessions, we had economic disruption, economic fears, and acted like assholes on the world stage with nothing substantial in reward.
“If minimum wage increases were a drug, governments would have to conduct trials and monitor adverse effects afterward. That’s what happened in Seattle when it raised the minimum wage in 2014. The city called for proposals to study the impact on actual workers earning below the minimum before the law. The Evans School of Public Policy and Governance at the University of Washington was the only volunteer. Its researchers found that the law didn’t cause an increase in layoffs among workers who had previously earned below minimum wage, but it did reduce their hours by an average of 7 percent. That was partly offset by a 3 percent increase in hourly pay for the hours they did work. On net, the law cost these workers an average of $888 per year.
That amount is significant in itself, but it’s important to consider that it accounts for only the short-term effects. As mentioned above, some layoffs and hour reductions will happen immediately, but others—such as more businesses closing and fewer opening, or automation and other changes reducing employment—can take years. Another point is that the workers who benefited from higher pay were the ones most likely to have risen out of the minimum wage ranks to the middle class even without a mandated increase, while the workers who lost much more than $888 per year are more likely to be the ones blocked forever from economic advancement. In fact, the paper found that the workers who benefitted net were the most experienced and highest paid among the group–earning more than the old minimum but less than the new–while the less-experienced workers earning the old minimum or close to it, lost considerably more than the average.
Seattle legislators must have been unhappy with those findings because they cut funding for the Evans School and reached out to the same group at U.C. Berkeley that did the California minimum wage study to do its own distorted analysis, which was rushed out a week before the Evans study was made public. Eventually, Seattle raised the minimum wage again.”
“all sanctions imposed on Israeli settlers involved in violent attacks against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and against organizations involved in the building of illegal West Bank outposts have been lifted and all frozen assets released.”
“President Trump will reinstate a policy cutting off U.S. global health funding to international organizations that provide legal abortion information, referrals or services”
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“The gag rule has negatively affected global health care systems beyond family planning, according to a 2019 review of existing research on the policy.”
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“Only a handful of studies actually examined the rule’s impact on abortion rates, and those three papers concluded that the policy does not decrease abortion rates, per the scope review.”
“Less than 1% of immigrants deported last fiscal year were kicked out of the U.S. for crimes other than immigration violations.”
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“To deport millions of “criminals,” Trump would have to consider all undocumented immigrants as criminals. But being in the U.S. illegally is a civil violation, not a criminal one.”
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“Those millions would have to include agricultural, construction and service workers, students and others who are unauthorized to be in the U.S. but have no criminal backgrounds, according to legal specialists and an Axios review of federal immigration data.”
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“”There are not millions of people with criminal records to deport,” Nicole Hallett, director of the Immigrants’ Rights Clinic at the University of Chicago, tells Axios.”
Despite producing tons of oil, the U.S. still imports a lot of oil. The stuff we produce can’t be refined by our refineries, so we ship it out to be refined and import foreign oil to refine here.