“”A lot of the problems with criminal justice in Washington lie in the federal courts where the city’s major prosecutions happen,” writes Josh Barro on Substack, imploring his fellow Democrats to be less dismissive about crime and to offer workable alternatives to Trump’s show-of-force plan. “There are too many judicial vacancies, and the U.S. Attorney’s office has been declining too many prosecutions, meaning too many criminals go free and too many miscreants believe they will get away with crime. Fixing those prosecutorial problems is a federal responsibility—Democrats should say that if Trump wants to be tough on crime, he can start by making sure prosecutors are bringing enough cases and there are enough judges to hear them.””
https://reason.com/2025/08/14/is-trumps-d-c-policing-doing-anything/
Because of the trade war, China is getting more agriculture goods from Brazil than the U.S.. China is building a port in Brazil to get even more from Brazil and even less from the U.S.. Too bad for U.S. farmers.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A4l_wHA8kvk
Trump is mostly deporting people without criminal histories.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AxXz7PbvT4I
If Trump successfully destroys the Fed’s independence, he will have eliminated the country’s ability to manage the economy with limited influence by short-term election cycles.
Israel hits hospital and kills five journalists, then says they will investigate what happened.
Trump is preparing to send the national guard to more cities. The national guard is not designed to enforce crime. Trump focuses on cities run by Democrats even though several high crime cities are run by Republicans. If Trump mostly or only sends troops to “crack down on crime” in Democrat run cities, that indicates that this is political intimidation and U.S. democracy is dead.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KLmiwzOxaaA
While both parties gerrymander, Republicans are the worst offenders. More Democratic states turned over their district drawing to neutral drawers. Republicans did not join them. Trump is leading the charge to gerrymander more often. Democrats like California’s governor are temporarily overturning their states’ neutrally drawn districts in order to combat Trump’s aggression.
Fair maps are needed to improve U.S. democracy, but even fair maps won’t be proportional because of where people live. You’d have to get rid of the district system altogether if you wanted representatives to be proportional to population.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=moG7ZOUXHv0
Treating the Israelis simply as settler colonialists that inherently need to genocide the people they stole their land from gives the Palestinians no agency. It ignores that Palestinians really could have had a Palestinian state but some Palestinians have repeatedly made that not possible by acts of terror.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qe_ppEHXs3w
“Senate Republicans have already said they plan to move quickly to confirm Trump’s Council of Economic Advisers Chair Stephen Miran to fill one current vacancy. If Cook loses a pending legal challenge and is dismissed — and her replacement is confirmed by the GOP-controlled Senate —Trump-appointed Fed governors would hold four of the seven seats on the central bank’s board.
That majority, in turn, would be enough to control the reappointment of the 12 regional bank presidents throughout the country who also have a say on rates and whose five-year terms are scheduled to expire in February.
And that, in effect, could give Trump control of the Fed’s policy-making Federal Open Market Committee, whose refusal to lower interest rates throughout his second term has put the president on the warpath with Fed Chair Jerome Powell. Any exertion of White House control over the reappointment process for regional bank presidents would represent an extraordinary break in precedent.”
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/08/27/how-cooks-dismissal-would-upend-the-fed-00527582
“Overall, the producer price index (PPI), which measures the prices paid to domestic producers for their output, climbed by 0.9 percent last month (well above expectations) and 3.3 percent on an annualized basis. A few categories saw particularly large increases. Wholesale prices for food, for example, rose by 1.4 percent, while wholesale prices for consumer electronics increased by over 3 percent.
…
Lots of domestic products rely on imports of raw materials and intermediate goods. You can’t make a chocolate bar without cocoa beans, for example, and over half of all imports are things that domestic businesses use as inputs.
Economists have warned that tariffs would increase the cost of importing component parts and force domestic firms to increase the prices they charge for their outputs. That seems to be exactly what today’s PPI report shows.
Second, the PPI is often seen as an advance warning system for higher inflation at the consumer level—because higher prices at the wholesale level will likely be passed along at the retail level.”
https://reason.com/2025/08/14/soaring-wholesale-prices-mean-higher-inflation-is-coming-are-tariffs-to-blame/
“The administration’s attempts to paint all university faculty as woke are misguided. Many leading scientists and scholars have continued to push the boundaries of knowledge while either ignoring ongoing culture wars or avoiding administrative activists on their campuses. Throwing the baby out with the bathwater is never a good idea, nor is schadenfreude worth risking the future of knowledge. The proper way to fight one form of intolerance is not to impose your own brand of intolerance.”
https://reason.com/2025/08/14/americas-two-front-war-on-science/
“As with any bureaucracy, the agency is fair game for criticism. BLS has plenty of flaws. But we know how Trump and MAGA play the game: Any results that are good for them are the truth—and anything not to their liking is evidence of rigging or conspiracy. Their take on any news is the one that advances their interests.
…
the feds need an independent body to analyze statistics. The New York Times quoted Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell: “Good data helps not just the Fed, it helps the government, but it also helps the private sector.” Trump has indicated he’d like to replace Powell—presumably with someone who will juice interest rates to help his political goals. Any intelligent person, though, can see why good policy flows from an accurate understanding of reality.
These are banana republic moves, backed by MAGA and the Banana Republican Party. Had any Democratic president tried to so directly politicize these independent agencies, Republicans would be screaming about the coming tyranny. Democrats aren’t immune to politicizing independent bodies—consider the troublesome plan to expand the U.S. Supreme Court—but they didn’t dare meddle in statistical counting.
Consider how budget matters are handled in Democratic-dominated California. The governor issues his budget and revenue/deficit predictions, which, of course, make the most optimistic projections. The nonpartisan Legislative Analyst’s Office (LAO) does its analysis, which typically is less sanguine. The governor might take issue with those results—but he doesn’t try to remove the head of the LAO and replace him with a political hack who issues only good news.
…
We’re all used to this administration “defining deviancy down,” as we all lower our standards for acceptable presidential behavior (free jet from Qatar, anyone?). So I guess this will be just another deviant action that the Republican Party will eagerly defend.”
https://reason.com/2025/08/15/firing-bls-director-over-weak-jobs-report-is-banana-republic-behavior/