“Economics creates the conditions — insecurity, a sense of decline, distrust of elites. But immigration (framed as cultural threat, not just economic competition) is what converts that grievance into a right-wing populist vote. The slogan “It’s the economy, stupid” famously explained Bill Clinton’s 1992 win. For right-wing populism, researchers are now saying almost the opposite: it’s the culture, not just the economy.”
“an attorney and former Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) instructor, Ryan Schwank, testified before Congress that the agency’s new training program is “deficient, defective, and broken,” leading to constitutional violations and unlawful arrests. “Deficient training,” Schwank added, “can and will get people killed.””
“Commercial real estate firm CBRE reported in an October 2024 research brief that single-family rental inventory had declined by 1.7 million units since 2016. Investors who own more than 100 homes are also responsible for some 3 or 4 percent of single-family home purchases each year.
The vast majority of homes are owned, bought, and sold by either individual owner-occupiers or small mom-and-pop investors who own fewer than 10 homes.
This is the windmill that Trump and lawmakers of both parties are tilting at.
And even though large investors are not major purchasers of single-family homes, they do provide benefits that would be lost if federal regulation excluded them from the single-family rental market.
A 2022 study by Neroli Austin of the University of Michigan found that institutional investment in real estate increases neighborhood diversity by opening up more affordable rental housing options. That study did find that these investors were raising home prices overall.
Banning institutional investors from the single-family market would reduce the accessibility they provide to renters who can’t qualify for mortgages.”
“Human soldiers can disobey unconstitutional orders, but “with fully autonomous weapons, we don’t necessarily have those protections,” Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei told Ross Douthat in a recent interview. Amodei also worried that AI could help the government track protesters and political opponents and “make a mockery of the Fourth Amendment.”
…
While not explicitly expressing a desire to use AI for those purposes, the Pentagon has insisted that Anthropic setting any limits on the military’s use will not do. It wants Anthropic to grant the government the right to employ its products for “all lawful use,” according to CNN.
…
This refusal hasn’t gone over well with the Trump administration. Hegseth has reportedly demanded that Anthropic remove its restrictions on certain military uses or else face consequences.
These consequences could include the Defense Department ending its business relationship with Anthropic as soon as Friday—which, OK, fine.
While not reassuring that the government won’t respect these limits around robot death machines and mass spying, it’s sadly not surprising. Ending its relationship with Anthropic’s contract in response would be a disappointing but not outrageous or beyond bounds.
What pushes this above and beyond normal government villainy are the other potential consequences that Hegseth has been floating, including using the Defense Production Act to compel compliance or declaring Anthropic a “supply chain risk”—possibly both. An anonymous senior official reportedly told Axios that severing ties with Anthropic would be “an enormous pain in the ass” for which Anthropic would have to “pay a price.”
Declaring Anthropic a supply chain risk would mean anyone who wants to work with the U.S. military in any capacity must sever ties with the AI company.
“Activating this power would cost Anthropic a lot of business—potentially quite a lot—and give investors huge skepticism about whether the company is worth funding for the next round of scaling,” writes Dean Ball, a senior fellow at the Foundation for American Innovation. “Capital was a major constraint anyway, but this makes it much harder. This option could be existential for Anthropic.”
Declaring an entity a supply chain risk is usually a move reserved for risky dealings with foreign companies. Deploying this designation against a U.S. company just because its leaders have some morals and some backbone is highly undemocratic—the sort of move one would traditionally expect from the Chinese Communist Party, not a U.S. administration.
…
But it gets worse. Hegseth is also threatening to “invoke the Defense Production Act to force the company to tailor its model to the military’s needs” and remove all safeguards, per Axios.
So, here we have an AI company trying to act ethically and prevent government abuse of this technology and the government threatening to seize the company’s property and do with it whatever the Pentagon wants. If that’s allowed, it means no limits on what abuses the government can force private companies to participate in.”
“Tariffs don’t conjure consumer demand out of thin air. Americans were buying plenty of washing machines, clothing, and steel before the tariffs. What changes is where some things are made. Production shifts from foreign manufacturers with efficiency or cost advantages to more expensive domestic manufacturers. American producers stand to gain, except when they must pay tariffs to import the materials they need (as is often the case).
But everyone who buys the product pays more. The extra $100 a family spends on a washing machine won’t instead be spent at the restaurant next door, the repair shop, or the shoe store. Real wages—what your paycheck actually buys—fall when the prices of most things rise.
…
When Americans buy less from China, it’s true, some of our overseas business competitors lose revenue. But what about the American households losing access to cheaper goods? Or the American producers losing access to cheaper materials and ingredients that make them more competitive?
Both countries take a hit. Serious analysts who favor targeted tariffs for strategic reasons generally acknowledge this tradeoff and argue that the benefits justify the costs. What they don’t claim is that such costs don’t exist.
…
Even when firms do absorb some of the hit, the money doesn’t disappear. These companies instead hire fewer people, pay lower wages, invest less or, in industries where profit margins are already thin, hike future prices. The burden just takes a different route to your wallet.”
““The average person doesn’t appreciate how stunning” it is for a grand jury to outright reject an indictment, as a former prosecutor in the U.S. Attorney’s office in D.C. put it to me. “The rules are skewed so heavily in favor of the prosecutor that it’s almost comical. But the public is essentially saying, ‘We do not trust you. We are skeptical of you.’”
…
Pirro, like Attorney General Pam Bondi, is willing to use her power to try to intimidate and punish Trump’s political opponents — even if that means degrading herself, the office and DOJ, and wasting taxpayers’ money all at the same time. On top of that, Pirro has managed to antagonize federal judges in the district and racked up a long list of rebukes, which will only make it harder for her and her prosecutors to win in court in the future.
Through it all, Pirro is failing to win the indictments, let alone convictions, that Trump craves. She is stumbling not just by the traditional standards of a U.S. Attorney, but also by the Trumpian version.
The Trump administration’s abuse of the Justice Department to pursue Trump’s antagonists would probably be an even bigger story if they were succeeding instead of flailing. The department’s cases against former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James were borderline frivolous on the merits, but they got dismissed after a judge concluded that Lindsay Halligan, who was separately taken to task for serious prosecutorial errors before the Comey grand jury, had been illegally installed as the U.S. Attorney overseeing the cases in the Eastern District of Virginia. The DOJ tried to charge James on two more occasions, but grand jurors rejected those efforts.
Of course, Pirro had joined the pile-on against Trump’s adversaries even before last week’s case. In January, she opened a criminal investigation into whether Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell lied to Congress about renovations at the Fed’s D.C. headquarters. The investigation was roundly criticized as a pretextual effort to force Powell to lower interest rates, as Trump has been insisting. It is also blowing up in Trump’s face, with GOP Sen. Thom Tillis vowing to block Kevin Warsh’s nomination as Fed chair until the Powell investigation is resolved.
Pirro’s effort to indict the six Democratic members of Congress marks her highest profile flop to date, but it is far from the first. Remember Sandwich Guy? Pirro made a video mocking the man who threw a sandwich at a federal agent, then failed to secure felony charges from a grand jury before losing the fallback misdemeanor case altogether.”
“Educators fear these immigration raids will have long-term consequences similar to the Covid-19 pandemic like increased student absences and anxiety and declining academic performance. They have already seen signs of this, with early data showing steep attendance drops despite their best efforts to keep students in their brick-and-mortar classrooms.”
The Conservative Supreme Court justices can’t agree on what the major questions doctrine is and what exceptions to it should be.
The Supreme Court made a major change in how lower courts operate by limiting nationwide injunctions. Such injunctions could have prevented the US government from illegally taking all this money in the first place and avoided the issue of if, when, and to whom, the tariff money is paid back. This policy allows the president to act illegally for months or years until the Supreme Court finally resolves a case.